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THE NEW ISSUE of Q has Arctic Monkeys on the cover and a top notch CD accompanying it that features the likes of The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Keane, Kaiser Chiefs and PJ Harvey recorded live at various Glastonbury Festivals. Inside the magazine we list Q’s 10 Most Exciting Bands In The World Right Now, which we fully expect you to debate and challenge in the days to come.

Upon picking it up, dear Lord I hope that you will instantly be struck by the fact that it looks somewhat different. Q has been through what magazine publishers like to refer to – with all due fanfare – as The Redesign Process. At the end of which, magazine Editors traditionally convince themselves that the results are sweeping and radical and will assuredly bowl over readers with the manifest improvements they have rendered. More often than not, all but the members of their immediate family remain happily oblivious of any change. The fonts are different, you say? How fascinating.

Perhaps with the sort of boundless optimism that allows me to convince myself each year that prolonged investment in supporting West Bromwich Albion FC will not lead to awful disappointment, I suspect this ‘redesign process’ will be more noticeable. It’s starting point, after all, did come with a room full of Q subscribers. Well, two rooms full of Q subscribers to be entirely precise. One evening at the end of last year, 16 or so of such valued folk kindly accepted an invitation to pop into Q HQ to tell us what they thought of the magazine, good and ill. Once their tongues had been plied loose by alcohol, the results were illuminating, instructive and inspirational. Which was nice.

At the time we had just unveiled another New Look Q. I rather thought we had conducted roots and branch corrective surgery on the magazine, and that both groups I sat in on that night would tell us as much, whilst administering hearty pats to our collective back in the process, But of course they didn’t. Instead they looked as one vaguely befuddled when the word ‘redesign’ was mentioned. And then, again as one, said, “Didn’t notice, mate, sorry”, or words to that effect. At which point I bid adieu to my self-satisfied afterglow. They then went on in many and varied ways to tell me, in no uncertain terms, what they liked about Q, but also what they thought was missing and what they would like to see more of. This was the point at which I began to think about redesigning Q again, for which I thank all those who attended these sessions.

‘The redesign process’ of which we have now spoken much is an odd thing. It essentially amounts to talking about and putting together your fantasy version of the magazine; and then endeavouring to make it into a reality. On Q, that entails Art Director Mark Taylor and myself retiring to a dark dungeon (more accurately: an airy, if compact and bijou office on the 4th floor of the building we call Mappin House), for six consecutive weeks. During which time I make a series of hare-brained suggestions, he patiently attempts to give them shape and form, whilst we listen to Dylan, The Beatles, R.E.M., Radiohead and Tom Waits on an inexhaustible loop tape. Ah, happy days.

We emerge – having been removed from the ebb and flow of normal life and more familiar with one another’s foibles than is strictly healthy – brandishing a big, black folder that contains the future for Q in dummy form. We are perhaps overtly excited about it and given to gibbering at length about its many constituent parts. Our colleagues, who have actually been doing the real graft of keeping the magazine running, do not for some unfathomable reason seem especially thrilled to hear that we spent one whole working day talking about the ideal positioning of a picture caption.

So it has always been, and so it was this time, I am, however, terrifically happy with the results and excited by the potential they offer. I presume this might be a good thing. The proof, though, is in the pudding, and that will depend upon you. If you’d be so good, then, as to tell me what you think of this month’s issue and those that follow – by mailing paul.rees@emap.com – it would be greatly appreciated.

But do keep one thing in mind: you made us do it.
PAUL REES – Editor, Q

2:47 PM | 01/06/2007