Thankful For: Good Design!

We were chatting yesterday with an editor at the New Yorker, and the conversation turned on the role of design in modern magazines. The New Yorker, of course, is an old-fashioned magazine that has not changed in any major way for more than seventy-five years. To be sure, there were some dramatic touches added under Tina Brown in the late nineties—photography appeared for the first time, bylines went to the tops of stories, a table of contents and letters to the editor were published for the first time. But these were dramatic only in context. Compared to all other magazines, the New Yorker remained an intransigent old-timer that persisted in its jazz-age stylings. Most of us still thank God for that.

Now it was the view of my New Yorker friend that readers simply do not care about design the way editors, publishers, artists, and designers do—in other words, it's only people in the publishing industry who care about something so frivolous as page layout. I'm not sure I agree completely with that view.

It's easy to say there is little interest in design when your magazine is the gold standard of narrative journalism and cartoons, and when the design has not changed in three-quarters of a century. My friend and I agreed, though, that design that is used to cover up a lack of substance in a story is a bad thing. But I think it should be possible to do both at the same time. (There are magazines, like ESPN, for example, that are emphatically about image rather than text— ESPN magazine was, after all, modelled on its television namesake. They play by different rules, of course, or create their own. Personally, I read Playboy for the articles, but I can see how some people might look more to the art.)

In most magazines, there is a rough balance between words and pictures. Good design is what marries a good story to good art. You can't just plop down on the page a big, full-color photo, and then flow a story around it in whatever space remains and expect it to "work." It is a careful, exacting thing—more art than science, surely—to make text and image play nicely and complement each other. Even at a place like The New Yorker, where text is king, there are still very serious design quandries every issue.

Their particular cross to bear is that they don't fit stories to space, but vice versa. In other words, a story is written at whatever length it takes to tell the story properly, and then the space on the page is fitted to the words. All those clever little postage-stamp drawings? They are called "space shims" to make a story end at the bottom of a page, and not some other random place in the magazine. Carmine Peppe was the legendary layout-editor at the New Yorker , one of its great unsung heroes. For more than fifty years, he was responsible for the incredibly delicate craft of space shimming, not unlike a master carpenter.

So. Even when you think design doesn't matter, design still matters.—The Editor in Cheese