Editor’s Letter: Toronto Life got a makeover

Welcome to the new and improved Toronto Life. We’ve added a fourth feature to each print issue, bringing you more of what you love, alongside a new logo and an updated interior architecture. It’s the first such brand overhaul in 15 years, and it comes at a pivotal moment, as the AI revolution lays waste to preconceived notions of what’s real and reliable. Call me biased or naïve—both are probably true—but amid this upheaval, I can’t help but foresee a golden era for trustworthy outlets.

I’ve always been drawn to magazines because they fixate not on being first but on being best. Of course, every day we publish a steady stream of buzzy news content on our website, on social media and via our newsletters, but when we decide to cover a big, meaty story, we toil in darkness for months before launching it into the world. We know you may have read a lesser, serialized version somewhere else, but ours should be the one you remember: the most comprehensive, best reported, most artfully delivered. We also want to make sure it’s the most accurate, which is why we fact-check every word we print, at considerable cost. In this post-truth era, we hope that means something.

While print is important to us, it’s merely one element of what we do. Toronto Life reaches its vast audience wherever they are, which is to say everywhere: online, in our pages and in person (we throw some 80 events a year, plus four big-top soirées). We’re also launching an events newsletter to help Torontonians decide how best to spend their precious free time. And we’re getting into the merch game, with a limited run of new-logo tote bags that prove civic pride and style don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In this wobbly era for journalism, it feels good to buck the trend toward pessimism and retrenchment.

Yet no matter the format, our product is consistent: Toronto Life in 2025 stands for fearless investigative reporting; ­spirited profiles of rainmakers, power players and rogues; plus authoritative service journalism. And we do it all with verve and sophistication.

The task of capturing this spirit in a logo fell to Toronto Life’s art director, Colleen Nicholson, and Commercial Type’s ­Christian Schwartz, who were inspired by the magazine’s debut. The inaugural cover, from 1966, featured Barbara Amiel, then a young writer and budding society fixture, under an orange logo featuring a bohemian “T,” a renegade rainbow “r” and a dignified uptown “L.”

A typographic homage to that era made a lot of sense, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Fact-based, pavement-pounding, sharply written journalism built Toronto Life into an enduring brand, and those qualities remain what we’re proudest of today. So please consider the new Toronto Life a return to our roots in both style and substance. That’s evident in this month’s best new restaurants ranking (accompanied by a rollicking 1,200-person event), a profile of the lawyer at the centre of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial, the inside story of fallen Raptor Jontay Porter, and a memoir from the muse behind the Oscar-­sweeping film Anora. We love what we do, and we value your trust. We hope it shows.

Malcolm Johnston is the editor of Toronto Life. He can be reached via email at editor@torontolife.com.