Is the current spate of new editorial designs a sign of a buoyant sector or of desperation?

We all know it’s a tough time for print publications - it’s never comfortable seeing your media dominance challenged, especially by something as new and fast-moving as on-line publishing. Of course, magazines and newspapers were already mature markets before the arrival of the Web, and the competition within printed media is intense. You don’t just buy publications from the newsagent anymore; you get them from a supermarket (at least the titles they decide to stock) or a petrol station. And, of course, there are some things you don’t even have to buy - you can pick up Metro on the way to work, where your carefully-targeted, contract-published customer magazine is already sitting in your mail.

All this competition and change do concentrate the mind, which is probably why there has been so much activity in launching, reformatting and redesigning publications recently, from the handbag-sized Glamour to the compact Independent and Berliner Guardian. In many ways, this may be the last frantic dance for printed media before the Internet, hand-held devices and electronic paper take over.

To what extent does the current environment allow for innovation in editorial design?

Design is central to a magazine or newspaper - it’s the product itself that you’re creating, not the packaging for something else. Compared to thirty years ago, almost everything today is immaculately produced. The basic digital design tools and the on-line font foundries and picture libraries have opened up the techniques of design to everybody. Colour printing is easier and cheaper than ever before - now black and white is seen as special.

How are commercial pressures impacting on the actual design process? Do marketing considerations always outweigh design?

What’s clear is that there isn’t much room for the mediocre or middle ground any more. Publishing is separating into two groups; either you’re a mass-market, mainstream title or a brilliant, niche publication. The mainstream publication is market-researched, focus-grouped and brand-extended, fighting it out on some kind of news-stand next to competitors who are often re-editing the same celebrity-based content. With lots of coverlines and fluorescent logos, these magazines are big businesses, with all the organisational risk aversion that makes innovation difficult.

The best-designed mainstream magazines match form and content. Titles like Nuts and Heat look like they do because the editors want busy pages with lots of different editorial devices attracting quick readers - headlines, introductions, pull quotes, fact boxes, the ubiquitous drop-shadows, cheeky arrows encouraging you to turn to the next spread (‘Pete Burns: it gets even worse over the page’) - mainstream, with all guns blazing.

Grazia (art director Suzanne Sykes), a mainstream women’s weekly, plays a much cooler design game. It has more white space and fewer editorial elements competing on the page, but is made to feel urgent and ‘newsy’ by angled type and big panels of yellow and black in the front news sections, contrasted with beautifully art directed photography in the features at the back. It has an edgy beauty that the American CondÈ Nast magazines (like Teen Vogue) have pioneered. Printed by gravure, Grazia has rich colours on a matt paper, making it stand out from the more conventionally produced glossies.

Which other titles do you think have managed to break through and express something new or interesting in their design?

The magazine racks are full of niche titles - cars, hobby and sports magazines that succeed by bringing good design and editing to specialist subject areas. A magazine like hill-walker’s title Trail (art director Louise Parker) uses reportage photography, strong layouts and well-designed information graphics, to persuade you to put your hard shoes on and then tell you how to get there.

Specialist niche magazines know their readers and some of them deliberately ignore the conventional editorial devices of the ‘manufactured’ mainstream publications. Tate Etc, published by the Tate Gallery (art director Cornel Windlin and designer Laurenz Benner), has a multi-image cover, eccentric headline fonts that change issue by issue, text set on wide measures and deliberately small images. It’s designed as though you were reading the transcript of a lecture, with thumbnail images, rather than the more conventional approach of ‘lifestyle’ editorial design. The redesigned Architect’s Journal (by APFEL, together with art director Sarah Douglas) also uses this raw design approach - simple page layouts, basic fonts (including a mono-space for captions and drawing notes) and photographs that show buildings in context, rather than architects’ monuments. The Journal’s cover has the issue date and main feature headline overprinted in the middle, in no-nonsense, factual way that’s the opposite of most news-stand instincts but, as a business-to-business title, most of its readers are subscribers and have it delivered anyway.

What other visual trends would you identify as significant?

In a period when many editors (or at least their publishers) are worried that pages with too many words put readers off, some magazines publish lots of text. In the Wire (art director James Goggin), it’s typeset in sans serif and combined in minimal layouts with deliberate anti-pop star photography, while in the London Review of Books, in newspaper format, the typography is the design - centred headings and justified columns, elegantly set in the serif font Quadraat, with very few images.

The challenge in contract publishing is to make something that people want to read, while also conveying the client’s message. Redwood’s magazine Contact for the Royal Mail (art director Tan Tarmar) works by just doing the job properly. It’s got real information, useful case studies, and is better designed and edited than many consumer magazines. 33 Thoughts (art director James Grubb) is published by John Brown Citrus for the accountant BDO and works by not really mentioning the client at all. Instead, it collects all sorts of snippets about business and management, illustrates them wittily and prints it all on uncoated paper to look like a school exercise book. It’s relaxed, uncorporate and memorable.

What do you think things will look like in the future? And what will be the future role of the editorial designer?

At the moment, newspapers are feeling the effects of the Web worst. Every day brings stories about them changing editors or cutting costs, while their publishers invest in any on-line idea they see succeeding. It’s a pincer movement, with both readers and advertisers deserting print, which means losing two sources of revenue at the same time. For me (OK, I’m biased, I used to work there), The Guardian is the only paper that looks as though it is preparing itself for the next age, when the relationship flips over and the website becomes more important than the printed product. The criticisms of The Guardian’s redesign (art director Mark Porter), that the front page is bland and the headlines aren’t bold enough, seem entirely bound by old newspaper thinking. The design is clear, structured and links to a website that, if the recently-launched ‘Comment is free’ is anything to judge by, will increasingly match the printed version. In the future, the surviving mainstream brands will exist across all media, their authority coming from content, rather than the method of delivery.

Films didn’t kill live theatre - we watch both, but are very aware of their differences. I think editorial print design will concentrate on the areas where it is different from a screen-based experience. In a blurring of the boundaries between magazines and books, it will rediscover its ability to make permanent objects, using different papers, production techniques and special formats. For editorial designers worried about their future, making magazines and newspapers is about working with editors to create and organise content. These principles are needed on-line more than ever before.

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