The University of Chicago Law School Record
Reflecting the Energy, Intelligence, and Impact of a Storied Law School
When we set out to reimagine our Law School magazine with a bold new creative direction—one that honors our traditions and reflects our innovative spirit—Stauber Brand Studio helped us clarify our vision and define our strategy. The result is a dynamic and elevated design that reflects the substance, history, and impact of the University of Chicago Law School, and that allows us to connect more powerfully with our alumni and supporters. And our readers noticed: We have received numerous messages since our first issue under Stauber Brand Studio about how much the new design direction resonates. Joy and her team did not only give us a “new look.” Their sharp strategic lens and aptitude for excellent design helped us set a new standard for how we tell our story—one that will evolve with us for years to come.
—Nadia Alfadel Coloma, Associate Director of Content, The University of Chicago Law School
The University of Chicago Law School set out to reinvent its magazine, The Record—a publication that sits at the center of the school’s relationship with its alumni and supporters. The communications team had built a strong editorial foundation of substantive, well-reported stories. What they were looking for was a design approach that could bring that content fully to life, and a partner who could help shape the strategy behind it.
Stauber Brand Studio led the redesign from vision to finished issues, developing a contemporary, dynamic creative direction that reflects the ethos, intelligence, and complexity of one of the country’s most distinguished law schools—and gives the communications team a flexible new standard to build on for years to come.
The opportunity
A great institutional magazine does more than look good. For the Law School, the magazine is a primary tool for relationship-building: a way to remind alumni of everything they value about the school, to convey why the work of the Law School matters, and to sustain the connections that keep a community engaged over decades.
The redesign needed to hold a set of dynamic contrasts in balance—history and tradition alongside contemporary practice, faculty scholarship alongside alumni life, rigorous ideas alongside genuine warmth. It needed to serve very different kinds of readers, from someone drawn in by a cover story to an alum who flips straight to class notes. And it needed to do all of this while reflecting both the Law School’s distinct identity and the wider University of Chicago brand.
Those contrasts are built into the Law School’s own home. Eero Saarinen’s Laird Bell Law Quadrangle—a landmark of modern architecture—sets the faceted glass tower of the D’Angelo Law Library against limestone that ties the building to the university’s Gothic tradition. The magazine needed to live in that same space between the contemporary and the enduring.
The approach
A magazine redesign is more than a styling exercise. We began by aligning stakeholders and clarifying goals—grounding the new direction in the Law School’s values and its competitive landscape before any design work started.
Aligning stakeholders. The magazine answers to a wide range of stakeholders across both communications and advancement. To bring those perspectives into focus early, we held a hands-on alignment workshop. Participants assessed the school’s magazine alongside peer publications, assigned personality adjectives to define how the current design was landing and where it should move, connected the Law School’s underlying values to a new design direction, and worked through what to carry forward and what to leave behind. The result was a shared, clearly-articulated foundation for the redesign—built together, and rooted in how the team knew their own audience.
Designing in a competitive landscape. A defining part of the work was considering the magazine not in isolation but within its universe of peer publications. We wanted the new magazine to have a clear and distinct identity in a readers’ world.
A symbiotic relationship between design and content. Every design decision was made in service of the story; to elevate the communications objective. Working closely and iteratively with the team, Stauber Brand Studio built a system that moves readers through content clearly and memorably, with dynamic pacing from spread to spread.
The design
The new direction gives the Law School a magazine that is at once contemporary and substantive—an elevated, recognizable brand with the flexibility to carry many kinds of stories. Key elements of the new system include:
Rooted in place. The creative direction takes its cues from the Law School’s own architecture—the clean geometry, glass, and light of its modernist landmark—reflecting the university’s balance of the contemporary and the enduring into the magazine, so it reads as unmistakably of this institution.
Dynamic pacing. The design balances visually driven spreads that set the tone and pull readers in against denser, content-rich pages—so the magazine has rhythm and impact from cover to cover.
Clear points of entry. A considered typographic hierarchy, a varied visual approach, and a system of pullquotes, callouts, facts and figures, and Q&As give readers clear ways into every story and clear paths through the messages that matter most.
Inviting, scannable density. Listings-heavy sections like class notes—among the most anticipated pages for alumni—are handled so they remain inviting and easy to scan without losing substance.
A flexible, lasting standard. More than a single redesign, the work established a strong and adaptable visual language: a new standard the communications team can extend across coming issues, informed as needed by University of Chicago brand standards and Law School messaging priorities.
The impact
Since the first redesigned issue, the response from readers has been immediate and enthusiastic. Beyond the visible refresh, the Law School gained a clarified strategy, an aligned set of stakeholders, and a flexible design standard built to evolve with the school. Together, these strengthen the Record‘s role as a tool for connecting with alumni and supporters—and for telling the University of Chicago Law School story with the substance it deserves.
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