Ten Books and Two Chapters

on Magazine Design

A Review Essay

by Gerald Grow

Professor of Journalism

Florida A&M University

� 2005

First published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Autumn 2005, pp. 729-736. (This version has been slightly reformatted for the internet. Title and headings have been added.)

Front Page: Covers of the Twentieth Century. Stephane Duperray and Raphaele Vidaling. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson (Orion Publishing Group Ltd.), 2003. 191 pp. $29.95 hbk.

Surprise Me: Editorial Design. Horst Moser. New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2003. 288 pp. $47.25 hbk.

Modern Magazine Design. William Owen. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. 240 pp.

Graphis Magazine Design 1. B. Martin Pedersen, ed. New York: Graphis Inc., 1997.

Best of Graphis: Editorial. Peter Feierabend and Hans Heiermann. Zurich: Graphis Press Corp. 1993.

Magazine Editorial Graphics. Kaoru Yamashita, ed. Tokyo: P.LE. Books, 1997.218 pp.

MagCulture: New Magazine Design. Jeremy Leslie. London: Lawrence King Publishing. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. 176 pp. $35 pbk.

Designing for Magazines: Common Problems, Realistic Solutions, rev. ed. Jan V. White. New York: Bowker. 1982. 223 pp.

Magazine Design that Works: Secrets for Successful Magazine Design. Stacey King. Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2001. 159 pp. $35 pbk.

Issues: New Magazine Design. Jeremy Leslie, with foreword by Lewis Blackwell. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2000. 172 pp.

"Magazine Design and Redesign," chapter 14 in Graphic Communication Today (4th ed.) by William Ryan and Theodore Conover.

"Magazine Designs: Creating the Look," chapter 9 in The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry by Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel.

It is difficult to find a textbook to use in a course on magazine design because design requires at least three kinds of experience: with hardware and software, with the visual meanings that linger from past periods, and with examples of good design. The available books on magazine design offer few specific instructions on how to attain particular effects. But several offer examples of interesting magazine design for study, and a few contain commentary that can help students understand how design works in particular magazines and how design has changed over the past hundred years, leaving a series of stylistic markers that continue to carry meanings from an earlier time. These books have other values for other readers, but I examined them in search of those that might be useful as a magazine design course textbook.

Front Page: Covers of the Twentieth Century. Stephane Duperray and Raphaele Vidaling. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson (Orion Publishing Group Ltd.), 2003. 191 pp. $29.95 hbk.

The first half of Front Page uses cover art to trace magazine history. Only the twelve-page introduction is chronological. From that point, the book embeds art and commentary in two- to four-page treatments of individual magazines or themes, starting, oddly enough, with underground magazines. The second half of the book presents a series of magazine design trends, from mechanical features such as red borders to the influence of movements such as pop art and art-deco. The book ends with a series of sections on celebrity figures that appeared on magazine covers, including Bridgette Bardot, Winston Churchill, and the Kennedy family.

The book has two strengths. The commentaries in Front Page are long enough to have some substance, and they combine an acute sense of historical events with a crisp eloquence in presenting cultural interpretations. The interpretations, while European in perspective, do not reduce to any particular school of thought and often offer provocative insights, such as this commentary that accompanied images of transportation: "At a time when escape from the collective life of a family or community was still a fantasy, an individual or family vehicle offered freedom and speed for those able to afford it." With such observations, the authors seek to anchor the success of magazines in the changing world their readers inhabited.

The other strength of the book comes from its extensive use of illustrations from European magazines. In many of the commentaries, the authors sketch a European history that precedes or parallels the American history of magazines, design, and photography, providing names and publications not normally mentioned in American books on magazines. The commentaries radiate a warm, detailed appreciation of the art of magazines, and they avoid the common temptation to belittle the subject from a culturally superior perspective.

While probably not suitable as a textbook, Front Page is richly illustrated with magazine covers, and it provides a large number of examples that may be useful for a student project or in a course on media history, cultural history, magazine history, magazine design, or photography, especially for a teacher who wants to include examples from European publications.

