Like most graphic design, newspaper and magazine design is an exercise in combining technical detail with artistic flair. The core components of editorial design are text and pictures, so a keen understanding of typography, layouts, grids and composition is essential. In fact, magazines perhaps more than any other format show how the many elements of graphic design can come together in one place: images, illustration, photography, logos and mastheads, information design, paper stock and so on.
The Face, Neville Brody, art director 1981-1986
Esquire covers under art director David Curcurito are very type-led
What is perhaps a little different from other areas of graphic design is that editorial design demands constant reinvention, as Jeremy Leslie of magculture.com explains: ‘Editorial design uses and fuses two key elements of graphic design. It uses templates and sets up rules to follow, which is the technical side, in terms of understanding structure and limiting your choices to make certain statements. But it’s also about taking the rules that you have set up and making something creative from them. Unlike most areas of graphic design, editorial design is an ongoing project. It’s not a one-off, like a piece of packaging or a poster, where you get it all set up and then hit the print button; it needs to develop. So you’re looking for graphic designers to come up with a strong functional basis and rules, but you’re also looking to bend those rules on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. There has to be a balance between the familiar, so people recognise the magazine they bought last time, and surprise, to let them know it’s a new issue.’
For Leslie, editorial design is an especially exciting area of graphic design because magazines can be adventurous with graphic styles. ‘I look at magazines historically as mirrors of their time in terms of what’s happening graphically. But they are also ephemera to some extent, which allows them to do things that are riskier or more experimental graphically.’
Twen, designed by Willy Fleckhaus
German youth magazine Twen, published between 1959 and 1970 and designed by editor, art director and co-founder Willy Fleckhaus, is a title which broke new ground visually and continues to be influential today, according to Leslie: ‘Fleckhaus saw the opportunity to combine the typographic creativity of US editorial design with the new hard-line Swiss graphic style. He developed a complex 12-column grid system from which came some startlingly dramatic page designs. His trademark was the change of scale between the basic elements of the page. Of the many magazines hailed as classics of their time, Twen is one of the few that genuinely looks as strong today as it was at the time and continues to exert influence and attract praise.’
While magazines can perhaps afford to be more experimental and flexible with their graphic rules, newspapers tend to be stricter in order to accommodate large volumes of news text. Research Studios director Neville Brody worked on a redesign of The Times newspaper in 2006, reworking its graphic ‘furniture’ to better suit its then recently adopted tabloid format.
‘We likened it to moving from a mansion to a one-bed roomed apartment but not getting rid of anything,’ says Brody. ‘So we were brought in basically to unpack their stuff and to figure out what they didn’t need [because] it was creating a real problem inside the newspaper.’
Brody’s description of The Times project reveals the particular challenges of newspaper design: achieving clarity, easy navigation and pace while accommodating high volumes of text and photography. Polish editorial designer Jacek Utko has created a number of award-winning newspaper designs in central and eastern Europe, many of which have contributed to double-figure rises in circulation, often following years of stagnation.
As more and more news and information heads online, so editorial design has been influenced by the internet, as Brody explains: ‘We tried to bring some of the internet thinking to print [for The Times]. When people read stories on the internet they normally get little introductions, so they know what the story’s about. Normally you click that and it will go to the story, so we’ve brought that kind of thinking in. We’ve created a larger number of ways to understand a story.’
The best graphic design in publications, says Leslie, is that created by a pair of principals – the editor and art director, or lead designer. ‘The character of the publication comes from these two principals. The product is being formed by the interaction between them.’
Puls Biznesu, designed by Jacek Utko, 2007