A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

“A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever”

John Keats, Endymion

Well, what do you think about the new cover design? Really faithful (and somewhat older) readers will remember the original blue-blue-white style which graced the journal's cover until the end of 2000. In 2001, Thieme introduced the silver-and-blue design for their non-German language products, including ThCVS. Now the corporate identity philosophy has reverted to “all in blue-blue-white” again, giving the whole Thieme product range a uniform appearance.

When the editor was first approached by the publisher with this concept, he asked for an example. The one he was shown was that of RBGO (Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetricia), the journal of the Federação Brasileira das Associações de Ginecologia e Obstetricia (FEBRASGO). Its cover shows an extremely beautiful rendition of a pregnant woman's silhouette which in turn was the incentive to come up with something similar. Unfortunately, internal organs by nature lack something of the aesthetic qualities of Brazilian (and other) women. The challenge then was to combine heart, lungs, and the aorta, as the representative of the vascular system, into one emblem which would, hopefully, become instantly recognizable. Thieme's designers got to work and came up with modification after modification, scrutinized at first by the editorial board, and, in the final stages, by the two editors of ThCVS and ThCVS Reports.

Immediate visual appeal can often be explained with simplification and the smoothing of lines. For instance, the astonishing success of Apple products is generally accredited to innovative technology in combination with elegant design without frills. When the editor bought his first personal computer back in 1987, it was a Macintosh SE for exactly these reasons: he did not have to learn cryptic messages with lots of backslashes in green letters on a black screen (also known as MS-DOS), and the box simply looked attractive, needing little space on an already cluttered desk.

It is the hope of all concerned that the new ThCVS “logo” will likewise become a recognized trademark, symbolizing our specialties with a modern touch.