All new and still the same. As ENR keeps up with the news every week, it has always kept up with the latest trends in publication design. In this issue and the issues to come, you will find all the content that you always count on ENR to deliver. But underneath our plain brown wrapper, we are putting new thinking in publication design to work to make the magazine more readable and give it a fresh new look.

The design was created by New York City-based Shostak Studios, which has done much of its work in technology and business publication design. "There is an abundance of information in this magazine, and our goal was to help readers navigate through it more easily," says Viviana Bromberg, senior designer.

Since this week’s cover story is about the reconstruction effort in Iraq, we decided to take a look at the evolution of ENR’s cover design as shown through cover stories about past conflicts and the rebuilding efforts that followed.

As Engineering News merged with Engineering Record in 1917 to create Engineering News-Record, the magazine faced World War I. In one of the early issues of the new publication (5/23/ 1918), war correspondent R.K. Tomlin Jr. told the story of how photos taken from planes flying at 6,000 ft allowed the Army Corps of Engineers to produce an accurate map of No Man’s Land and the German trench system. A cover illustration later that year (10/3/1918) encouraged readers to buy war bonds.

ENR’s cover design also shows changes during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In 1971, a cover story on Rear Adm. Walter Enger, commanding officer of the Seabees in Vietnam, gives us insight from history about how the scope of work can expand in such situations. A $22-million contract awarded in 1962 for airfields and communications facilities evolved into the biggest single work order ever assigned by the military to a joint venture of private builders (7/15/1971). The contract extended over almost a decade, "and the scope of facilities completed under it in the combat zone of...America’s longest war has soared to nearly $2 billion."

By the time the magazine covered the Gulf War and made Bechtel Construction Co. President Terry Farley "Man of the Year" for leading the effort to put out the oil fires in Kuwait (2/17/1992), we had become best known as ENR, and the acronym became a cover element for the first time. The design we now replace gave inside news stories cover treatment. "The new design gives more prominence to the cover image, and the new logo has a bolder feeling and brings us back to our traditional red," says ENR Art Director Guy Lawrence.

Janice L. Tuchman
Editor-in-Chief