For over 40 years Summit Magazine was a top periodical in its genre. “And its impact was—and continues to be felt—well beyond the climbing world, in large part due to the avant-garde aesthetic that Jean and Helen cultivated with the Summit‘s covers: sometimes chic, sometimes stark, sometimes playful,” says Michael Levy, its new publisher and editor-in-chief.

This spring, a refurbished Summit Journal (issue 320) was reborn as a print-only, biannual, oversized, coffee-table-quality magazine devoted to longform storytelling and large-format photography. The first issue came out in February, and the next is due in August. Previously, Levy spent five years working for two other outdoors magazines, Rock and Ice and Climbing. As has happened with so many other print properties in recent years, the print editions of those titles “went the way of the dodo.”

“As someone who loves print as a medium for longform storytelling, it seemed like the perfect time to take a crack at starting a new print magazine,” Levy says. “Rather than start a brand new magazine, though, I loved the idea of breathing new life into a historic title. Summit, in the climbing world, is as historic as it gets.” He acquired the rights in February 2023, and put out the first new issue in over 27 years.

Here he talks about his climb back up the summit, as well as some of the covers art directed by Kilness and Crenshaw, who have been unheralded in the history of magazine design.

Why have you revived the magazine as a journal in print only? Doesn’t that seem to be counter-intuitive?
On its face, there’s definitely something counterintuitive to being print only. But in another way, it seems exceptionally rational to me? That is, if you can get the material in the magazine online, doesn’t that decrease the perceived value of the print product?

My feeling is that with the glut of content online, there’s something to be said for a highly curated physical product. There’s so much out there on the internet that a lot of stuff, much of it quite good, just gets lost in the noise. But something tactile that you can feel between your fingers and read over a cup of coffee or a beer, that prioritizes longform … it might not reach as many people, but the people it does reach will be that much more invested. Print feels a bit like vinyl to me; what’s old is new again, and the collectability of it, the quality of the physical thing itself, is important. Just like vinyl isn’t going to replace Spotify, print isn’t going to replace digital, but there is a very real audience out there (and I’m in it) that likes analog media, and appreciates reading things that aren’t on a screen.

And building off that, print also felt like a more achievable business model, in a strange way. Though print has a higher bar to entry–the hard costs to get it off the ground were greater, and if I didn’t attract enough subscribers, the whole thing would have been dead on arrival–once cleared, the way forward felt much clearer. You can only fill a magazine with so many articles, after all. 

Of course, I’m a storyteller: What matters most to me is pursuing quality longform journalism. If the articles and image curation inside the magazine are no good, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But given what I think is the extremely high quality content we have managed to fill the magazine with, my feeling is that the exterior should match.

The magazine was founded by two committed climbers. Tell me a little about their goals and feats of magazine publishing.
Jean and Helen were trailblazers, plain and simple. … They were iconoclasts.

Jean and Helen were serious and eminently capable climbers. They lived in Big Bear, CA, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and would head out for adventures in the mountains, and climb at smaller cliffs close to home. Another fun story: Sometimes, so busy were they with their adventuring, they’d forget what issue number they were on, so there are a couple of the old ones that have the same month!

In the hundreds of issues they published, they were actively shaping the culture of the nascent sports of rock climbing and mountaineering in the U.S., pursuits that had a longer history in Europe. In addition to publishing the essays and accounts of cutting-edge ascents by the best climbers of the day—guys like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins, who are household names today—they also published trip reports by families out in the hills or on a fishing trip. They cultivated an egalitarian ethos with their magazine, in content and authorship, publishing an outsized number of women.

What do you think is or are the most significant graphic element(s) of the magazine in its original form and format?
Summit’s old covers are just so distinctive. Particularly in the 1960s, they had a really bold aesthetic, combining bright colors, illustration, playful geometric shapes and different media. Most of the covers are devoid of coverlines, and many have a very minimalist look, e.g., a single pinecone against a blue background, or a silhouetted climber on a cliff against a bright yellow background. My favorite cover is probably September 1967: a minimalist illustration of a lone figure silhouetted on a hill looking up at the night sky. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

They also used color in paradoxical ways—e.g., a mountaineering scene bathed in neon green or neon pink—and sometimes used ultra close-up shots—e.g., one section of a climbing rope.

One of the cool things in resurrecting the magazine has been to see how far its legacy extended beyond the fairly insular climbing world. I’ve had a whole host of people from the design world reach out to me to express their love and affinity for the old covers and their style.

