Magazine Culture notes a recent Mark Newman piece in Folio about the art director/edi….er excuse me, I mean the editor/art director relationship. It seems the editor is always right.
As you might expect, there’s a bit of foot stomping about the piece in art directorial circles—at least I think that’s what it is. As we are just art directors, we can’t express ourselves very clearly with words—so I’m hearing complaints but I’m not really sure what they’re about. People think we art directors speak a secret language, sorta like porpoises, but no, we make no more sense to each other than we do to anyone else. Sad.
So, as I am incapable of mounting an effective counter-argument, I think I better concede his point, yes the editor is always “right” but only because he or she is defined as being so—at most magazines the art director reports to the editor. I’m actually not sure why this is a point worth making, there are very few of us who do not report to someone—editors report to publishers, publishers report to presidents, and presidents report to boards of directors. There’s a lot more Dagwoods around than Mr. Bumsteads.
So why is he making it? Probably because it has never been less true. In the 1940s, when art directors were assigning a fraction of the art that appears in a modern magazine and pasting up rude mechanicals for hot-type forms, Mark Newman would have felt no need to defend his autonomy against the visual clerks who brought largely generic form to his words. It’s now that the culture has grown increasingly visual, and the cognitive walls between words, images, and form have been shattered at the most successful magazines that his point seems urgent. The editorial inches, budgets, and staff devoted to art and design has never been higher. Most editors know that if they aren’t visually conversant, their career will be limited and their magazine will suffer.
Now, good art directors have always been word people. The translation of verbal ideas into visual and graphic ones requires it. But, a lot of old-school editors are playing catchup right now, and they know it. But clearly, there are also and a few who haven’t noticed that the nature of the magazine has changed.
There are, of course hacks in every field—art directors who can’t read or understand past a headline, and complacent and blunt-witted editors, but we have entered a period in which, whether you are an art director or an editor, you must be bicameral to be fully competent. The increasing number of visually astute editors (and editors who know they should be, but aren’t) has been good for us, and it’s the future. No matter who’s boss, we’ll be getting up in each other’s business for the foreseeable future.
I’m an art director, and my editor and I happen to be great friends. We work pretty simultaneously … it’s more of a symbiotic relationship. While this is probably an exception, I feel like it might be one of the best ways to create; we can’t make an entire magazine alone, so why not make working together as even-handed as possible?
Great point, excellent answer.
I think we mostly see eye to eye here, however I think your assessment of mid-century magazines is a bit skewed. Let me say for the most part, I think old magazines are better designed than much of what is seen today, though you are probably correct in describing the primacy of the editor in those times. However, the major difference between an editor in the 40′s, or really anytime in the first half of the 20th century, is that the editors had a more rounded education that included the visual arts. The disciplines were not as fragmented as they are today, despite what you call “largely generic,” and it makes sense that an editor should direct the efforts of technicians. Today, taste and visual sophistication is fairly absent in many editors, which is why art directors are so important.
I also totally disagree with your assumption that our culture is more visual than past generations. Our tastes are different, that is all. I would actually argue that people have become less sophisticated in “reading” images, as they have become accustomed to everything being laboriously explained. The first written languages were pictures, and ever since then things have been increasingly fractured. The best design tries to heal these fractures.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
I do not use the word “generic” as a pejorative, but as a simple statement of fact. While it is possible to do anything with hot type that could be done later with phototype, it was also much less likely that you would. The highly visual Life and the word-driven Time of the 50s share a strict visual divide between imagery and words. Pictures were almost always used (as they still sometimes are) to illustrate specific ideas in the text. Due to the nature of production (and not anything as subjective as taste) magazines were not designed so much as formatted. But, starting in the mid 50s the wall begins to chink. Today many pages feature an absolute interdependence of words and images. If you remove either one, the remaining half makes no sense. You see this, I gather, as mere “explanation” but I see it as hybridization. Other evidence of an increasingly visual culture? if you compare article length and text/image ratios in typical feature stories in the five decades preceding this one you see a clear trend towards more pictures and fewer words. More? look at ads–compare the word-heavy John E. Kennedy “salesmanship in print” approach of the early half of the last century to the often textless ads of today that sell through visual subtext.
