Published twice a year, the goal of the Visual Arts Journal is to present a timely snapshot of the College—news about alumni, students and faculty, as well as information regarding everything from developments on the SVA campus to national and global trends in the visual arts. Like the College itself and the creative talents that make up the SVA community, the magazine is always in the process of changing and moving forward.

The fall 2008 issue of the Journal featured a thorough redesign of the magazine, including a different size, a new logo and a fresh visual approach to how stories are presented. This current issue not only continues that design concept but also introduces something else new: For the first time, the entire magazine is available in an online version. To click through the content of the Journal’s new site, visit sva.edu/journal.

Journal readers can now choose how they want to read and interact with the magazine’s articles, reviews and alumni content. From now on, each issue of the Journal will be stored in an online archive, allowing convenient access to past articles without having to search for a paper copy or take up storage space.

In time, every story will have a link that can be posted to a blog or sent via e-mail, giving members of the SVA community the ability to share the Journal’s news easily and conveniently. And within those stories, we’ll be able to offer links and resources to further contextualize and expand on the stories. Finally, our alumni content—exhibition news, notable milestones and achievements—will now be more tightly integrated with SVA Connect, the online alumni community. While we are able to present only a limited amount of alumni news in the physical pages of the Journal, more expanded versions of these offerings will be found in the online version.

One important point: The launch of this new site should not be taken as a portent of the passing of the hard-copy version of the Journal; we want to make it clear that print is alive and well at SVA. Instead, the online Journal should be seen as an expansion of the magazine that we know many alumni, parents, students, faculty and staff members look forward to each semester. As future issues of the Journal roll off the presses, we will continue to work on making the Web version both an enjoyable alternative to and a worthwhile extension of the print edition.

Thank you for your readership, and we hope you continue to enjoy the new directions Visual Arts Journal is taking.