What have you done to bring it valiantly into the 21st century?
One of the fun parts of reviving an old magazine versus starting one from scratch is that we can lean into the old stuff. The new Summit very much has one eye on the past, while also keeping one eye on the present and future. One example of this: For our debut issue in February, we had two covers. One was an illustration, one was a photo. The illustrated cover, by a great young French artist named Thomas Danthony, was very much an homage to Summit’s covers in the ’60s. The photo cover is very much a splashy, modern climbing photo, full of motion. The stories inside reflect this duality too: We publish both modern reportage, and stories about the history of climbing and climbing culture.

Physically, the magazine has also gotten a big overhaul. The new version is 10″ x 13″, so quite large. It’s printed on heavy stock, uncoated paper. It feels closer to a coffee table book than a newsstand magazine.

In terms of the aesthetic, the inside has what I’d consider a pretty modern look overall: Most of the imagery is displayed in full-page or spread format to really take advantage of the magazine’s size. My art director, Randy Levensaler, has been working on print magazines for decades, and has an incredible eye for effective yet eye-catching layouts

That being said, in terms of the text, we’re very much charting a classic look. I can’t tell you how much Randy stressed over the font choices, text size and spacing—and I think it shows.

We also retitled it as Summit Journal. For six years in the 1990s, after Jean and Helen sold the magazine, it was rebranded as Summit: The Mountain Journal. It closed up shop in 1996, and hasn’t been published since. So going with Summit Journal felt like a way to nod to both former iterations of the mag, yet once again signal that this is a new magazine for a new era.

Do you have to be a climber to be a reader?
Definitely not. I myself am a passionate climber, but at the end of the day my mission is to fill Summit Journal’s pages with quality journalism, photography and art.

The best piece in the first issue is by a brilliant young writer named Astra Lincoln, and it is about the advent of photographic surveying in the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, and how this a) led to a boom in mountaineering, and b) is also inextricably related to episodes of ethnic cleansing in the area. It’s masterful.

Some of what we publish is surely a bit lingo heavy, but most of it, I’d say, should be totally accessible to the non-climber.

What is your longterm goal for Summit?
To make a magazine that people want to keep on their shelf to read and flip through again and again over the years.

In postwar West Germany, twen‘s luminescence brightened up the creative space in ways that are difficult to measure. Now, a new book, twen [1959–1971] by Hans-Michael Koetzie, Serge Ricco and Stephane Darricau, produced by Bureau Brut, brings its inspiring legacy once again to the fore. Below are some pages that underscore the intelligence endemic to Fleckhaus’ inventive, editorial typography and cinematic page flow.

The following is a translation of a French essay by Hans-Michael Koetzle excerpted from twen [1959-1971] .

The most influential, and thus the most important, magazine in postwar Germany was called twen. It was published from April 1959 to May 1971 and, although it never sold millions of copies like Stern (Hamburg) and Quick (Munich)—to name but two of the most widely read publications in the early days of the Federal Republic—it did have genuine international reach. It remains the only West German periodical to have attracted a readership not only in Europe but also in America.

With its innovative photography and spectacular layout, twen set a benchmark for editorial design and, it would seem, still inspires young designers, typographers, art directors and creative types of all kinds today. Avenue and Nova would not have seen the light of day without twen.

… Art director Henry Wolf described it as “the last individualistic magazine,” and David Hillman said it was “like no other magazine, past or future.”

In 1964, Milton Glaser staged a major twen exhibition at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and four years later the magazine was awarded a gold medal by the Art Directors Club of New York. As the editorial of the July 1970 issue proudly announced, this was the first time a European magazine had received such an accolade.

A new kid on the block, twen (“teen”) was founded in the late 1950s by two young Cologne publishers, Adolf Theobald and Stephan Wolf. It started out as a “mere” supplement to the student magazine Student im Bild, which Theobald and his team had been publishing since 1957. The aim of this new project was to reach beyond the campus to all types of young people between the ages of 20 and 30. The title was taken from the ready-to-wear clothing brand Wormland, whose … Twen jeans were hugely popular at the time.

The name was original—a first even for English-speaking countries—and a fresh reminder of young West Germans’ interest in the United States, less than 15 years after the end of the Second World War. Yet, despite the fact it covered jazz, literature, art, cinema, fashion and, first and foremost, photography, all topics of interest to this particular readership, twen was neither a magazine for young people nor a photography magazine, a cultural review or a traditional illustrated publication. It transcended all the usual categories and stood out not only as a magazine that was brazen and provocative, with a penchant for the erotic, but also for its generous and masterful layout.

The first issue hit the newsstands in April 1959 and was 104 pages long with a 36.5 × 27 cm format (slightly larger than subsequent issues, which were all 33.5 × 26.5 cm). It was printed in rotogravure by the long-established printer and publisher DuMont (Cologne), which guaranteed not only production quality but also efficient nationwide distribution. According to Stephan Wolf, the first issue of twen sold out very quickly, not least thanks to the coverage it received from the mainstream press.

