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Case Study | RealSimpleThe Challenge: Real Simpleis not your typical style maga-zine. The design needs to mir-ror the specific editorial phi-losophy of pure, elementalstyle. With his design, RobertNewman created a beacon oflight and clarity in the midst ofa world of clutter. It wasn’tsensible to design a compli-cated, overly decorated pagethat describes how to unclut-ter a closet and thus one’s life.Designers took cues from thetitle and the editorial.Specifically, Real Simpleadvances its design philoso-phy through three majorareas: color use, white space,and how words and imagesblend in the story tellingprocess.

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What we did: The contents page typifies theapproach at Real Simple. Newman describes thedesign: “Most contents pages serve as little more thanreference tools for the editors who put out the publica-tions. To us, the pages give the reader a sense of themagazine’s interior design and mission over and abovethe information and data they deliver. And they aren’t‘work’ to look at.”

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What we did: Unique toReal Simple is an overallcolor palette, in both typeand photographs, for eachissue. Sometimes it’s veryprominent and other timesit’s subtle, and often it’srelated to seasonality. Forexample, in an issue with alot of photographs of bluesky and water, the designersopted for blue type and blueaccents. The philosophy is tolet the images and/or thecontent themes dictatecolor.

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