Surprise Me: Editorial Design. Horst Moser. New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2003. 288 pp. $47.25 hbk.

Surprise Me: Editorial Design is organized around the component parts of the designer's task, plus a series of themes. It starts with a tribute to Alexey Brodovitch, whose challenge-"Surprise me!" -inspired the title. What follows is a series of fairly detailed commentaries, many 500 to 1,000 words long, on sketching, layout patterns, working with art directors, grids, formats (sizes), and types of frames around pictures.

From that point, the book takes a more practical turn and walks the reader through each production element, starting with a forty-eight-page section on cover design, which, like most of the book, consists of brief commentaries followed by many illustrations from magazines. Next comes a brief commentary followed by many examples of logo design, another for titles and subtitles (called, in the British terminology, "standfirsts"), then additional sections on section headings, page numbers, drop caps, subheads, pull-quotes, captions, tables, charts, boxes, infographics, feature spreads, contents pages, editorial columns, and section dividers--each with an introduction followed by pages of examples.

The remainder of the book illustrates major types of magazines as "themes," such as fashion, computers, business, travel, and architecture. This part of the book consists almost entirely of pictorial examples with brief credit lines and no interpretive text.

Although his explanations are brief, Moser is an interesting commentator on magazine design, and his work is clearly directed to working designers: "It should be the ambition of every editorial team to create something new, or to reveal something that has never been seen before." He offers brief ideas that seem intended to provoke designers into thinking about their work in different ways. In his commentary on a highly blurred photo of a newspaper page, he remarks, "Our first impression is through general perception rather than through reading," a view supported by recent neurological research on vision. As with many books on magazine design, the reader may wish for more explanation and less illustration, but the commentary that the author offers is interesting and thoughtful.

Modern Magazine Design. William Owen. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. 240 pp.

Though no longer in print, Modern Magazine Design was the best, and perhaps only, systematic presentation of the history of magazine design. This is a book meant to be read, not just viewed. It contains extensive, detailed, articulate chapters by an author who is an expert in his field. Owen writes exceptionally well, but with this limitation: He expects readers to come equipped with a knowledge of art history and the terminology of recent philosophical movements. Modern Magazine Design is divided into two sections. The first traces a history of magazine design from the beginning to the third quarter of the twentieth century. Along the way, Owen presents the most important magazines of each era and appreciatively describes their designers and their work. The second part of the book focuses on the "new" magazine design of the 1970s and 1980s.

Owen places each title in a historical and cultural context, relating it to corresponding movements in art history. There are many illustrations of covers and spreads, and the lengthy commentaries in the captions in part two contain some of the best writing in the book. The book is heavy on illustrations from British and European magazines, and it is dense at times with art-history terminology, but it is the best book of its kind.

Owen interprets what he presents. He argues for a point of view. He urges readers to look and tells them what to appreciate. And he expects readers to work at it, perhaps with a dictionary alongside. The book is like taking an art history course from an excited professor who also happens to be a field practitioner. Though the commentary is dense at times, it is a real pleasure to read his history and analysis and to see sample pages from so many magazines that were influential in the history of magazine design, among them Leslie's Weekly, La Vie au Grand Air, Illustrated London News, USSR, Merz, Bauhaus, Red, Compo Grafica, and Links Richten. It is a shame the book is out of print. Even though "new magazine design" has become even newer since the book came out, Owen covered magazine design up to 1990 better than anyone else has done, and the book remains a valuable resource.

Graphis Magazine Design 1. B. Martin Pedersen, ed. New York: Graphis Inc., 1997.

Best of Graphis: Editorial. Peter Feierabend and Hans Heiermann. Zurich: Graphis Press Corp. 1993.

Magazine Editorial Graphics. Kaoru Yamashita, ed. Tokyo: P.LE. Books, 1997.218 pp.

MagCulture: New Magazine Design. Jeremy Leslie. London: Lawrence King Publishing. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. 176 pp. $35 pbk.