(Editor’s Note: Fleckhaus invented the position of the “art director,” which did not yet exist in Germany. He acquired the nickname of “Germany’s most expensive pencil.” This is further explored in Design, Revolt, Rainbow (Hartman Books), the first comprehensive monograph on Fleckhaus. It includes texts by Michael Koetzle and Carsten Wolff, both experts on Fleckhaus’ work.)

Sister Mary, led by founder Leigh Chandler, unveils a new limited-edition printed publication designed exclusively for The Signal, a global current affairs brand based in Washington, D.C. “The Long Game” highlights the global struggle between authoritarian states and democratic life.

Created in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, in support of the Oslo Freedom Forum, the magazine features interviews with the Bosnian investigative journalist Miranda Patrucić, the American social scientist Francis Fukuyama, and others—on questions from how autocrats are adapting artificial intelligence to how corruption inside dictatorships is spreading beyond them to what the issues of democracy and human rights might end up meaning for your investment strategy.

The Signal’s team, including John Jamesen Gould and Hywel Mills, partnered with Chandler to infuse the inaugural issue with the alternative spirit of underground publishing. Samizdat, a term derived from Russian for “self-publishing,” refers to literature clandestinely written, copied, and circulated during the Soviet era, often critical of the government.

The Signal offers a different approach to current affairs. Its focus is on exploring urgent questions in dialogue with knowledgeable companions around the world—an approach meant to support readers and help them develop their interpretations of global events.

This debut issue not only pays homage to samizdat but reimagines it. The editorial design captures the raw essence of underground publishing while presenting it in a contemporary context.

The layout demands attention, using layering, cropping, aged textures, and bold typography to create a sense of urgency.

Unbleached newsprint was chosen for the paper stock, reminiscent of samizdat’s historical context. The color palette of light beige, black, red, and gold reflects the publication’s rebellious yet premium aesthetic.

The typography is bold and commanding, with headlines in Manuka and complementary text in Untitled, echoing the theme of defiance and urgency.

The publication’s imagery invites readers to explore deeper narratives, aligning with The Signal’s mission to engage with complexity in today’s rapidly changing world.

To be able to assemble our work in a print publication like this isn’t just beautiful; it’s transformative. It’s allowed us to bring a historical connection with the samizdat publications of the Soviet era to life in the language of design—and that’s allowed us to create a reading experience with a completely different emotional resonance and, ultimately I think, a deeper meaning.”

John Jamesen Gould – Editor, The Signal

About The Signal
Current affairs. Strange world. As our world becomes more intricately connected, changes faster, and seems only to get more disorienting, we’re all navigating it—or trying to—in a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic manipulation, polarizing engagement, and partisan spin. It can be hard to focus on what matters—and harder to think. The Signal is for people who want something different. The nonpartisan U.S.-based current affairs organization has diverse global contributors and is committed to liberal democracy.

About Human Rights Foundation
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF aims to raise awareness about the nature and vulnerability of freedom worldwide while strengthening the work of grassroots activists in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. Grounding its work in a deep commitment to individual liberty, HRF achieves its impact through unique policy research and legal advocacy, global events and educational initiatives, innovative and creative campaigns, and direct support to activists on the frontlines of democracy.

The Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) is a global conference series hosted and produced by HRF. Established in 2009, OFF brings together the world’s most prominent human rights advocates, journalists, artists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and world leaders to share their stories and brainstorm ways to expand freedom globally.

Would you call yourself an artist who designs?
I certainly started out as a designer who makes art, but as I’ve moved between mediums over the years, it really has all coalesced for me and become one big playground where such strict categorizations no longer apply. I would even argue that this applies to writing as well, where perhaps at the onset one may apply the kind of design thinking that being a designer tends to train you for, but then once you’re deep in the writing, it’s quite common to enter a kind of lucid flow state often associated with art-making. Ultimately, my favorite works are the ones that encourage one to utilize their design mind as well as enter that elusive flow state.

What are the primary themes of your work?
Challenging established norms, highlighting injustice and speaking truth to power if I can manage it.

Tell me about the plot of The Solar Grid.
Several centuries after a great flood has subsumed much of the Earth and prompted some of the population to migrate to Mars, much of the Earth is now a dry and desolate landfill thanks to The Solar Grid, a network of satellites that orbits the planet and keep it based in eternal daylight, consigning night to legend. The satellites help power solar factories on Earth that operate ceaselessly to manufacture goods exported to Mars, whereby Mars sends the waste of their consumption back to Earth. Two orphans on Earth, Mehret and Kameen, who rummage through the landfills in search of valuable items they can live off, come upon an artifact that will completely disrupt life as they know it.