I think that you are right that people are more specialized today than they were 50 years ago. But I also think that the passive vocabulary of interpreting imagery has been replaced with an active vocabulary. Everyone now has easy access to at least rudimentary DTP software, from MS Word to MySpace to Blogger—if you use this stuff, you think about it at least a little. The creation of bicameral projects has also become common in school (my daughter had to create a book report in the form of a cereal box, it was pretty cool, and much more integrative than most of what I was asked to to at that age) We’re all dealing with the visual these days as creators, not just consumers.
Firstly, when I say design I am talking about text, not just photographs and illustrations. Words are pictures, and old magazines had a much greater sense of typography than MOST today. The typography from even the lowliest brochure from the 50′s was infinitely more refined than the highest circulated magazines (eeew, Cosmopolitan) of today. Now, I am not particularly nostalgic, but what I like about older magazine design was refinement. Today, production is much easier, much more accessible… which is wonderful, but also means people don’t think things out as purposefully, and as carefully as they once did. We do have more opportunity to experiment today, unfortunately the variations within that experimentation are just as generic as the basic grid layouts back in the day… and usually much, much…. much more sloppy.
I think when you talk about article length to image ratio you are going to have to talk about the difference in specific magazines that have been around for a long, long time. Vogue for instance has waaaaay more writing now than it did in the first half of the 20th century. Also, again words are pictures, so when you look at old magazines like The New Yorker or National Geographic, you will see that the arrangement of text is visually beautiful. (On a side note, 19th century and early 20th century National Geographic design is totally influencing a lot of current magazines; now if only National Geographic would get the point, and update their “contemporary” look)
First we were talking about the 40′s, now the 50′s. Magazine design in the 50′s became incredibly lurid and colorful at this time, as well as integrating all of the philosophical and artistic movements of the preceding years. Modernism was king; never before or since has an art movement been so integrated into mass media.
Just because people today are into rapid fire explosions of visual clutter does not mean they are more visual, it just means they are less thoughtful, and more instinctive. Compare, for instance, a 1950′s Bugs Bunny cartoon, which usually had incredibly modern background paintings (that often bordered on abstract) to the the laboriously realistic CGI animated movies of today like Ratatouille. Which one you prefer is definitely a matter of taste – but you can’t argue that one is more visual than the other. The production methods definitely effect the work and the choices the creators can make. Computer animators today can basically do ANYTHING they want to do – they’ve got the eyelash rendering DOWN. The hand painting animators of yesterday had greater limitations of staff and technology, so they had to be much more careful about what they would create.
It seems to me you are pulling a bit of a bait and switch, away from imagery and towards typography. I am willing to stipulate that type in the 40s was more carefully set than type today, Type was a craft skill through the late 80s–the purview of trade typographers rather than designers, of which I might add, I was one (Boston Typographical Union, class of 1987). If, however you define typography as imagery, the discussion of a more or less visual culture becomes meaningless. When type in a publication is reduced in favor of imagery, the image/type is merely replaced by the image/picture, but the total quantity of image/content remains the same. To have this discussion you have to say that words is words and pictures is pictures, and a hybridized blend of the two is a blend.
Let me stipulate to another of your points: “People today are into rapid fire explosions of visual clutter…they are less thoughtful, and more instinctive.” when the visual life becomes “instinctive” doesn’t it mean that the people who have those instincts are themselves more visual? If people can successfully and happily navigate the cluttered environments of which you disapprove (I’m willing to disapprove of them too) doesn’t that also mean they are inherently at their core more visual?
