TABLET MAGAZINE
From Niche Journal to Leading Community Platform
Tablet is an award-winning online magazine exploring Jewish life and culture in all its diversity. Since its launch in 2009, it had grown from a niche journal into a wide-ranging publishing platform with books, podcasts, and a deep 10-year archive of written pieces. To reflect its growth, the Tablet editorial team collaborated with Pentagram on a new identity and website that repositioned Tablet from a small publication to a major platform for Jewish cultural conversation.
Role
Client
Creative Services
Design
Designing for Breadth Without Losing Depth
As Tablet expanded, its original online format struggled to keep pace with the breadth of content and community it served. The publication wanted to reach a broader audience beyond long-form essays—embracing everyday subjects like food and sports—while still maintaining the intelligence and authority that defined its voice. The redesign needed to create a digital platform that felt both community-focused, like a local newspaper, and elevated as a trusted intellectual resource.
SOLUTION
Rooted in Tradition, Reimagined for Today
The new identity draws inspiration from the vernacular of Jewish community newspapers, temple newsletters, and Lower East Side theater posters. A custom logotype, rooted in the slab serif Clarendon, introduces a bold yet warm personality. The modular grid and varied typography give each section its own character, while maintaining overall cohesion. Details like a beige newsprint background, black-and-white images that shift to color on rollover, and “widget” sidebars for events and podcasts add texture and community relevance. The design also surfaces evergreen stories from Tablet’s archive and introduces flexible tools for editors to compose pages with clarity and variety.
IMPACT
Strengthening Community Engagement
The relaunch positioned Tablet as both a trusted cultural authority and a lively, everyday companion for readers engaging with contemporary Jewish life. The redesign strengthened the magazine’s ability to tell stories across topics and formats, boosted discoverability of its archives, and created a more engaging, newspaper-like reading experience. With a confident new identity and adaptable publishing system, Tablet became better equipped to grow its community and continue shaping the conversation around modern Jewish culture.
35%
increase in overall website engagement
50%
increase in visitor traffic
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