(FORTUNE Magazine) - Like any great magazine, this one is always evolving. Most often the changes are subtle, sometimes even imperceptible, but as you make your way through this issue of FORTUNE, you'll notice a few more innovations than usual. We have refined the look of the departments in both the front and back of the book--First, Investing, and Business Life--with an eye toward making the entire magazine more useful, more readable, and much easier to navigate. And on the pages after First, we've created a new section called Dispatches, featuring sharp business reports from around the world. (You'll find four strong ones in this issue, starting on page 41 with Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean's file from the Enron trial in Houston.)

We don't think of this evolutionary process as a "redesign"--we didn't bring in a team of consultants, and we're not throwing any parties for ourselves--but it is a subtle updating of FORTUNE's basic look. It's intended to serve you, the reader, and to maintain the power and integrity of FORTUNE's content. The idea, says our design director, Robert Newman, is to "tie the components together typographically and visually, offer bold signposts to help readers get around, and present information in a wide variety of formats." Newman, who has been art director at both Real Simple and Entertainment Weekly, ran the project with a team of five designers--Ann Decker, Robert Dominguez, Kelly Peck, Linda Rubes, and Samuel Velasco. Together they came up with a look that's modern, yet classic FORTUNE. "We'd like to think," Newman says, "that even with the elements of this contemporary look, it's a design that the great writers, editors, and photographers of FORTUNE's past would feel comfortable with." I hope you'll feel comfortable with it too. Please let me know what you think.

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