Fiction or nonfiction—do you have a preference?
Fiction.

What are your plans for other displays of your art?
Nothing on the horizon right now, but as soon as The Solar Grid is complete, I’d love to organize a touring exhibition with all the original art pages along with some contemporary art pieces inspired by the world of The Solar Grid.

For 46 years, Tom Bodkin has been the heart and soul of design at The New York Times. His job titles have included Art Director, Designer, Design Director, Creative Director, Chief Creative Officer, Associate Managing Editor and Deputy Managing Editor—only the second time an art department head has ever been listed on the prestigious Times masthead. Bodkin served under more executive editors than I can count … a feat in itself.

“Tom Bodkin plays an essential role as our art and design guru and is one of my most valued and trusted masthead advisers,” [former Executive Editor] Jill Abramson wrote in an e-mail to staff when Bodkin was named Deputy Managing Editor for design in 2011. “He is central to all of our future efforts in digital and print and to the integration of our work.”

Bodkin’s life isn’t all wrapped up in newspaper design, as The Daily Heller reported back in 2011, but the institution in all its forms has consumed at least half of his waking (and dreaming) life (whereas the other half has been consumed by fixing motorcycles and cars, driving tractors, refurbishing antique machines like player pianos, movie cameras, rebuilding a real airplane …). He’s been my friend for at least 44 of those 46 years at the paper. Now, with his leaving, I feel the circle has closed. He was my life support—and last link—to the inner workings of the place I called home for 33 years.

Under his tutelage, the Times has incredibly changed. He’s tripled the size of the art department, altered its management structure and increased respect for design among the newsroom and its editors. Bodkin’s retirement leaves a void that will be impossible to fill for me, and hard for many others in his orbit of colleagues and peers.

Last Friday was his official final day as CCO. Yesterday, his friends and colleagues celebrated his accomplishments and leadership. Now it is time for him to be given a rightful place in the histories of graphic design and visual journalism. Bodkin has never sought the spotlight—his modesty is legendary—but he leaves a major legacy that he did not egotistically promote or advertise. He was simply doing his job … and did it extraordinarily well for 46 years.

Sharaf, a graduate of SVA MFA Designer as Entrepreneur, has been photographing abandoned places in Kuwait since 2002 using various types of cameras (film, digital and mobile phones). The sheer volume of photographs contained in the collection is a relic of everyday life, “creating an imaginary post-apocalyptic documentation of places once occupied by people, animals and plants,” he says.

Each book in AFTER THE END is made up of 684 pages and divided into chapters based on the different locations in which the photographs were taken. Within these chapters are occasional reflections that were written in response to the photographs by 18 contributors who come from diverse backgrounds.

In this conversation, Sharaf tells us about his method and reasoning.

What was the inspiration behind this book-as-object?
To be frank, I can’t think of one sort of inspiration. It is an accumulation of various experiences and practices that happened throughout the years. I’ve been photographing abandoned places in Kuwait since 2002 using various types of cameras (film, digital and mobile phones). Not really for any particular reason but my obsession with details, grids, lines, frames and overlooked things.

As a designer and typographer, I have been experimenting with words, imagery and the relationship between them. Besides my client-based work, I’ve been producing “posters” that challenge and explore the relationship between word and image. In some cases, they support each other; in other instances they contradict each other—at least at first sight.

After using typography as one of my main tools on digital and print media, I’ve moved into containers/objects where these “words” live. One of these main containers/objects is the book. For example, one of my previous artworks is “The Book.” The artwork is a metaphoric installation of how a sacred text—the Kuwaiti Constitution—is preserved.

Then in 2018, I created “The Cemetery of Banned Books in Kuwait,” a symbolic piece of protest and public art intervention. It was conceptualized on the sidelines of Kuwait’s International Book Fair. A book is one of the most common means to encapsulate stories, and if I was to describe AFTER THE END in one word, I would say it is a story, or multiple stories.

What does that title refer to?
AFTER THE END not only serves as the title of the book but also describes its content and creation process. It signifies the conclusion of buildings, eras, experiences, inhabitance and history.