Finally, I did look at trends by magazine—Esquire, Mother Jones, Wired[!], National Geographic, and Time have all moved in a more visual direction. I’m not entirely sure that that’s the best way to do it. It would probably be most meaningful to compare top ten in circulation year by year, rather than by title, which in the long haul may be rather arbitrary. There may be exceptions but the trend is undeniably towards the visual. You may argue that that suggest reader weakness, or a moral decline, you may even be right, but that hardly matters in this argument, what is key is that people are taking in information through pictures increasingly and not through words. You can not quantify image quality but you can quantify quantity, and the trend is overwhelmingly obvious.
Finally, I don’t think cartoons are a fair illustration for the change in culture that we both perceive but interpret differently. Animation–Bugs, Sponge Bob or Monsters’ Inc. have always been visual. It’s in on the border of words and pictures (such as one finds in magazines) that changes can be seen and felt.
When you write words, they are pictures, just as when you speak words they are sounds. It’s not a bait and switch, it’s an acknowledgement of what often becomes forgotten. Like a human who forgets to stretch and becomes sedentary – we forget the nature of language, just as our bodies forget movement and action causing backs to ache and prostates to swell. There was no divide between language and image at their onset; despite the development of more complex forms–in actuality, there still is no divide. The best writers and artists have always expressed this. I don’t ever forget this when talking about art of any kind.
When I said instinctive, what I meant was that our contemporary culture just consumes as a tiger in zoo will consume all the meat thrown at him, or a dog gobbles down all his food like a wild animal even though his food is perfectly safe from competitors. Just because a fat, bloated man eats a mound of technicolor burgers and fries doesn’t mean that he’s more into food than a careful gourmand who creates a fabulous meal and takes time to enjoy it slowly, savoring every morsel. My point is… just because people are gluttons for pretty pictures and entertainment, and are barely literate or patient enough to read an article doesn’t mean they are more visual…. it just means they are gluttons for any crap thrown at them.
I still don’t know what you mean when you say these magazines are more visual.. how in the world could you ever say that a magazine like Esquire, for example, which is a hot ghetto typographic mess, is now MORE visual than it was in the 60′s? Esquire at that time was a spectacular example of high concept design, with covers that communicated INSTANTLY without one drop of type! Which culture is more “visual,” the one who understands a cover without any verbal explanation, or the culture that needs everything spoon fed with layers of cover lines? The only trend I see is an arms race for vapidity and stupidity, at least in corporate media. More photographs and less writing, to me, does not equate to more visual, just more thoughtless. The writing is abridged of pertinent information; the photographs devoid of meaning. Especially, and most certainly, in the magazines you listed. The real trend, which is what my blog printfetish.com is all about, is about the end of mass printed media, ( in it’s last desperate gasp) and the rise of small, thoughtful, self-published magazines. Print will only survive this way, while news and gossipy drivel will go completely online.
Comics (which I studied in school), the primary influence on animation, are an even greater example of the “boarder of words and pictures” than magazines (well actually they are often, technically, magazines), and it is through them that I learned to appreciate the nature of language. If you care to, read an essay here: http://www.postroadmag.com/11/criticism/McGinnis.phtml
don’t blame me, some of the formating got messed up when they pasted the article into html, and never fixed it. You get the idea though.
Wait a minute, have you seen what Esquire looked like in the 60s after you turned past those magnificent covers? A great reader’s magazine? yes. A highly visual experience? Most certainly not. Even George Lois, who designed covers (and only covers) for Esquire in the 60s told me when I interviewed him that he thought that interior design today is better.
I would guess that all three of us would agree that the teaser-heavy covers one often finds on the newsstand are pretty wretched. Even so, we remember those Esquire covers because they were exceptional, not because they were typical.
I would agree that comics are highly visual, these as well have exploded in popularity in the second half of the 20th century.
I think though that after that we have to agree to disagree. We both see the same evidence but we interpret it differently.
Yes, and I respect your opinion – love your blog. Esquire, however, is an absolute pile of cultural detritus.