Readers of magazines today engage with their favorite publications on screen as often as on the printed page. Magazine content now extends across various platforms, including websites, tablets, smart phones, books, live events and more. To better reflect the growing ways—online and offline—that magazine content reaches consumers, the Magazine Publishers of America has changed its name to MPA – The Association of Magazine Media. Pentagram has designed a new graphic identity to accompany the name change.
The MPA is the industry association for multi-platform magazine companies. Founded in 1919, the organization represents approximately 225 domestic magazine media companies—including industry giants like Condé Nast, Time Inc. and Meredith—and more than 1,000 titles. The MPA name is well known and has been kept as initials in the new identity. It is now joined by a new tagline—“The Association of Magazine Media”—which describes the organization’s true scope. By adopting the well-established initials MPA as the organization’s formal name and dropping publishers from its tagline, MPA is underscoring the fact that magazine media content engages consumers across multiple platforms.
The designers worked closely with the organization on the development of the new name and identity. MPA’s new logo replaces its classic turning page symbol with two rectangular frames that appear horizontally and vertically around the letters M-P-A, evoking the multiple ways through which magazine media are being experienced today.
Nina Link, MPA President and CEO, says: “The future of magazine reading is undergoing a transformation; audiences and advertisers now interact with magazine brands on so many different levels and platforms. MPA’s identity simply had to reflect this fact.”
In its animated form, the identity extends the frame of a magazine into the frame of a horizontal screen. The logo can appear as a geometric pattern in applications; the frames can also be used as brackets to set off information. Modern and iconic, the identity has room to evolve along with the industry.
