Good Fruit Grower is 60 years old this year—and we want to celebrate with you, our readers, advertisers, and owners—the people who have made the magazine such a worldwide success. Rather than having cake and punch to mark the occasion, however, we plan to celebrate by reinventing the magazine and our business. Our expectation is to become an even stronger presence in the tree fruit and grape industries. During the last few, difficult years in the apple industry, we have observed and admired the many and varied efforts made to shift focus, accept change, and look to the future. We aim to be as daring and resourceful as you have been.

Our first step in our reinvention was an obvious choice: to redesign the magazine, beginning with the logo on the cover, through to the closing pages. This issue introduces some (but not all) of those changes to you.

Over the past year, our staff, together with the firm Ayers/Johanek Publication Design, Inc., analyzed every element of Good Fruit Grower and detailed the magazine’s strengths and weaknesses.

One of our first decisions was to have the word “Grower” in our
logo increased in size to reflect the importance of our growers to
our mission.

Good Fruit Grower’s focus has always been on comprehensive, accurate reporting, and that won’t change. But our functionality will. We know you are busy people, so we have focused on improving our readability. New typefaces should help, along with a greater emphasis on photography. Although it won’t be fully apparent until 2007, we will be opening up more pages for editorial, graphs, and larger photos.

We’ve changed the table of contents to make it easier for you to find the information you need, and we’ve varied the treatments on feature articles to make it clearer which articles are most important, and which are in supporting positions.

We appreciate the acclaim Good Fruit Grower has received throughout the years, but we know that we must work to deserve your continued support: We want our appearance to measure up to our content.

As you read this issue, please note what you like (and don’t like), and let us know. Good Fruit Grower is a work in progress that will always evolve into something different, something more than it was. We intend to continue to be the world’s most important publication on tree fruit and to be worthy of that industry. And we hope to someday earn a similar stature with grape growers.

Please join us in celebrating our past, as well as designing a new future for Good Fruit Grower and the tree fruit and grape industries.