New year, new look

The digital version of Speciality Chemicals Magazine, which will be online shortly (I’m writing this on 11 January) and the print version, which will be hitting your desks in late January, will look a bit different, because we have been through a redesign to bring it up to date. Relaunches and redesigns are a constant part of life in the media, but it is easy for us to overestimate their importance, so your views are important to us.

The major differences have included a radical change to the layout and colour coding of the features, which basically amounts to a whiter look which those who think about these things tell me is more modern, fresher, newer, etc. Of course, they also said that about the previous look back in 2004… To be fair, that was probably true at the time and I’m not the best person to ask about presentation issues. Certainly a redesign was overdue.

We have also moved from ‘justified’ to ‘ranged left or ‘ragged’ text. I was outvoted on that one in a 1-1 tie, with the publisher getting the casting vote. So if you don’t like it, tell him. He’ll be easy to find because his contact details will be on the Editor’s Letter page rather than on the contents page, which now looks much more accessible all-round.

You will also notice some of these changes being applied, naturally in a modified way, to the online version of the magazine, which alternates with the print edition every other month, beginning in February.

One change we considered but discarded was the use of the acronym ‘SCM’ in place of Speciality Chemicals Magazine on the cover. It seemed feasible, not least because the industry is awash in acronyms, but this one has other meanings, most notably one which is the title of a feature in the revamped editorial calendar: Supply Chain Management.

More to the point, no-one yet calls the magazine SCM: sometimes Spec Chem, sometimes just Speciality Chemicals and in the US Specialty Chemicals but never SCM. On that note, we are still using UK English generally, but sharp-eyed readers will notice that I have given up the battle to spell ‘sulfur’ with a ‘ph’, simply because so much depends on internet searches and the standard spellings are increasingly in US English.

In terms of content, there have also been a few tweaks to the schedule. Readers and customers were telling us that they wanted more focused features. This is already being reflected in the January edition in a feature on High Potency APIs, an obviously hot topic that was previously subsumed in the catch-all of Pharmaceutical Intermediates & APIs and which has yielded a raft of high quality articles from Ferro Pfanstiehl, Evonik and SAFC.

Also new in the January edition is Chemocatalysts, which is now treated separately from Biocatalysts. That will feature later this year, as will Biobased Chemicals, as opposed to the rather vague Biotechnology. Again, your feedback is very welcome. Things change, everything in the schedule has to justify its place. At the risk of concluding with a cliché, it is your magazine, not mine, and I’d rather have negative feedback than none.