The Business Week, Business Week, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg Businessweek.

The magazine has changed its name more than once. English Wikipedia says it was first published in New York City in September 1929, weeks before the stock market crash, under the title The Business Week, and that the name was shortened to Business Week in 1934. It was later written as one word, BusinessWeek, and since 2010 it has appeared as Bloomberg Businessweek.

Its early sections were built around the working week of a manager. English Wikipedia lists marketing, labor, finance, management and a section called Washington Outlook, and says the magazine began as a resource for business managers before it widened its audience in the 1970s to include readers outside the business world.

One editor held the top job for two decades. English Wikipedia says Stephen B. Shepard was editor-in-chief from 1984 until 2005, when he became the founding dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and that he was succeeded by Stephen J. Adler of The Wall Street Journal.

The change of owner came in 2009. English Wikipedia says that in July 2009 it was reported that the publisher McGraw-Hill was trying to sell the magazine, and that in late 2009 Bloomberg L.P., the financial data and news company, bought it and renamed it Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Eye magazine, in its Summer 2011 issue, gave the same sequence: Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek in 2009, installed Josh Tyrangiel, formerly of Time and Time.com, as editor, and relaunched the magazine in April 2010. Bloomberg L.P. has owned the magazine since 2009.

The publishing rhythm has since changed twice. English Wikipedia lists Megan Murphy as editor from November 2016 to January 2018, followed by Joel Weber, and says that Brad Stone was appointed editor in January 2024, when the magazine switched to biweekly publication. In June 2024 it became a monthly, published twelve times a year, according to the same article.

A new creative team, a lowercase w and a grid built to be broken.

The relaunch began with hiring. Talking Biz News reported on 19 March 2010 that Bloomberg BusinessWeek had named Richard Turley creative director, Cynthia Hoffman design director and David Carthas director of photography, all reporting to the editor, Josh Tyrangiel. The report said Turley came from The Guardian, where he had most recently been art director of G2, the daily features section, and where as a senior designer he had worked on the newspaper’s 2003 redesign. Hoffman had been deputy art director at Time.

The title itself was restyled. English Wikipedia says that in early 2010 the magazine’s name was set as Bloomberg Businessweek, with a lowercase “w”, as part of the redesign. The same article credits the magazine’s look in the following years largely to Turley, then to Rob Vargas from 2014, and to the deputy creative director Tracy Ma from 2011 to 2016.

Turley explained the method to Eye. In an interview with Simon Esterson published in Eye no. 80, Summer 2011, he said editors and designers at the magazine sat side by side, and that the structure of the magazine was indebted to the grid and type approach he had learned working with Mark Porter at The Guardian. He said he chose Helvetica because he wanted a typeface that did not surprise anyone, rather than a branding exercise. Eye noted that early online critics had called the redesign “too gridded”, and wrote that for Turley the grid was there to be broken by graphics, diagrams and pictures.

Turley described that breaking in his own words. The type structure and spacing, he told Eye, were the bricks and mortar of the magazine, and on top of them the team added pictures, display type, big numbers, charts, captions and illustration, a process he called “graffiti-ing the pages”. He described the graphics staff as graphic journalists who work with reporters and draw much of their data from Bloomberg’s own network, and said charts were scaled to the size the material deserved rather than dropped into a space left in a layout.

He also told Eye how the job came about. Bloomberg asked Jim Kelly, a former editor of Time, to recruit an editor and art director; Kelly asked Time’s design director, Arthur Hochstein, who still had a PDF of Turley’s work, and Turley pitched for the role and won it. Eye illustrated the interview with covers from 2011, including one with an illustration by John Hendrix.

A 1929 weekly, a 2009 owner and a 2010 redesign.

A magazine can keep its name for decades and still change the way that name is set. InPublishing reported on 5 November 2015 that the London design magazine Icon, launched in 2003, marked its 150th issue with a new logo, new typefaces and a faster-paced layout, together with three new sections and a new strapline, “Design worth knowing”. English Wikipedia says the same title moved from monthly to quarterly publication in 2020, so the masthead now appears four times a year.

A name can also travel between titles. English Wikipedia says the Paris weekly Elle was founded in 1945 and that its publisher launched Elle Decoration in France in 1987; Business of Home reported that the American Elle Decor marked its 35th anniversary in 2024. Covers carry the other half of the change. Business of Home wrote on 11 September 2024 that the first Elle Decor issue under a new editor in 2020 used an illustration by Rachelle Baker that reimagined Nancy Lancaster’s Yellow Room. When reading a magazine’s identity, look at when the logo and typefaces were last redrawn, how often the issues appear, which parent title lends the name, and whether the cover shows a room, a photograph or an argument.

A plain typeface, a strict grid and pages that interrupt both.

The name records its owners. The title began as The Business Week in 1929, became Business Week in 1934, and took the parent company’s name after Bloomberg L.P. bought it in 2009; the lowercase “w” arrived with the 2010 redesign, according to English Wikipedia.

The relaunch paired an editor from Time with a designer from The Guardian. Talking Biz News dated the appointment of Richard Turley, Cynthia Hoffman and David Carthas to 19 March 2010, and Eye dated the relaunch to April 2010. Turley told Eye in Summer 2011 that he had settled on Helvetica almost as soon as he was asked to pitch.

The design idea is a contrast. A plain typeface and a tight grid set the base, and charts, photographs, big numbers and illustration sit on top of it, many of them outside the grid. In the Eye interview Turley called these elements “syncopated moments” and said they were a form of narration, the magazine talking to the reader in a voice separate from the writer’s. He also argued for cropping photographs, which he said many New York magazines were reluctant to do.

The team after Turley kept the approach. English Wikipedia names Rob Vargas as creative director from 2014 and Tracy Ma as deputy creative director from 2011 to 2016. Since June 2024 the magazine has appeared monthly under editor Brad Stone.

For a design guide, Bloomberg Businessweek shows how a business magazine can set a strict grid in an unremarkable typeface and then let charts, pictures and display type break across it. Compare Bloomberg, the parent company and its terminal, or Fast Company, another American business magazine. For this guide we use yellow, orange and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bloomberg Businessweek’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.