There are many physical aspects to this book. Is that modernity at work?
I believe that description fits, but I see it more as a reflection of meticulous craft and deliberate design choices. Every aspect of AFTER THE END was carefully considered as a design decision. Imagine receiving the box with the two books inside: You’ll immediately sense the rawness of the object, accompanied by the scent of brown cardboard infused with silkscreen inks. Upon opening it, you’re greeted by two faceless block books. They resemble bricks in appearance and feel. As you pick one up and begin to flip through the pages, you’ll notice the texture, the color and the binding. Then, you will see the photos, presented in three forms. The majority adhere to a vertical full HD ratio (16:9), akin to the way we view stories on our phones nowadays. Additionally, there are squares and full spreads interspersed throughout. Each chapter, sequence and spread was meticulously crafted to convey its own narrative.

Within the book’s chapters, you’ll encounter occasional textual reflections penned by 18 contributors from diverse backgrounds, responding to the photographs. This serves as an invitation for readers to delve into others’ perceptions of the book’s content and to experience their own interpretations.

Titled in both English and Arabic, the books may be browsed from left to right, right to left, or from anywhere in between. This deliberate design makes the books seem almost unprecious, much like the abandoned lives scattered throughout the photographs.

Where does your interest in this theme of destruction come from?
I believe the essence lies not in mere destruction but in the allure of abandoned and overlooked places. Naturally, many abandoned locations surrender to decay and ruin over time due to neglect. However, a significant portion of the book’s content focuses on the aftermath of the second Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Moreover, I believe my background as a graphic designer (and because I learned photography in architecture school) has profoundly influenced my photographic work. The influence is evident in the book through the attention to grid lines, framing, colors and form. The contrast between the structured elements of buildings and rooms, juxtaposed with scattered articles and objects, creates an intriguing narrative. Each detail within these photographs, whether viewed individually or as a whole, tells a story, or multiple stories.

This looks and feels like a well-put-together book. Is it all handmade?
A considerable portion of the book has been handcrafted. To be candid, we lack the luxury of utilizing advanced artistic techniques and resources for printing and binding here in Kuwait. I was adamant about producing the entire book and its box here in Kuwait exactly as I envisioned it, and I am pretty happy with the results.

There is something eerie and ominous about the content.
The sheer volume of photographs contained in the book becomes an interesting relic of everyday life, creating an imaginary post-apocalyptic documentation of places once occupied by people, animals and plants.

Is there a specific audience you are aiming at?
It doesn’t target a specific audience. However, I believe certain people may find it more captivating and engaging than others. It particularly resonates with architects, photographers and designers. Additionally, it appeals to those who have personally experienced or are experiencing forms of destruction, war, immigration or gentrification.

In a world that seems to get bleaker by the day, children’s media reminds us to keep our sense of wonder—that innate curiosity that all children have.

Anyone who came of age before social media, smart TVs, iPads, and even the internet understands the glory of magazines. Here at PRINT, we have a particular affinity for the form, as a formerly printed publication founded in the 1940s, and we’re quick to wax nostalgic about other printed magazines of yore. I have strong memories of growing up in the ’90s revering Highlights, for example, a monthly magazine for kids filled with games, puzzles, and written features. While the magazine landscape has changed immensely since my Highlights days, some small but mighty publications are still kicking and doing their darnedest to keep printed media alive.

Studio Anorak, the publisher behind ‘Happy Mags for Kids,’ has produced two titles geared toward kids, Anorak and DOT, for 18 years and counting. Founded by Cathy Olmedillas in 2006, who now helms Studio Anorak as the editor-in-chief and creative director, issues of ‘Happy Mags for Kids’ are released quarterly and are sold on newsstands and in museum gift shops, boutiques, and bookshops worldwide. Both Anorak and DOT are geared toward kids ages 6+. Printed on recycled paper with vegetable ink, the magazines offer illustrated stories, games, and activities, with each issue structured under a given theme.

In celebration of their 18th anniversary, Olmedillas answered a handful of my questions about the ins and outs of keeping a printed magazine going during the digital age and the power of children’s media. Her responses are below. 

(Conversation edited for length and clarity).

What’s the origin story of ‘Happy Mags for Kids’? When did you first decide to start a children’s magazine? 

Around 20 years ago, I was working for The Face, where I fell in love with the craft of magazine-making. I was itching to launch my own but wasn’t really sure what it would be about.

In 2002, I became a Mum, and that’s when I realized the children’s magazine market was poorly served. It had evolved into a sea of pink or blue plastic-filled throwaway magazines. I had fond memories of the ones I used to read as a child, so I set out to launch one that reminded me of the ones I used to enjoy: one that would educate, look great, make us laugh, and last beyond one quick read.

In hindsight, I realize how bold that was because every aspect of our magazine went against the super well-established rules of children’s publishing: our paper, our tone of voice, our aesthetic, our frequency—everything, basically! Nonetheless, I just did it (despite many people advising against it), and with very little money.

