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FRONTLINE was launched in December 1984 by The Hindu group of publications as an all-colour fortnightly of quality and variety, with plenty of visual content. The subsequent two decades have witnessed major social, political and economic changes that put an end to many certainties, shook institutions, and transformed the way the world looked at itself.
Over this period, Frontline has evolved into a progressive and critical fortnightly with a focus on politics, domestic and international, socio-economic development, deprivation, and culture. At a time when mainstream magazines have tended increasingly to go for subjects relating to lifestyle and leisure, Frontline has concentrated on issues that affect the lives of large numbers of people in India, in neighbouring countries, and in the rest of the world. It also covers a range of subjects, including science and science policy as well as books, literature, music, and the arts.
Frontline has an investigative and analytical orientation and a deep interest in ideas, movements and trends. Its journalism consistently aims to provide analysis, or descriptive analysis, of issues, without losing a current news content or topicality. It covers India's neighbourhood and world affairs in a more detailed, nuanced, and sustained manner than other news-related periodicals. On the economic front, Frontline perhaps is the one mainstream magazine that critically examines official policies from the standpoint of ordinary people. As part of its overall socio-economic coverage, it focusses on the realities of mass deprivation of various kinds in India and elsewhere. On the social side, the magazine has devoted much attention to issues, trends, and incidents relating to socially and economically oppressed and disadvantaged sections, notably Dalits.
We believe Frontline is a publication with a difference, especially in the Indian media context, for four basic reasons.
First, we take magazine journalism seriously. In contrast to trivialising and cynical approaches to journalism, we believe serious journalism has a future as an independent, analytical, investigative, socially responsible, and ethical pursuit. The challenge is to make this content more engaging, accessible, and popular. Secondly, Frontline journalism is centred on issues. This orientation can be expressed in the line, "behind every issue, there's a deeper issue". Thirdly, as a `views magazine', Frontline espouses a consistently progressive outlook but provides space for diverse viewpoints, including contrarian editorial content. Fourthly, in contrast to dominant trends in the Indian newspaper field, our fortnightly seeks to foster and publish, in a discriminating way, long form journalism without which journalism will be condemned to be the professional pursuit of superficiality and dilettantism.
But if ever a serious publication needed a complete design makeover, it was Frontline. Several years ago, the great Satyajit Ray, a serious Frontline reader frustrated by its `look and feel,' expressed an interest in redesigning its logo and cover but that was not to be. A couple of years ago, The Hindu group found the answer to its 21st century design needs in the pure design - described as "clean, elegant, usable, and true to itself" - offered by Garcia Media headed by Mario Garcia, the world leader in this field. Dr. Garcia, John Miller and the German Art Director Günter Zwerina, working with our inhouse design, editorial, and production teams, have created this new `look and feel' for Frontline. The purpose of the redesign is to offer readers a more modern, disciplined, structured, accessible, newsy, interesting and elegant magazine. The highlights of the new design are: a strikingly pure black-on-white logo; elegant new fonts (sanserif Din and serif Miller); improved navigation and layering; clear structuring and demarcation of the magazine's various sections; a fine balance between words, photographs, infographics, maps and fact boxes; use of white space to enhance readability; a sophisticated nine-colour palette dominated by "Frontline red"; and colour coding of the distinctive sections. We believe that, in a design sense, Frontline has been excitingly reinvented.
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