Graphis Magazine Design I, Best of Graphis: Editorial, Magazine Editorial Graphics, and MagCulture: New Magazine Design all present stunning anthologies of magazine design, with an emphasis on the current version of avant garde design. Of these four, only MagCulture contains more than about a dozen pages of text. All would have been strengthened if they had included more commentary and made more of an effort to take a comprehensive approach to the topic.

Graphis Magazine Design I contains more than 300 large-format pages of recent magazine design examples, interlaced with sparse commentaries in English, German, and French. The many illustrations seem chosen for their ability to grab attention, arrest thought, lure and entice readers, and excite with unrelenting novelty. There does not appear to be a Graphis Magazine Design 2, by the way, even though a prepublication announcement was made in 2002.

Best of Graphis: Editorial is a slim, eighty-page collection of inside magazine pages that the editors have chosen for unstated reasons, but apparently because they found inspiration in the super-sized self-assertion, fragmented images, bared body parts, and skyscraper typography. The examples are indeed remarkable. A few are only modestly revolutionary, but the rest are like great bands playing gripping music with the volume turned up twice too loud. You may want to approach this book, and the others in this section of the review, wearing sunglasses. The only text (a brief preface in German with translations into English and French) explains little about the magazines selected for the book or what use we are to make of them.

Magazine Editorial Graphics, a difficult book to find, seems to be the entire 1,000image swipe file of favorite examples from the editor and the contributors. It contains virtually no text, except for a few thumbnail sketches of magazines in English, German, and Japanese that serve in place of an introduction. The book consists of examples of a variety of types of magazine pages including covers, but all from the postmodern school. Indeed, this collection probably contains the wildest examples of any of the books reviewed here. The rationale for the selection is explained by the opening of the brief introduction: "In today's computerized world of seemingly unlimited access, magazines have emerged whose cool, raw sensibilities are influencing creators to be more conceptual"

Those" cool, raw sensibilities" are reflected in the examples of growling faces, bodies in twisted postures, degenerating type, fractionated nudity, roomsized lips, pages like bulletin boards, colors that promise to explode if mixed, beautiful shots of nature rendered into layouts that make them look fake, irony delivered ironically as simulated seriousness, and occasional layouts that look shockingly normal, as if they came from everyday magazines. All in all, it is an interesting collection, apparently directed to readers who require from their magazines not the orderly evocation of a world view they share but an ongoing argument that the world is actually a gigantic cartoon. I like it-moving through these exaggerated images, there is a breath of creativity bold enough to blow some of the dust off your brain.

The examples are collected into "chapters" labeled culture, fashion, arts, design, architecture, entertainment, and a few others. But these chapters have no text; the pictures do not even have captions, only credits. The editor seems to believe that pictures can communicate sufficiently without explanatory text, but it would have been a much more useful book if it had an author who took on the challenge of finding words for the trends and distinctions pictured here. If you have students who want to see what artful designers are looking at, and who do not have access to the actual magazines, this is a good place to send them.

MagCulture: New Magazine Design is another book that trusts the image over the word, though it does offer about twenty pages of introduction plus another ten pages or so of text scattered among about 150 pages of illustrations of recent magazine designs. Although the introduction announces that this collection presents magazines that "continue to be a source of inspiration to graphic designers everywhere," I wanted more explanations, more analysis. I wanted an experienced designer who was willing to write about these designs.

The illustrations of magazine design are grouped into" chapters," that, like the chapters in Magazine Editorial Graphics, contain no introduction, analysis, or explanation. The examples, however, are organized in a way that may be potentially useful in a magazine design class. As you flip through the illustrated pages, the footer changes on page 28 to "format," and the following pages show different formats of pages (size, shape). The footer changes on page 52 to "covers," followed later in the book by sections whose footer identifies them as pace, words, and pictures. Within each section, the illustrations present examples of format, covers, pace, etc., though looking through them is somewhat like watching a historical movie with the sound turned off: The costumes are stunning, but, who was that fellow in the feathered hat?