I publish our Happy Mags because I love making them, writing them, working with illustrators, and receiving feedback from families about how they spark creativity in their children.

What is it about the magazine form specifically that you love so much? What sets magazines apart from other mediums? 

As a child, I loved that magazines were like a good “brain snack,” i.e., something that didn’t require as much commitment as a book. As a teen, they were my Bible because we had no internet back then! As a grown-up and parent, I love the craft that goes into making them and the fact that they are multi-faceted, i.e., they carry many different types of content. I love the niche magazines; the ones that focus on one passion.

As a publisher, I love the process involved in making a magazine: putting words on a page, sending them to an illustrator, seeing them turn into a story, and, a few weeks later, ta-da! You have this physical thing that you can share with people. Doing that for the children’s market is the most rewarding thing.

What’s the team makeup behind ‘Happy Mags for Kids’? How many people do you work with day to day, what are the roles, etc.? 

We are a tiny but mighty team. I write, commission artists, and run the business. Ben is our main illustrator and designer. We commission many different freelance illustrators who come on board for specific issues. We have Karolina, who does our PR; Max, our proofreader; Slava and Eritobi, our accountants; and Marcus, who looks after our site. That’s it!

I know that in numbers magazines aren’t doing as well as they were 20 years ago, but their role is just as important, if not more.

How do you feel about the changes in the magazine and printed media landscape over the years? Do you feel a sense of responsibility or pressure to keep ‘Happy Mags for Kids’ going while so many other magazines have folded?

The role of magazines has certainly changed in the last 20 years. They—along with newspapers—went from being essential for culture and information to being an alternative to what the internet offers. I know that in numbers magazines aren’t doing as well as 20 years ago, but their role is just as important, if not more. Plenty of titles are closing down, but many great independent ones are also launching. Whether they last as long as the behemoths of the past or sell as much is doubtful, but you never know! We are celebrating our 18th anniversary this year with new markets opening up in China and Korea, so … there is hope!

I publish our Happy Mags because I love making them, writing them, working with illustrators, and receiving feedback from families about how they spark creativity in their children. These are the only reasons I keep our magazines going, along with the crucial fact that they sell! As soon as they stop selling or I stop loving making them, I will reconsider.

What’s been the most rewarding part about helming ‘Happy Mags for Kids’? What’s been the biggest challenge? 

The most rewarding thing is seeing children explore their creativity, receiving drawings from them (which we feature in the magazines), and getting emails from parents about how much our mags spark conversations.

The most fun is putting the mags together. 

The most challenging part is distribution. Magazine distribution is wasteful and expensive, as no one in that chain pays promptly, so I focus on the business online, where most of our revenue comes from. We are lucky that because of our high production values, we are accepted by and work directly with bookshops, and we have one trusted book distributor who looks after our titles well.

In a world that seems to get bleaker and bleaker by the day, children’s media reminds us to keep our sense of wonder; that innate curiosity that all children have.

What lessons can people of all ages learn from children’s media?

In a world that seems to get bleaker by the day, children’s media reminds us to keep our sense of wonder—that innate curiosity that all children have. That fuels our Happy Mags, and it’s a gentler way to approach the world around us!

Since its founding, National Geographic, or NatGeo for short, has evolved into a multifaceted platform spanning print, digital, television, and more, exploring science, geography, history, and culture. NatGeo seeks to inspire curiosity, foster understanding, and champion conservation efforts worldwide through its articles, documentaries, educational initiatives, and photography.

The globally recognized magazine, which has over 84 million monthly readers, unveiled a significant design refresh this month. This transformation, revealed in the March issue, marks the debut under Editor-in-Chief Nathan Lump and Creative Director Paul Martinez, who assumed their roles in 2022. With Lump’s rich editorial background, including publications like TIME and The New York Times, alongside Martinez’s creative expertise at Travel + Leisure, the duo brings a bedrock of experience to the publication.

The key design and content highlights include:

• New sections, including “In Focus,” a selection of full-page images from National Geographic’s photographers in the field, amplify the focus on photography and visual storytelling.
• Short-form content is now interspersed with in-depth features to create a more varied and dynamic reading experience.
• A larger typeface for an easier read – an intentional update taking reader feedback into account.
• And a subscriber-only cover that features more artful, intimate visuals.

I reached out to Lump and Martinez, eager to discuss the driving forces behind this redesign and their plans for holding 130+ years of tradition, while addressing the evolving needs of print and digital audiences. Our conversation (condensed for length and clarity), is below.

The redesign marks a significant shift in National Geographic‘s visual identity and content structure. What was the inspiration behind deciding to introduce new sections like “In Focus” and the added emphasis on visual storytelling?

