Editor's Notebook: The New Look

We hope you will be excited too, as you see bigger and better photographs, more imaginative on-point illustrations, and a design that's intended to give you a faster grasp of important elements of the stories we are telling.

Government is an interesting and exciting place. Missions often are performed with constituencies and in places that offer chances for photography that deserves larger display. The people of government are at the center of our publication, so we want to offer better portraiture as well. Government also is about ideas, so we remain committed to first-class illustration as well. The changes do not alter our central purpose, which remains to inform you, our audience of senior federal officials, about issues and trends that affect your working lives.

The magazine now has more clearly defined sections, published in this order:

• The Buzz, a selection of short items we hope will be informative, entertaining and wry.
• News & Analysis, a new section that makes room in the magazine for stories about people, trends and events that can be told in a page or two.
• Features, our traditional stock in trade, consisting of carefully crafted, full-length articles, now more lavishly illustrated, on topics of central interest to our audience.
• Advice & Dissent, a final section that will include regular technology and management columns as well as opinion pieces from diverse viewpoints.

With this issue we also begin a twice-a-month publishing schedule that will, in combination with the redesign, allow us to treat more topics in timelier fashion.

To fashion our new look, we turned to a top-flight magazine consulting firm in New York, Don Morris Design, whose credentials include work for BusinessWeek, Smithsonian, PC World, Golf Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival.

We asked Don, and his art director, Josh Klenert, to liven up our pages while recognizing that we serve a professional audience involved in serious business-the nation's business. Don saw his intense four-month assignment as offering "a unique opportunity to combine the best elements of business magazine publishing with treatments of topics that are hugely varied and visually compelling, as broad as the tasks that fall to the public sector. We looked for ways to invite readers into these stories, and worked with the editors to find new ways to tell them."

You hold in your hands the results of this effort. For longtime readers, it will seem quite a different Government Executive, but the subject matter remains the same, and we hope that its new display will be greeted as a big step forward.