Come May 1, next Monday, this is set to change. Stewart’s Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will formally launch Blueprint, a home, design and fashion magazine that will extend her franchise to a younger audience: women 25 to 45 years old. The tagline: Design Your Life.

On the face of it, Blueprint would appear a modest launch. The first issue, a test, has a rate base of 250,000. A second test issue is planned for August. If Blueprint gets a go-ahead, it will come out in 2007 as a bimonthly.

But Blueprint is hardly a modest endeavor. With Martha Stewart Living, Stewart reinvented the staid women's service category, challenging the older, established titles with its hipper, more stylish design and editorial, and in the process she opened the door for such publications as O, the Oprah Winfrey title, as well as Real Simple.

Stewart's Blueprint could well introduce a new round of upheaval as a magazine aimed at younger women yet offering the same expanse of editorial as her founding publication, across fashion, food, design and lifestyle.

"I think it’s going to be Martha Stewart Living for the twenty-something crowd," says Martin S. Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine publishing consultancy. "It will be interesting to see if she can capture this space that nobody else has captured."

Blueprint is described by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia as a magazine to help readers define their style and design their lives. It will delve into the areas of health, beauty, fashion, home decorating, cooking and entertaining with plenty of how-to advice.

It is aimed at young women who have a certain amount of disposable income and who are embarking on buying and decorating their first homes and still developing their own personal style.

The first issue, for example, offers hundreds of tips for decorating rooms, preparing meals, doing one's hair, and getting a better night's sleep. There are also features on the machine-washable living room and a quick-prep dinner party.

Walker sees Blueprint competing with Time Inc.’s Real Simple as well as, in a sense, Dwell, Metropolitan Home, Elle Décor and, at the fringes, Martha Stewart Living.

Like Martha Stewart Living it will span the shelter and lifestyle publications. And like when MSL first came on the scene, the intent is to shake things up.

"MSL changed the whole concept of women’s shelter magazines. It had sophisticated style and good recipes, but without making it a magazine only for the affluent. It showed you could be middle class and live well," says Walker. "It forced the other women’s service magazines to change and move into the same kind of space that Stewart had."

The intent with Blueprint is to create almost a new category, one that is a combination of a shelter and lifestyle magazine. If this is successful, says Walker, others will jump in.

The company is well placed to enter this space, with Blueprint a natural extension of its existing publications. Plus, the company already has a huge presence among advertisers. "It makes good business sense," says Walker.

The launch comes at a time when Stewart’s other magazines are soaring in ad pages, having fully recovered from the slump they suffered while Stewart was in prison serving time for lying to federal investigators over her sale of ImClone stock.

In the first quarter of this year, ad pages at Martha Stewart Living were up 80.9 percent, to 250.5 pages, compared to the same period the year before, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Everyday Food, her cooking title, was up 55.3 percent, to 106.7 pages. Stewart’s other title aimed at younger women, Martha Stewart Weddings, was up 16.8 percent to 290.8 pages.