Analyzing Wired Magazine
Holding it all together: Structure, System, Form | C MINI FALL 2021
Introduction
Before this project, I had never read Wired and I had only seen their content ,
After analyzing it is clear why, I am not their intended audience
Even in their mission statement, Wired is clear as to which audience they are trying to reach out to: “ “
Mission Statement:
“WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives — from culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. WIRED reaches more than 30 million people each month through WIRED.com, our digital edition, the magazine, social media, and live events.”
Hypothesis:
Wired is a magazine written primarily for young to middle-aged adults looking to be innovators and world-changers in the science and technology realms. While they have a strong emphasis on education and facts, their use typography, structure, design, and color emphasizes the new age and encourages people towards discovery and pushing boundaries. We see a difference in audiences between their print and digital content, which is apparent through the different ways the two mediums are formatted and presented. Their print content uses more experimental designs and goes for a more trendy look to communicate cutting-edge ideas and discoveries, while their web content is cleaner and seems to be more focused on delivering longer, more in-depth stories. Ultimately, through their design choices, they attempt to make science and technology more appealing and easily digestible for the new generation of innovators and gear their content to this specific audience.
Audience
Wired gives an idea of the types of people that they are gearing their information towards in their mission statement, and further research has confirmed this. we found that their audience is a majority male, middle-aged, of high income, and most have at least a Bachelor’s and/or a post-graduate degree. With their office being based in the San Francisco Bay Area, they have a clear focus on tech and their audience is largely people living in these high-tech, metropolitan areas:
Circulation Rates:
10.18% — NY metro
7.80% — Northern CA & Southern NV
6.78% — Northern CA & Northern NV
6.18% — TX
5.24% — FL
As pictured below, many of their covers include important figures in the tech world, like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, as well important figures in science and medicine. The most recent issue, which me and my teammates analyzed, had an important scientist on the cover who researched mRNA for covid vaccines.
One thing we found surprising was that the print content had an overall younger audience than the digital content. We thought that this would be reversed, as younger people tend to be more interested in and well-versed with technology, but this turned out to not be the case. After analyzing the decisions with typography and structure within the magazines, which I will later get into, we realized why this may be the case.
Design/Structure
Magazine Structure & Organization:
Each issue is split up into 4 main parts: START (collection of short articles about the industry), Work Smarter (more in-depth pieces), Gear Special (analysis of a new gadget or piece of technology), and a Feature Story (interviews and/or in-depth on specific world-changing figures in tech and science). It is important to note that even though there are more stories in the Work Smarter and START sections, the features section is the longest and takes up almost half of the print content. This shows the type of content and the difference in the length of stories between the two sections.
Analyzing Grids:
When analyzing the overall structure of the grids in the magazine, we found them to be very inconsistent. At first we were confused as to what the structure or method to the grid systems were, but after analyzing them, we found some patterns.
We noticed that in the START and Work Smarter articles, the grids were often inconsistent and often times asymmetrical. The grids and text boxes often wouldn’t match up with each other from page to page, even within their same sections. We noticed that some pages were more conventional with their grids and they included color blocks to indicate where the grids are, while other pages had indicators for margins and the text went outside of the margins. We think that because this is more short form content, it is harder for the text to be more organized. We also noticed that the text often went right up against the images, leaving no margin space in between. The images also often break up the margins and take dominance on the page.
This type of formatting may be hard to read, which leads us to believe that Wired is intentionally trying to make their print design in these section more unorganized and “trendy” to specifically cater it towards younger people. It would be difficult for older people to take a liking to this type of print design or be able to follow along with the unclear grids and sometime not reader-friendly text boxes.
We split up the different sections of the magazine and I was assigned the Feature story, which we found to be wildly different from the other 3 sections. The grids were very straightforward and were laid out by a “divider” in the margins and the text columns were much wider, probably because these stories are much longer. With the short articles in START and Working Smarter, the more chaotic structure worked because the stories were shorter so the reader didn’t need to stay engaged for as long. But with the feature stories, since the content is much longer, the organization needs to be clearer so the reader can follow along and stay with it for a while. This is the most important part of their magazine, they want to make sure it is more accessible to all readers, making readability more of a priority here.
Another reason why readability may be more important for these stories is because this make it easier to transfer it over into a web format. When looking through their website we couldn’t find any of the other articles from our magazine online and we realized that their web articles are completely different from their print ones. However, we were able to find the main feature story on their website. When looking at the grids below we can see that their website, unlike a lot of their print content is much more readable and has clear margins with the main text in just one column. Even their homepage has very clear and organized grids, making it easy to navigate.
When comparing the structure in both the web and print content, it is now clear why the print may have a younger audience. The readability between the two is drastically different. A younger person may be able to read the print content easier than an older person would, making the web content for appealing for them.
Typography
We noticed that the spread all have very unconventional typography formats and choices with abrupt breaks in text for captions, text that goes right up against the edge of images, and sometimes even goes over an image. Again, this doesn’t show up to as much of an extreme in the feature sections to make them more readable and easier to convert into digital content. However, this unconventional formatting of the text does remain somewhat consistent through the print issue which leads us to believe that this content can only be read and accessed by a certain age demographic. This may be another reason why the print content has younger readers than the more straightforward and simple digital content does.
The font types differ between the various sections. While they all consistently have the first letter standing out from the rest of them, each font conveys a different tone for each of the sections. The START section has a sans serif font to match the trendy and very short form content in the beginning articles. The Work Smarter section has a serif font to indicate a shift towards more serious content. Finally, the features section has a variation of a sans serif font that is distorted, which separates it from the rest of the magazine to indicate that this section is the most important and has the most impactful pieces, as they often discuss tech giants and leaders.
Color & Imagery
Their color and imagery stands out as a large part of their brand. Throughout the beginning of the issue their images are bright and extremely colorful, and they even employ bright colors into the background of their spreads. This differs from their feature articles which use predominantly black and white images that are simple and have one focus point, as they are typically focusing on a single person.
I noticed that while the color may vary between images, Wired’s photography maintains a sleek and modern look throughout. This differentiates it from other science journals and magazines, as it frames science to be less in the light of academia and more trendy and as a part of everyday life and culture.
Analysis Overview
In my analysis I greatly discussed the difference between Wired’s shorter articles in their Work Smarter and START sections with & their Feature stories. Wired uses color, imagery, typography, and overall structure to indicate the importance of the feature section, by making it more muted, structurally organized, and in turn much more readable.
Despite this slight difference in audiences, their overall seemingly chaotic choices lend to a very specific audience. Wired seems to be using these choices to differentiate themselves from typical science and technology such as Science Daily, and instead focuses on innovation and breaking out of the mold. Overall, through their design choices, it is apparent that WIRED’s mission seems to be to present technology and science more appealing and trendy to young innovators and entrepreneurs.
