A year after celebrating its 20th birthday, Cottage Life has received its first major redesign since 1998. “Cottage Life is always evolving and it was time for the magazine to be updated, to have a more contemporary look,” says Kim Zagar, CL’s art director. The updated appearance debuted in the April 2008 issue, now available on newsstands.

Cottage Life has a CCAB-audited paid circulation of 70,621, and a readership of about 1.1 million, according to the Print Measurement Bureau.

Everything from the logo and fonts to cover dates and the placement of the folio has been changed. Editorially, tweaks have been made to the contents of the “On the Waterfront” front of the book and DIYer “Puttering” sections, along with a new back page.
One aspect that Zagar’s particularly excited about is the new serif font, Odile (pronounced “oh-deel”), which will be used for body and display copy. Released in 2006 by Houston-based designer Sibylle Hagmann, Zagar says its features include ligatures, upright italics, dingbats and decorative initials.

Other design changes include a six-column grid (as opposed to the previous four columns) to allow for greatly flexibility in page layout and plans to make use of more white space.

Long discussed in parent-company Quarto’s offices, the redesign process was kick-started by bringing in Frank Viva, co-founder of Toronto-based Viva Dolan Communications and Design and a “long-time reader and fan of the magazine,” for 16 weekly meetings with the CL art team starting back in April 2007.