A glance at the index indicates the kinds of magazines featured in MagCulture: In the first part of the index, along with Adbusters, Cosmopolitan, Elle (Japan), and Fortune (Japan), you find AM7, Another Magazine, Archis, Arena Homme Plus, Axis (Japan), Bare, BEople, Big, Blah Blah Blah, Brainheart, Brutus, Bulgaria, Cyzo, Doing Bird, and Dot Dot Dot. Looking at these examples, you might never understand why anyone would want to design a magazine that looked like Time, Oprah, Good Housekeeping, or TV Guide.

Though the books in this group may not be good candidates for classroom use, they serve another purpose. Most working designers are occupied day after day with the mechanical and mundane tasks of creating layouts, using a format that may have been dictated by others, succeeding most when readers are unaware of the design, and doing this under the constraints of time, budget, and the competing goals of the editor and publisher. Elsewhere, though, other designers produce pages as if they were artists--experimenting with new forms and techniques, breaking old rules and inventing new ones, creating work that is thrilling, shocking, funny, delightful, or deep. Every issue of some magazines contains a hundred experiments in design-and two or three of them work so well that designers everywhere immediately adopt them. Many of these experiments take place in publications with small circulations. Some use stunning typographic and visual creativity to make up for not having enough money to purchase good photos.

Graphis Magazine Design I, Best of Graphis: Editorial, Magazine Editorial Graphics, and MagCulture: New Magazine Design are intended for experienced designers who are looking for new ideas, rather than as texts for students learning about magazine design. Looking through them, you will never be reminded that People-which is not even mentioned in most design books-is probably the world's most successful magazine, or that most designers work within rigid constraints, or that most readers of most magazines actually like to see the same kind of design, issue after issue, because it reminds them how to navigate the publication. These books seem to be like fashion magazines for designers-wake-me-ups for drudged-out designers who may rarely imitate the examples but who find their creative feelings stimulated by them, the way a magazine writer may turn to poetry and drama for inspiration, not about how to write, but why.

Designing for Magazines: Common Problems, Realistic Solutions, rev. ed. Jan V. White. New York: Bowker. 1982. 223 pp.

In Designing for Magazines: Common Problems, Realistic Solutions, Jan White, author of the enduring Editing by Design, presents the culmination of the cool modernist approach to magazine design immediately before the raw creativity of postmodern design erupted through Punk and surfing magazines into the mainstream. This is the textbook for those who believe design to be a rational process for presenting information to users: "Graphic design is not something added to make pages look lively. It is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end-that of clear, vivid, stirring communication of editorial content."

It requires a leap of imagination to grasp the significance of some of White's points since all of his illustrations are taken from publications created before desktop publishing. But it is a book full of observations from experience. White systematically analyzes examples of ways to present each of the main components of a typical magazine: covers, contents, flash forms (late-closing news), departments, editorials, openers, and the display of products. White discusses the challenges posed by each.

Unfortunately, nothing is more out of date than yesterday. White's examples look quaint today when any undergraduate has access to hundreds of fonts with kerning and adjustments of line spacing as well as color photography and printing. All White's illustrations are in black and white. As rich as White's thought is, any undergraduate would find the book's appearance as crudely out of date as daddy's ties. But anyone who gets serious about magazine design should read this book because it was a major influence on designers from the time it first appeared in 1976 until desktop publishing upended the relationship between designers and editors.

Magazine Design that Works: Secrets for Successful Magazine Design. Stacey King. Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2001. 159 pp. $35 pbk.

In a recent book on magazine design that contains a substantial amount of good writing, Magazine Design that Works: Secrets for Successful Magazine Design, King presents nineteen magazines, describing each one with approximately the same outline: the magazine's design philosophy, audience, editorial concept, grid, color palette, typography, photography, illustrations, and unique design features. Illustrations accompany each chapter, although they do not always illustrate the precise points made in the text. The writing is more extensive, detailed, and better organized compared to all the other books but Owen's. A typical chapter gives its magazine about 850 words of text plus about 600 words of captions that point out the design characteristics of the many sample pages from the magazine.

