Webfeet
Edit 376: Print Media Design
Webfeet is a magazine for young politically and socially active Pacific Northwestern urbanites. The name itself is a play on natives’ nickname: It’s so wet, they grow up with webbed feet. It’s targeted at the 25-34 demographic, who are often childless and interested in going out in their cities (Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Spokane and Olympia), but who are also immersed in the coffeeshop-bookstore-brewpub intellectual culture independent of the region’s universities. There are 1.1 million of these potential readers; 57 percent have a household income greater than $40,000 per year, and disposable income of at least $24,000. They work at local tech- and service-sector businesses from Intel, Microsoft and Nike down to InFocus and Safeco. And many of them ride the bus or take light rail to work—a commute that averages 30-44 minutes.
Designing a magazine for these readers is not simple. They are modern, tech-savvy and design-oriented. So I selected two principal colors to construct a palette around: the color of the Willamette River in Portland, and the color of the evergreen trees in Seattle’s Seward Park. I found their split complements, an orange and a yellow. The green and blue are the colors of the environment, and their familiarity soothes; the yellow and orange excite and stand out. The fonts are also important: I chose a very geometric sans, Avenir, because it is clean and modern but muted, and a balanced serif, Caledonia, for its open letterforms and large X-height.
The key was to make it all come together. I chose a story about the impact of global warming on Arctic birds’ eggs because it would immediately resonate with the Webfeet reader, and from there sought out an uncluttered cover photo and a wide, impacting opener photo for the spread. The cover lines are stacked and in matching colors, but they’re also straight-forward references to important Northwest figures. The story headlines are all references to the looming population and environmental disaster, and the supporting display copy is loud and enticing. I designed an infographic to show how much warmer 2005 was than the 1880-2004 mean, and found a strong take-away statistic to pull out, for the spread.
h3. More demographic information
Who is Webfeet?
We are a magazine focused on the intellectual life of the Pacific Northwest. There are many writers, musicians, artists, moviemakers, and other “creative class” thinker-intellectuals in the Northwest, and, as a consequence, a very rich intellectual life totally independent of university culture. Elsewhere, except in the biggest cities, the intellectual classes are totally associated with universities; but Oregon and Washington are rich with independent thinkers — just among the class of writers, we think of Ursula Le Guin, Chuck Palahniuk, Octavia Butler, Tom Robbins, and Neal Stephenson as associated with the Pacific Northwest.
Richard Florida coined the term “creative class” to describe these people, and it is they — artists, writers, musicians — who make the Pacific Northwest the intellectual haven that it is. Oregon’s new tourism slogan is the perfect encapsulation: “We Love Dreamers.”
Yet there is no one covering these intellectually minded citizens as a whole; they are shunted off to Columbia, Seattle Magazine, Portland Monthly, and local newspapers and alt-weeklies.
Why not a magazine that draws on this?
Who are your readers?
Here, we draw on Census 2000 data; although the population of the Pacific Northwest has continued to boom in our target population in the six years since then, more recent tabulations are much less comprehensively analyzed.
There are 6.3 million urbanites in the Northwest, primarily in six metropolitan areas: Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, Spokane, Eugene and Olympia. Of these, our target demographic would be the “coffee shop” set, the intellectually active between 24 and 34 who still have time and interest to go to an art-house film screening or a book reading.
In that age range, there are approximately 1.1 million in the metropolitan Pacific Northwest. They are divided into 314,000 family households and 174,000 non-family households, and of these households, some 280,000 — or 57 percent — have a household income of greater than $40,000 per year. In our demographic, 323,000 are renters and 166,000 are owners; of owners, 78 percent spend less than 35 percent of their post-tax income on housing, and of renters, that is true of 70 percent. The great majority spend less than 25 percent. In short, they have a relatively high percentage of disposable income in relation to total income. The median target reader has a per-capita income of $42,000, and therefore on average a post-tax, post-housing household income of $24,000.
Our readers are also well-educated: Among 24-34–year-olds in the urban Northwest, 64 percent of men and 70 percent of women have some college education, and 34 percent and 30 percent respectively have a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
These readers are the active young “creative class” intellectuals who fuel the economic development of the Pacific Northwest. The only significant industrial base in the region is the Boeing manufacturing plant in Tacoma; otherwise, the vast majority of jobs available in the Northwest are in the service and technology sectors, and many in small businesses. The Northwest is home, after all, to tech-sector research facilities for companies like Microsoft, Intel and Samsung, and to countless small tech companies like Panic Software and InFocus; other well-known service- and tech-sector employers in the region include Nike, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com, Real Networks, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Tektronix, Safeco, and Mentor Graphics.
Most importantly, we know our readers love to read. The example of Portland is instructive: It has more bookstores and public libraries per capita than anywhere else in the United States, and the second-ranked public library system in the United States for metropolitan areas over 500,000. Oregon and Washington are the No. 2 and No. 4 states, overall, for public library rankings by the American Library Association. Many writers make the Pacific Northwest home. We believe that, given reading material, our readers will gladly read — especially when we target the means that many of them use to get to work: mass transportation.
What do your readers want?
They want to know what’s going on around them, and what opportunities there are for them to go out and see things. More to the point, they want to know what has happened, and what’s going to happen. They also want to read about more intellectual topics — they want to participate in coffee-house debates and chat with the other patrons at Powell’s, at microbrewpubs and in the line at the bank.
They also want to know how events will affect them. They are passionate about national and local politics, about the environment, about books and music and movies and coffee and cuisine, and they deserve a magazine that caters to their interests without being East Coast-centric.
That’s what Webfeet is for.