QUARTO CREATIVE
Quarto and the Chapel Hill staff collaborated on populating an interactive moodboard, featuring multiple ideas and options for typography, color palettes, photo styles, information hierarchies and more.
Chapel Hill
Triangle Media Partners — publishers of multiple regional magazine titles in the Raleigh-Durham triangle — found themselves at a crossroads. With a change in leadership and an important publishing anniversary on the horizon, the company wanted to explore new ideas and approaches for their flagship magazine, Chapel Hill. Quarto was delighted to join Triangle’s small but nimble staff in collaborating on the magazine’s redesign in time for its twentieth anniversary in March, 2026.
The previous design philosophy of Chapel Hill’s feature articles was predicated on an ever-shifting family of typefaces and colors.
Step One: Replatform
Chapel Hill started from a strong position. It was a well-written and well-designed free service publication for the residents of Orange County, North Carolina. It was hitting the usual regional magazine touchpoints: dining, culture, personalities and events. But the magazine lacked two crucial elements: a predictable department structure and direct references to its region.
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Departments are the backbones of any strong magazine, regional or otherwise. They become signposts for readers, both within a given issue and as a point of return in future issues. As such, they need a sense of consistency — in style, frequency and position within the magazine.
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Quarto audited a year’s worth of issues and then moderated a two-day brainstorming session with the Chapel Hill staff. We began by establishing the voice and mission of the magazine, based on a core set of keywords that identified the community and the publication’s place within it.
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We then picked apart every standing department, asking existential questions that hadn’t been considered before: Why is this here? What’s the benefit of this content for the reader? How can we communicate the brand promise of this department? And how can this department be more efficiently produced in future? Most importantly, we developed an organizational structure that could flex seamlessly with shifting seasonal content opportunities without sacrificing the consistency that regular readers would rely upon.​
The solution became “Only in Orange,” a front-of-book compendium of local event listings, restaurant reviews, personality profiles, community news, and modular content like book and music reviews that could be dropped into layouts as they became available without disrupting the regular department structure. The section branding makes plain the publication’s connection to its community with a name that could only be applied to a small handful of like-minded publications across the country.
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The section announced itself to readers with an interior cover page, teasing subsequent content through the repetition of another new magazine element: taglines. Every department would now announce its purpose and intentions to readers with an explicit 4-5 word promise. Taglines not only help readers identify articles of interest, but they also become constant reminders to the editorial staff about what types of content belong in which parts of the magazine.
“Only in Orange” announces a new section of the magazine to readers through an internal cover page, complete with teasers for other front-of-book departments.
Quarto and the Chapel Hill staff collaborated on populating an interactive moodboard, featuring multiple ideas and options for typography, color palettes, photo styles, information hierarchies and more.
Step Two: Redesign
With the establishment of a clear voice and mission statement, a new set of design elements fell easily into place. Quarto and the Chapel Hill team collaborated on a mood board, pulling together typefaces, color palettes and layout tools that supported the magazine’s identity and new tagline: “Because life’s better here.”
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The team developed a collection of typefaces that offered consistency with the historic branding and positioning of the magazine while expanding its voice. In past, Chapel Hill’s design staff would introduce new typefaces with every feature article, a valid approach that marries the typography to the textual content. But Quarto encouraged the team to challenge itself by restricting its type library, choosing a set of typefaces with personality as well as durability, so that the letterforms could be manipulated to suit individual feature articles without losing readability.​
As part of Chapel Hill’s new magazine platform, Quarto provided a library of typographic options to be used both for standing content and for unique feature designs.
Chapel Hill’s color palette had, likewise, changed from issue to issue in tandem with the content. Quarto built a broad but limited color palette for the magazine, using just two color swatches as the foundational basis for the magazine’s recurring departments and design elements. These swatches were related to — but distinct from — Triangle Media’s corporate palette, acknowledging the importance of the independent voice of Chapel Hill magazine.
Chapel Hill’s color palette offers a broad range of tones within a limited spectrum, all built around the two primary colors called out here.
Step Three: Refine
Quarto strongly believes that a magazine production team should make use of every workflow efficiency tool in order to free up the editorial staff’s time in favor of real creativity. For Chapel Hill, we crafted a magazine template that incorporates automated styling without sacrificing layout flexibility.
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We also built a series of design libraries that will allow the Chapel Hill staff to precisely place page headings, department tags, sidebars and fractional ads within layouts with a minimum of effort. Building from the Chapel Hill team’s preferences, Quarto has worked to predict as many future use cases as possible, reducing the volume of judgment calls and style deviations that the staff may feel tempted to implement in future.
Quarto provides all of its redesign clients with thorough InDesign templates and libraries, designed to increase efficiency and reduce the need for design and editorial judgment calls.
Step Four: Rejoice
The March/April, 2026, issue of Chapel Hill — the magazine’s twentieth anniversary — became its biggest issue ever. The 200-page debut of the redesign attracted a flood of advertisers, excited both by the occasion and the introduction of new premium positions created through the redesign. Editorially, the issue combines a nostalgic review of its first two decades with a bold vision for the new ideas that will guide the community through the decades to come.
