Erich Nagler: At the start of our rebranding process, we surveyed the competition, which includes logos of both Internet-based media brands as well as established publications that have their roots in print. How have those identities, and that legacy of publication design, shifted in the digital age? Is something lost? Something gained?

Luke Hayman: It’s now much easier to retain the character and nuance of a print brand on the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, designers struggled with limitations of screen resolution and bandwidth which affected the number and size of images, the choice of fonts, etc. Today, with software like TypeKit, along with high-resolution retina screens, much more is possible. However, the digital experience still loses the nuance of the physical form — the texture and smell of print. Having said that, print isn’t so great at displaying YouTube. Each medium has strengths and weaknesses.

EN: What was the feeling that the logo needed to evoke?

LH: I’ve rarely had a brief for a logo that had such ridiculously high expectations! Some of the language Matter’s editor-in-chief Mark Lotto provided: “Aggressive, ambitious, deep, intelligent, provocative, interesting, lively, entertaining, intimate narratives, vivid, rigorous, beauty, infectious, compelling, distinct, fresh,” along with, “playful and irreverent, charged and subversive, high-quality and high-stakes, serious but never dutiful, urgent and of the moment, transparent and accessible.”

Although the word beauty is there, Mark cautioned: “Beauty, in the strictest sense, is not the highest value… Stories can change minds, and lives, and the world, and it’s our mission to take big swings at big issues with big pieces. These are stories that matter.”

Ambitious. [Gulp.]

But most inspiring and fun was this: “A sense of danger and spontaneity and immediacy.”

EN: How did you eventually hit upon the 1925 André Vlaanderen type specimen that became our brand inspiration? It’s such an obscure reference! Was it just one of a bunch of Post-it notes in a graphic design book in your office that you found and thought, “Hey, that could be something for Matter”? Or…?

LH: The reference came from one of my favorite books, a collection of ephemera called ABC XYZ. It’s a book I’ve looked at a lot over the last 20 years. Bringing in the Vlaanderen specimen was a long shot. You either love it or hate it. It’s not conventional fare; it has a lot of power for six little letters.

EN: Can you give a sort of “baby’s first steps” narrative of your process, including the move from the 1925 specimen, to the earliest sketch of the logo (with the tall pointy M), to its numerous iterations, to its prototype implementation, to its final form? Was it a process of streamlining? Modernizing? Simplifying? Testing and revising?

LH: It starts by scanning the page from the book and “cutting” the letters together on the computer. The letters were traced and cleaned up. We looked at several modifications of some of the letters. Many versions are made and tested across various applications. There are dozens of tiny decisions about the length of strokes, relative proportions of letters, and the space between letters. It’s pretty geeky.

EN: You’ve designed so many iconic publications, it makes my head spin. How was your process different when designing for a newfangled sort of publishing-platform thing that we barely have a noun for yet? Were there things that were easier? More complicated? What were the different hurdles that don’t often come up in print?

LH: It’s usually easier to redesign a brand with heritage. It gives us a starting point and something to either capitalize on or push against. We typically have choices along a spectrum starting from a careful, respectful evolution (or restoration) to a complete revolution — a radical redesign. When starting completely from scratch, like we did here for Matter, we have a seemingly endless number of choices.

EN: Were there challenges or constraints to working in this entirely digital space? Where you want the total control and flexibility of the printed page, rather than the strictures of code and platform?

LH: This newfangled publishing thing comes with limitations. Many of the places designers use to play out a brand language in print are simply not available. For instance, we don’t have simple things like page numbers, a conventional table of contents, a back page, or even a cover! The cover is one of the most important expressions of a print brand.

EN: In the past few weeks, designers who’ve seen our new logo have tried to pin it as the following: Bauhaus, midcentury Modern, 1970s retro-futurist, space age, juvenile, and just about everything else in between. What do you think are its clearest precedents, stylistically?

LH: The letters are constructed from basic geometric shapes: squares, circles, triangles. This has a direct connection to the Bauhaus but also to children’s building blocks, so I can understand the comments. In the early 1970s, Push Pin Studios certainly used similar typefaces with fat, almost goofy simplicity. The truth is that it’s a mix of many of these styles. My favorite comments that arose during a couple of our presentations were comparisons to paintings of crowns in Basquiat paintings and Pac-Man. We all agreed these were two fantastic references.

EN: How has the Matter branding project and the ultimate Matter logo differed from the iconic media brands (New York magazine, Travel+Leisure, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic) you’ve had a hand in shaping the identity of? Was this just another magazine-y branding project?

LH: This is a different process from working on one of those brands where we spend a lot of time figuring out how much change we should make — the earlier question of evolutions versus revolution. This is in some ways more fun — we can create anything.