Spring brings big things, like a redesigned print edition of our alumni magazine.
Steven Boyd Saum
01 Jan 2015
First let’s pause for a moment—it’s good to take a breath and look around—in this case, in the mountains somewhere south of Lake Tahoe, snowshoeing on a ridgetop as winter turns into spring. It’s the Lenten season, Easter yet to come. You’ve navigated a trail past cornices and crevasses and rocky outcrops, felt the lovely strain of the climb in your muscles and your lungs, and you’ve been readjusting a little to the altitude from the balmy valley floor where you spend most of your days. Now you’ve begun the return trek, and for the time being the clouds have blown through and the swirling white and gray has cleared, and the world around you is something utterly transformed: blue sky dome and craggy peaks shaggy with ice and snow, and the field of snow in front of you sparkling and brilliant. (Which is a good reminder for the only occasional snow-walker: Did you remember to put sunblock on the bottom of your nose?)
Sip your water, ponder shedding your coat, then: rising up the ridge in front of you, dancing over the snow in a trickle and then a stream, black-and-orange-winged butterflies. Painted ladies, you reckon—Vanessa cardui—headed north by northwest. Hundreds! Thousands! Millions! (Awright, maybe not here—millions elsewhere. But certainly thousands.) Being at this altitude already alters your awareness of geography—and now these wondrous and delicate and astounding creatures of tensile strength and metamorphosis, pausing for nothing on their great journey from the desert. Behold!
A NEW PAGE—OR, A REDESIGNED MAG
When spring is fully sprung, you’ll see some transformations with the next print edition of Santa Clara Magazine, too. The redesigned magazine will reimagine ways to tell Santa Clara’s stories big and small: speaking to the tradition of California’s first university with a few hundred years of Jesuit educational experience, here in the heart of Silicon Valley with threads reaching around the world. How do the pages of a print magazine capture that in a way that’s true and remarkable and beautiful and compelling? That’s one of the questions we’ll answer. We hope you’ll like it. Certainly the magazine has grown and changed dramatically since it was launched 35 years ago—as some of you remember, before the interwebs, back when there were telegrams but no emails, and it took three months for a letter to make it up El Camino Real from Mexico City to Mission Santa Clara de Asís. Those thousands of you who’ve visited the digital mag at santaclaramagazine.com in recent months have already found a different environ—particularwise, that the stories look better on smartphones and tablets and portable screens of various sizes (Hello, responsive design!), all of which we hope makes for a more pleasant and stupendous reader experience and encourages you, dear friend, to spread the word.
Keep the faith,
Steven Boyd Saum
Editor