Maxim: experiments with colours
Men’s magazine Maxim has had an overhaul and experimented with pink for the first time. The redesign also includes new sections and an increased pagination and print run.
Editor-in-chief Tom Loxley said: "In the great tradition of painting the Forth Bridge, you have got to stay on top and keep refreshing it. The look of the magazine had become a bit boring."
"The traditional red and black is still there but we are using other colours, such as magenta and yellow.
"We have brought pink out of the closet and I think it benefits from it but anyone who feels dubious about reading a men’s magazine with pink in it will be reassured by the amount of black and red that remains," he added.
The Reality section from the front has been dropped to make way for Death, a new obituaries page, and an eight-page style section has been added to the fashion pages which have moved forward.
The revamp also includes a new Lies section, exposing urban myths that circulate on the internet, Idiocy – celebrating all things daft – and Gentleman’s Relish, a section setting the agenda for the month ahead.
Loxley said maxim had replaced words such as "fella" with "chap" and "gentleman" over the past few years.
Ash Gibson, former GQ art editor, led the redesign along with Steve Neaves, former art editor of Later.
Loxley said the redesign had been in production for about six months. "It is not a knee-jerk reaction to bad ABCs," he said.
"This really is about trying to make the magazine look and feel different from the competition. It is subtle but we wanted our own identity."
The latest ABCs showed the men’s lifestyle sector had dropped 12 per cent. Maxim’s overall ABC of 276,640 did not rely on bulks, unlike its rivals, but it did suffer a decline in line with the rest of the sector.
Maxim will be promoted heavily over the next six months.
By Ruth Addicott
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