Joshua Darden

Case Study: Cookie

In November 2005, Condé Nast launched Cookie, a lifestyle magazine for sophisticated parents. Early in the design process, art director Alex Grossman and design director Kirby Rodriguez called in Joshua Darden to assess the magazine's typographic voice. (Rodriguez met Darden during his work for W Magazine.) In their discussions, consultation quickly grew to creative contribution. Darden brought typographic sophistication to the magazine through nameplate refinements, custom-designed folios, and an excellent use of his Freight Sans.

Wordmark Refinement

Designing a wordmark from scratch involves many considerations: balanced visual weight, a confident footprint, crisp drafting, legibility of the individual letters, and recognition of the overall mark. Refining an existing wordmark means attending to these concerns without contradicting the spirit and proportions of the original.

Cookie's creative team had already comped a rough version of their nameplate, and it had fared well in focus groups and preliminary marketing for the new title. Darden worked closely with Grossman, Rodriguez, and managing editor Joyce Bautista to carry the nameplate through dozens of iterations. The final product preserves the vigor and spontaneity of the original, but serves far better its myriad applications.

Custom Typeface Design

The magazine's designers wanted to effect a playful and postmodern take on non-lining numerals for the magazine's folios, but the limitations of existing retail typefaces made their concept cumbersome and clumsy in execution. Darden proposed that a custom typeface would allow them to control the numerals' positioning as well as their typographic effect.

During several weeks of research, Darden was drawn to the numerals used in a book in his personal library -- a modernized Caslon used in an 1885 volume of Robert Herrick's poetry. Bearing in mind these attractive figures, he designed an original typeface, with two adjusted forms of each numeral to accomodate intuitively the magazine's system of running footers. Though born of practical concerns, in use the typeface is a strong asset to Cookie's distinctive design system.

Typographic Consultation

Grossman and Rodriguez had chosen Century Schoolbook as the magazine's primary text face, and they made liberal use of Mrs Eaves in display settings. It clearly remained necessary to unify the magazine's voice with one strong typeface family that could serve a wide range of purposes while complementing the faces already in use. After testing several sans serif designs, they found Darden's own Freight Sans ideal for the rôle.

Cookie is fortunate to be helmed by a team of astute designers, who make the most of the comprehensive range of styles Freight Sans offers. Consulting with Darden on overall typographic tone and the minutiae of H&J values, they make the typefaces sing in dramatic display settings for coverlines and editorial, yet put them to the task of carrying information-heavy text in running footers, recipes, charts, and listings.

Cookie, now on newsstands everywhere, is published by Condé Nast Publications. To learn more, please visit http://www.cookiemag.com/.