Our New Look

Yes, the magazine you are holding in your hands is indeed Digital Transactions. I don’t blame you, though, if you thought you had grabbed the wrong magazine. After all, we’ve had the same look since our first issue rolled off the press in January 2004. So anyone who has subscribed since then has seen the same design issue after issue for fully 15 years.

Well, with this April 2019 issue, we decided it was time for a makeover. We began planning for this several months ago, working with the editors and our intrepid art director, Jason Smith, who captained the effort from the start. Our objective all along was to create a design that retains the trust you have placed in Digital Transactions for years while also pointing to a fresher way of navigating the book and taking in its contents.

All the familiar departments are still here, including this one, as well as the thorough reporting and incisive writing you’ve come to expect over the years. Electronic payments is a fast-changing, often complex, business, and we pride ourselves on helping our readers sort out the trends.

But in designing this fresh look we have also sought to create a clearer, more contemporary aesthetic that, page to page, guides the reader from topic to topic and from department to department. This objective led us, for example, to a color-coding scheme by department and a bolder look for charts that we think presents data more clearly and with more force.

Why monkey with a successful publication? Well, just as markets like payments change over time, so too does the time readers have. As that time shrinks, we want to present important trends and information in a way that can be more rapidly comprehended—while presenting our content in an inviting environment for analysis and data.

That was our objective. Whether we have met it is something only you can determine. It’s no secret that print publications are increasingly going digital, leaving behind paper pages as if they were remnants of a lost era. We, too, have long since provided our reporting online, but we also think print presentation is something worth preserving. We’re willing to bet you agree, and that there are more of you out there than the digerati will admit to.

But we want to make that presentation something worth spending time with—something you can easily learn useful things from. We think we’ve been doing that for these last 15 years. But now we think we’re doing it better. Do you agree? Let me know what you think of our new look. My email address is in my signature line below.

—John Stewart, Editor |  john@digitaltransactions.net