NL: We’ve had an emphasis on visual storytelling in our pages for many decades, so while I don’t see our recent adjustments as a particular shift in that direction, we are continually looking for ways to heighten for the reader what is special about what we do. The core of our mission is helping readers to discover and better understand the wonder of our world, and for me, a lot of what I wanted to accomplish with this refresh was to showcase the true diversity of the subjects we cover and what we’re learning about them – from animal behavior to science to history and more. Our new recurring story types are designed to do just that. “In Focus,” a handful of pages at the start of the book, is in many ways a microcosm of that wider approach: we are fortunate to have relationships with great photographers around the globe who are always at work, and this column brings readers a selection of their recent images from out in the field, across the full spectrum of topics of interest to our readers. 

PM: A segment such as “In Focus” truly emphasizes one of our strengths: photography. Placing this at the forefront is not just about captivating the reader with compelling images but also about swiftly propelling them into the heart of the magazine. This seamless transition leads directly into our initial main feature, where we aim for readers to immerse themselves in a deeper narrative.

How do you balance honoring the magazine’s rich heritage of storytelling, particularly through its iconic photography, while also pushing boundaries in today’s media landscape? In what ways does the redesign reflect the evolution of storytelling mediums and audience preferences?

NL: I am extremely conscious of our legacy and of the incredibly loyal, devoted readership we are fortunate to have, and of course that makes you be very deliberate and thoughtful when you make changes. But legacy can also lead you to be too conservative and hold you back from making genuine improvements in the service of your audience. My feeling is that as long as you retain your commitment to telling meaningful stories that align with your brand and meet your reader’s expectations of quality, you have permission to adjust as long as you are putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and thinking about what will serve them best. I thought a lot about what it means to innovate in print as we approached this work and tried to ask myself whether traditional conventions still held true. Years of working on digital content and products have grounded me in UX thinking and research, and I drew on that in this process. Our decision to radically simplify the book structure—essentially, almost the entire magazine is one unnamed “section” that consists of shorter and longer stories mixed together—stems from an understanding that digital and social environments have conditioned us to consume content in more free-flowing and serendipitous way. The story selection and flow are still highly curated, as any great magazine should be, but it allows for more variation and surprise that we think makes the overall experience more pleasurable and engaging.

Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content.

Paul Martinez, Creative Director

The decision to incorporate more short-form content alongside in-depth features is interesting. How do you navigate maintaining depth and substance while catering to shorter attention spans in today’s digital age?

PM: Many of our decisions revolved around the concept of pacing. Our strategy involved interspersing shorter stories among the longer ones to create a dynamic flow of peaks and valleys for the reader. We discovered that grouping all the longer features together risked reader fatigue, so placing shorter pieces between them offers readers a chance to engage swiftly with the content.

From a design standpoint, we aimed to signal to the reader when they were transitioning from a longer feature to a shorter story. To achieve this, we developed a consistent template for the shorter stories, facilitating a smooth exit from and entrance into the longer features. Additionally, we sought to engage the typographer more in introducing the features to signify the beginning of a substantial story.

Typography plays a crucial role in readability and accessibility, and your decision to introduce a larger typeface reflects a commitment to improving the reader experience. How did you approach this aspect of the redesign, particularly in response to reader feedback?

PM: Ensuring readability is a constant and top priority. Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content. Moreover, from an aesthetic perspective, we aimed to provide sufficient space for the increased type size in the body copy and captions to breathe. By augmenting the white space in the layouts, we were able to strike that delicate balance and hopefully improve the reader experience.

The subscriber-only cover featuring more artful and intimate visuals is a bold move, especially in an era where digital content often takes precedence. What motivated this decision, and how do you see it contributing to the magazine’s relationship with its most loyal readers?

NL: I am conscious that our relationship with subscribers is a personal one—they’ve invited us into their homes—and that the experience of receiving a printed magazine in the mail and diving into it on your sofa is quite particular relative to other ways that you encounter content in other environments and platforms. On a traditional newsstand, you need to shout, as it were, to gain a potential reader’s attention. In digital, it’s much the same—you have milliseconds in someone’s scrolling to grab their attention. When they’ve subscribed, they’ve already indicated an interest in your content and a willingness to engage. That’s not to say that the cover doesn’t need to provoke engagement, but when you hold a magazine in your hands at home, you are quite literally up close and personal with it. That allows us, I think, to showcase artistry and to be quieter in our choice of image when it’s appropriate, and we deliberately went minimal with type, in a nod to the old National Geographics with type-only covers that essentially served as a table of contents. Our goal is still to intrigue or to move the reader in some way, but we can take a different approach that we hope delivers something tailored to the subscriber’s mindset now that they’re ready to sit down and read.