In addition, King includes an introduction and conclusion, plus six interspersed essays on topics related to design: the grid, the creative process, the evolution of a magazine (featuring Yoga Journal and Blue), advertising and magazines, redesign, and a question-and-answer session with magazine professor Samir Husni. One of King's strong points is her use of descriptive metaphor in characterizing just what a magazine accomplished through its design, what effect a picture has, what emotional appeal a layout makes, and why this design works for those readers. Her vocabulary of description, using metaphors from personality, speech, touch, space, cooking, emotion, and music, among others, is worth analyzing, which would make an interesting assignment in a magazine design class. Unlike all the authors in this review except for Owen, King has accepted the challenge of finding words that help to make intelligible the nonverbal art of magazine design.

For example, King makes the design of Real Simple as close to fascinating as you can get with such a low-key publication by the way she ties the specific appearance of sample layouts with the way the magazine evolved its design as it came to know its readers better. Here is a sample from the caption accompanying the picture of a spread: "Amid the magazine's spare and orderly pages are hints of colorful chaos. In this primer on cosmetics, crumpled blush and lipstick smudge an otherwise serene layout." This observation is tied to quotes from the magazine's creative director explaining that readers had complained that "the magazine was too unrealistic [in its original design]-that there was no such thing as true simplicity."

The book has many similar observations connecting a magazine's audience and design philosophy with specific examples of layouts. The author is always present in the book, pointing things out, interpreting, explaining, drawing our attention to specific design features. This kind of writing is immensely helpful in understanding how magazine design works, how designers think, and how design relates to the purpose and audience of a magazine-much more helpful for a beginner than the other books that consist mainly of interesting layouts without commentary.

The choice of publications that King's book covers seems somewhat personal, though the book offers a range of magazines. Unlike the postmodern magazines featured in most of the books reviewed here, King's examples focus substantially on well-designed mainstream magazines and not on magazines that specialize in experimental design. Indeed, Owen and King are the only authors of the reviewed books who include successful magazines that are not primarily known for artistic design.

Issues: New Magazine Design. Jeremy Leslie, with foreword by Lewis Blackwell. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2000. 172 pp.

Issues: New Magazine Design might be viewed as a radical companion to King's book. Issues is the more systematic predecessor to Leslie's wilder MagCulture, and in a sense it picks up where Owen left off, with the design of the 1990s, though without the thoroughness of detail. The 5,000word introduction by Lewis Blackwell sets the context for a collection of examples that represent the shock and vigor with which imagery has taken an equal seat with text in many recent magazines. The rise of design as a powerful, even competing, force is surely one of the most important changes in magazines in the past twenty years.

The book is organized around five themes (format, covers, pace, words, and images) interleaved with brief essays on five specific magazines (Blow, Vanidad, 2wice, Speak, and Econy). The choice of titles cautions that this is not a book for readers who think of magazines in terms of National Geographic and Time. The "New" in the subtitle is serious. The book quotes Vanidad's Guiterrez: "The word magazine means storage space for dynamite. A magazine is full of surprises and it can explode. It can go off at any time."

Each theme chapter begins with a useful introduction to the concept, and each magazine chapter begins with a brief history of the title. Inside each chapter, however, there is little text, and the captions offer little more than credits and bits of background necessary to understand the image. There is nothing like Owen's captions that read at times like miniature essays in interpretation, or like King's captions, which interpret the images in terms of the concepts presented in the text.

Issues: New Magazine Design offers a valuable collection of examples of the trends and titles that have contributed to the emergence of design as a powerful factor in magazines-parallel, perhaps, to the way the small brass and woodwind section of Haydn's classical orchestra grew into the magnificent forces used by Stravinsky. Here, you find pages from Arena, Beach Culture, Bikini, Colours, Dazed & Confused, Egg, Eye, The Face, i-D, Paper, and Visionaire, alongside more widely circulated titles such as Vogue, Details, and Rolling Stone. David Carson (Raygun) and Fernando Guiterrez receive special attention, though Neville Brody is missing.

