M. When you’re holding something that has full bleed, you have an art object, and when you’re looking at something that has a margin on it, then you’re looking at a picture that’s in a frame.

Getting away from the bleeds created the sense of directly experiencing the art, and standardizing the headlines and the typefaces that were used in those headlines and in our section heads, and just doing some subtle visual cues to identify sections really served to allow for a smooth way-finding within the publication, so you can choose your own adventure a little bit better. And when you were trying to soak up a really well-crafted essay, you weren’t having all this other stuff getting in the way.

We worked really hard to allow the design to recede and become invisible in a sense.

And then we’ve been slowly re-inserting it. If you look at the summer of 2013, July 2013, if you look at that issue compared to the issue before, it’s like “Whoa, this is the same magazine?”

I think a good designer is like a good wedding planner—if they did their job, you don’t think about them. So that was what I was striving for, let’s make this design so good it’s invisible.

And then we’ve kind of been slowly having more fun with things. We also went full color throughout, at one point. That I think has upped the energy level a little bit. But we still pretty much stick with a couple of basic typefaces for everything that is ours.

But design… design is everything.

M. There is a staggering design value index chart, showing companies that invested this much in design did this much, and companies that invested this much in design did this much.

There’s practically nothing better to invest in design for your business to succeed, and that’s whatever business you’re in. Whatever business you’re in, if your shit looks cohesive and thoughtfully placed, and things are where people expected them to be, and you’re anticipating their questions and their needs, and making it easy for them, they’ll buy your thing.

You just made it easy. And they trust you.

Good design, it instills trust. It’s considerate. It’s considerate to the reader, and it’s considerate to the contributor. That’s important, big time.

If I worked all week on an illustration that was going with an article in Little Village, and I saw the headline was like in eight fonts, over it, I’d be pissed. So I owe a lot of people apologies over the years.

I. Somewhat related to the design question: High-quality journalism is one of the cornerstones that make your model work. How do you achieve that, and how do you maintain that standard?

M. We have really high-quality editors. Lauren Shotwell, our news director, she’s amazing. She’s got a lot of newsroom experience, she’s got an investigative reporting background. She came over to us from IowaWatch, an amazing non-profit investigative journalism organization. That’s one key.

Another one is that we just invest a lot in review. We review content way more than most publications. We have a lot more of a rigorous process. Our production cycles are a month long. It’s staggered: another issue starts before the last one is finished. We have a couple of weekly meetings, where in the beginning it’s arguing over what’s going to go in, and the third Wednesday’s is the first time that next week’s issue will be seen in its full form. That’s a week before it drops.

At a daily, they’re going to look at it at 3 a.m. and distribute it at 6. We look at it for the first time a week before it comes out.

Our core editorial team will see it in its full PDF glory on Wednesday night; argue and sand and refine and polish Thursday and Friday; probably remember some things on Saturday and work some more on Sunday. And then we go to print at dawn on Monday, get the issues on Tuesday, do the distribution over the course of two days.

So that’s pretty luxurious. Others in our field are usually weekly, and they have to do that process every seven days. I can’t speak to that. But for us, it’s a good pace.