This Magazine has not changed the way it appears on your computer or phone for a dozen years now. That is a very long time in Internet terms. If we had marketers on our staff, they would have changed the look of the site at least twenty-four times in twelve years. Marketers are easily bored, and nothing is more destructive than a bored marketer except perhaps a bored urban planner.

But some people have asked whether Dr. Boli intends to modernize the site, and Dr. Boli himself has been thinking about its future. That led to this long essay about how this long essay looks when you read it in this Magazine.

There are many reasons for changing the look of a publication, and certainly every magazine, whether in print or on screen, goes through changes in design if it lasts more than a few years. Even the designs that seem most stable—“iconic,” to use a word borrowed from our Eastern brethren, who have not yet noticed that it is missing—can hold out only so long before some marketer or designer fusses with them. Time, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal—we think of these as bastions of conservative stability. But go back a century and see how different they looked.

The main reason designs change is to keep up with trends. That seems like a very stupid reason: trends are by definition temporary, and no one thinks, “I want to create something that will make people turn up their noses six years from now.”

But trends are never presented as trends. They are always peddled to us as new discoveries in what is true and beautiful. Previous generations wallowed like pigs in the slop of ignorance, but we have stood up, washed ourselves off, and seen the light.

For example, these paragraphs are right-justified. That is a “rookie mistake” in Web design—so much so that WordPress, which runs half the Internet, removed the right-justify formatting option several years ago. How do we know it’s a rookie mistake? Well, this article is one of the sources most often pointed to when the question comes up. Some of its information is outdated: every major browser—Firefox, Safari, Chrome and all its cousins—supports automatic hyphenation now. (Here’s a curious fact that may surprise even the most loyal readers of this Magazine: before browsers supported automatic hyphenation, Dr. Boli used to hyphenate articles by hand. It was not as hard as it sounds. Pasting “­” between syllables of long words took care of it, and few articles were so long that hyphenating took more than thirty seconds.) But you will notice, if you read to the bottom of that article, that our designer’s opinion is not based on or limited to Web technology. He believes that justification is “just bad typography.” Justifying text in print is also a bad idea most of the time, he says. Naturally, his own self-published book is set ragged-right.

Everyone from Gutenberg to the advent of me got it wrong, but at last we know the truth about type. This is how design trends always come to us: as discoveries of how stupid our predecessors were.

Incidentally, here is a little challenge for you. Visit that article if you haven’t done so already, and judge it by its typography. You may think it is a breathtakingly gorgeous piece of design. You may say so in the comments if you like. Dr. Boli thinks it’s ugly and hard to read, but his opinions were formed by reading books. In which context, it is interesting to note that, if you read publishing professionals’ advice on formatting books for publication, you will find that they point out failing to justify text as a “rookie mistake.”

So trends, we reiterate, are a stupid reason for making changes. But adapting to the current state of technology is not a stupid reason. The introduction of printing changed the way books looked, and some of the changes were for the worse. But it was necessary to adapt to the new technology, because the benefits were obvious.

The software that runs this Magazine is WordPress, and the part of the software that controls how everything looks is the “theme.” There are thousands of themes out there for WordPress. Dr. Boli’s site runs on a theme called “Dr. Boli,” which is not one of the more popular ones. As far as he knows, the number of sites running it hovers around the one mark, dipping down to zero on those rare occasions when this one is off line.

This theme was cobbled together from spare parts twelve years ago, and it has been creaking along since WordPress 3.5.1. We are now at version 6.9.4. In most software, something put together for a twelve-year-old version of the software would have ceased to work about eleven years ago. We have WordPress culture to thank for the longevity of this design. “In core WordPress,” writes Matt Mullenweg, one of the founders, “we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress.”

Not all of them, though. Dr. Boli has seen themes break with software updates, and his may be next.

So would it be a good idea to give the site a fresh look, based on current technology instead of the Bronze-Age theme it currently runs?

Dr. Boli has been trying some experiments. On a small model of the site, he created a new theme based on other up-to-date themes. It works.

But then he looks at all those “iconic” publications whose designs have been fussed with and thinks that he liked them better the way the used to be.

So he has made a compromise. For now, he will let the “Dr. Boli” theme continue to shape the site. If it breaks in a future update, though, there is a substitute waiting. It may not be perfect yet, but it will work. This will still be a publication where words are primary, and design exists mainly to make the words easy to read.

And it will still have right-justified text. If it was good enough for Aldus Manutius, it’s good enough for you.