Atlantic Business is celebrating its 25th year with a magazine redesign and the launch of its Super Start-up Program, teaming with corporate partners to support aspiring entrepreneurs.

The business magazine, founded by publisher Hubert Hutton, sought out 25 corporate partners to donate $2,500 of startup funding and 25 hours of mentoring to fledgling entrepreneurs. "We decided that we have this longer-term mission of promoting and encouraging business activity in Atlantic Canada through our publication," said executive editor Dawn Chafe. "Response was so strong and powerful that we actually ended up with 27 corporate partners."


The deadline for proposals is February 21, 2014. Each successful applicant will will blog about their experiences throughout the year on the Atlantic Business website. Corporate sponsors will be spotlighted in the print magazine starting with the March edition.

The anniversary also presented an opportunity to overhaul the look of the magazine. The Jan/Feb 2014 issue sports a new logo that is significantly smaller in size. While Chafe admits this might appear to be a counterintuitive choice, the smaller size recalls the mag's original logo and also opens space for cover images to breathe. "And I think, after 25 years in the business, we have pretty good brand recognition built up. We think enough of ourselves that a smaller logo will do the trick," she said.

The interior has been visually subdued with less imagery and a new Boton body font. "We think that the content is strong enough that we don't need a lot of distraction from that. We're inherently showing readers that this is worth their time to read because it's not overloaded with pictures and graphics. At the same time, we're also benefitting our advertisers because we're giving them an opportunity to maximize their display space," said Chafe.

Less photos doesn't mean a smaller budget, however. Chafe says artwork for the anniversary issue was among the mag's most expensive. The cover features an original photo rather than stock photography, and the interior includes more original illustrations than usual. "There's going to be more of that going forward," she said.

A new tagline, culled from reader suggestions, will now guide editorial content. "Four words that consistently popped up were: smart, sophisticated, provocative, powerful. We opted to use that as our tagline to keep reminding us that that's what our readers expect us to deliver," said Chafe.