If you are a frequent reader of American Farriers Journal, you’ve noticed the different look with this issue when you took it from the mailbox or picked it up from the supply shop shelf. This issue is the culmination of more than 18 months of work to update American Farriers Journal.

During this time, we gathered input from readers from conversations, surveys and focus groups to understand what we should continue doing and also do differently to better serve you.

Why update this magazine? Change for the sake of change is a foolish strategy. But so is complacency. This is why feedback from readers was essential. Through this, we established several goals after putting all of these suggestions together.

What’s Changed

With any magazine redesign, a common goal is updating the design so it is more contemporary and reader friendly. That was part of our redesign process. I believe we accomplished this through gathering feedback from our readers, as well as graphic designers.

More important, however, is a redesign provides a good time to think about the content that we supply you, the readers. Inside you’ll see several changes from it. Some article types were added, some removed, and some adjusted.

Take “Shoeing For A Living” as an example. Readers we spoke with and shared layout ideas with still rate the series as a favorite, but wanted to see some changes. Dropping the time stamps and focusing more on the farrier’s insight on their work were common suggestions…