Issues: New Magazine Design features sample magazine pages that are somewhat less experimental, disjointed, and edgy than those in MagCulture, though both are tamer than Magazine Editorial Graphics. And, as in the other largely visual collections reviewed here, the images displayed in Issues are energetic, challenging, sometimes disturbing, and exhilarating. It's easy to see why a designer could love this book.

"Magazine Design and Redesign," chapter 14 in Graphic Communication Today (4th ed.) by William Ryan and Theodore Conover.

"Magazine Designs: Creating the Look," chapter 9 in The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry by Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatei.

Chapters from two books round out this review: "Magazine Design and Redesign," chapter 14 in Graphic Communication Today (4th ed.) by William Ryan and Theodore Conover, and "Magazine Designs: Creating the Look," chapter 9 in The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry by Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel. These two chapters are longer than the entire text in several of the books reviewed here, and each introduces magazine design in some depth. The presentation of magazine history in these chapters is better than that in any of the books except Owen's. Each chapter introduces the major elements of magazine design, the grid, typography (covered in Ryan and Conover by two earlier chapters), a magazine's relationship with the reader, photography, terminology, and redesign.

The Johnson and Prijatel chapter is more like a textbook-it concentrates on history, principles, categories, and abstractions-and it does so in a good sense, because this is what students need from a textbook. Ryan and Conover aim the chapter more toward people who will be doing design. Their prose is somewhat less formal, more how-to, and directed to the reader as "you."

Within this difference, each book provides some balance by including a dose of its opposite. Johnson and Prijatel insert long sidebars giving specifics--e.g., how one magazine handled an issue. Ryan and Conover, for all the teacherly friendliness of the prose, present a chapter carefully organized around concepts. Their explanation of "The Four Fs" (Function, Formula, Format, and Frames) is extensive and contains examples that make it much more useful than the way the same topic is covered in King's introduction.

The chapter by Ryan and Conover shares one of the great strengths of Owen's book: Color illustrations from magazines provide examples of the major points in the text, and each illustration is explicated by a lengthy caption that specifically points out what it illustrates. The Ryan and Conover book also contains extensive chapters on the history of visual communication, design basics, typography, color, illustration, photography, printing, and specialized forms of design. This book is almost opposite in approach to those that use illustrations with little or no text; it provides detailed chapters on each aspect of graphic communication, 600 pages worth.

Johnson and PrijateI's chapter includes a ten-page color insert with a dozen illustrations of magazines with short but useful captions. The other eleven chapters cover magazine history, concepts, formulas, management, editing, production, law, and ethics, in what I consider the best book on the magazine industry.

Both books read more like magazine features than like textbooks, which make them easier to read, even a pleasure to read. But it also means that both books shift imperfectly between the general, abstract, historical principles of the subject and quotes from interviews that might have appeared in last month's magazine. There is at times an uneasy balance between the general and the specific, and sometimes a particular practitioner's opinion is placed on the same level of significance as the results of the past seventy-five years of design or photography.

Conclusion

If you are considering any of these books for a magazine design course, you'll have to supply the practical skills from another source. No book on magazine design can offer the kind of help that students and teachers need with the mechanics of page layout, partly because the hardware and software change as rapidly as trends in design, and no book reviewed here has a section on how to do it. Owen's book, if you can find it, teaches students the history of magazine design and the innovations of the 1980s. King's book gives thoughtful presentations of nineteen magazine designs in a format that shows students how to see and understand design. The chapter in Johnson and Prijatel gives an excellent overview of magazine design in the context of the magazine industry. The longer chapter in Ryan and Conover provides an excellent introduction to magazine design in the context of graphic communication. And Issues: New Magazine Design shows students that some of the visual world they are immersed in has taken radical new forms in the hands of gifted designers.

Perhaps even more important, these books can help student editors understand better how to think in terms of design, understand what designers do, and work better with designers. And the titles that consist mainly of pictures offer working designers a dose of the visual intoxication that many seem to need to keep their creativity alive.

GERALD GROW Florida A&M University