What’s New?

Introducing a bigger, bolder, lovely new design in print

So here’s something that you might not know: Magazine is a verb as well as a noun. Go back to the well of language and you find the English word comes from Italian and French and before that Arabic: makzan, a storehouse, kazana to store up. It’s good to think of a magazine as an action word, even if that use is pretty rare these days. Take this magazine: There’s the place and what we do.

And we’re doing some different things starting with this edition. The visual transformation is the work of DJ Stout and colleagues from the design firm Pentagram, out of their office in Austin, Texas. The whole shebang is bigger and offers more room to breathe.

Magazines speak, too. Through this redesign, we hope you’ll find ours is a resonant voice. Stories take new shapes, revealed through unique lenses. There are more pages and a new texture to the paper (100 percent post-consumer waste). Three major sections populate the environs: Mission Matters, Features, and Bronco News. That third part is magazined with stories of SCU alumni near and far, from the World Series to weddings, from the ocean depths to the first international chapter for the Alumni Association, in Bangalore.

In back as well as front, meet the Keys—literal as well as metaphoric: symbols from the keyboard to unlock for you quote, paragraph, plus, copyright, and more. We reclaim @ as place and # as numbers. (Twitter handles and hashtags we know; have you met our digital mag?) The keys open doors and wider geographies—of earth and the imagination, to this time and centuries past, perhaps racing across the water or redolent with the fragrance of ancient redwoods.

An old literary friend, 17th-century English writer Ben Jonson, inquired: “What more than heauenly pulchritude is this? What Magazine, or treasurie of blisse?”

So glad you asked, Ben. Let’s say, where this mag is concerned, it’s where images and words meet in vibrant collusion, a place for wit and wisdom, laughter and tears—and because this is Santa Clara, a place to speak of faith and hope and birth and death; of truth and beauty; of human beings in sinew and spirit, strength and humility, subtlety and surprise. Welcome.