How do you navigate the preferences and consumption habits of print readers versus digital consumers, and what lessons can other content creators learn from your experience? Any advice for media companies looking to strengthen connections with their audiences in an increasingly digital landscape?

NL: Like many publishers, we know that our print and digital audiences are quite distinct, and while they share some common affinities, they are not mirror images of each other. For many years, at other titles, I tried to achieve nearly total platform convergence—with all content designed to flow seamlessly between platforms—but I no longer think that’s the best approach. Increasingly, we take a fluid approach to our content creation, with some stories designed specifically to satisfy the needs of either print or digital (or social) audiences, and then selectively, those stories migrate to other platforms, often with modifications and sometimes in a different medium. It’s more bespoke and requires more care, but if you build the intention into your production process from the outset, you can ensure you’re generating the right type of material and minimize the effort required after the fact. This is an essential part of being responsive to audience preferences. What will work for a certain type of reader or user in one place will not necessarily work for another reader or user somewhere else. My goal with all our storytelling is to maximize the reach and impact of our work, and the way that works is by recognizing how preferences and behaviors vary based on where someone is and their mindset. The through line, of course, is quality – personally, I find this thinking and the process it informs so much more creatively energizing than when I started my career, although it is undoubtedly more complicated. You can’t do everything all the time, so it’s also important to be mindful of who you are most focused on reaching and strategically what you are trying to get out of building that relationship. I think that today, in digital environments, in particular, success is a lot about super-serving more specific audiences and interests. In some ways, we’ve always done this with our printed magazines, so we’re well positioned to thrive wherever we may be because we think consumer-first, fundamentally, and build that into everything we do.

The phantom of liberty haunts all contemporary culture.

Fans of Real Review will know this magazine likes to think outside the box. Take, for example, the innovative extra vertical fold that runs down the magazine, giving it essentially a quadruple-page spread. But the latest issue looks very different to the publication we have come to know and love, thanks to its large, empty spaces, which make a brilliant and striking statement on the war in Gaza.

“The phantom of liberty haunts all contemporary culture. At the last moment before this issue went to print, every non-text element (photo, diagram, drawing) was removed from the layout and replaced with an html accessibility description, also known as an ‘alt text’. What this reveals is the medium of communication itself; and what remains is an aesthetic ghost of the original,” writes Real Review‘s editorial staff.

The lead story of the issue is an interview with writer and cultural critic Shumon Basar, who accuses Israel of “normalising ultraviolence by layering horrific images on top of obscene images every single day, like rubble on top of rubble.” Indeed. We have been overly saturated by images of the war, making it too easy to simply look away. But leaving a white box with the alt text instead of the actual image encourages the reader to think more deeply, drawing upon everything we’ve already seen and possibly skimmed over in other media and adding to the power of Basar’s words.

Elsewhere in the magazine, the missing images assume different power. For example, an article on humour and protest, based upon the 2013 book Can Jokes Bring Down Governments, was initially accompanied by pictures of lolcat memes from 2013 and 2023. Sure, we’ve all seen plenty of lolcats, but I’d like to see the particular images the designer chose to contrast with one another across the decade divide. And besides, who doesn’t want some funny cats scattered through their cultural criticism? In this case, the absent images don’t add anything to the story; instead, they become a reminder that something here has been lost. 

See my full review and walk through the issue below.

Steven Watson is the founder of Stack, the independent magazine club that delivers a different title every month to thousands of readers around the world. He lives in London with his wife and two sons, and is running out of shelf space.

Bereal’s work, encapsulated in The Black Yearbook, offers an intimate portrayal of the joys, challenges, and truths encountered by Black students navigating higher education. The book challenges our societal narratives with honesty and depth, and in the process, Adraint Bereal opens our eyes.

I was fortunate enough to ask Bereal about his educational and creative journey in bringing The Black Yearbook to life; below is our interview.

(Interview edited for clarity and length).

Left: The Black Yearbook cover, Right: headshot of author Adraint Bereal

Bereal’s profoundly personal project began with his alma mater, the University of Texas. Through a collection of portraits, personal statements, and interviews, he provided a window into the lives of Black students in a predominantly white environment. Inspired by his initial exhibition, 1.7, a raw and candid portrait of the experiences of Black men at UT (1.7% of the student population), Bereal expanded his vision. He embarked on a nationwide exploration from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to predominantly white institutions and trade schools.

What sets Bereal’s approach apart is his commitment to showcasing more than just the trauma often associated with Black narratives. Instead, he amplifies stories of resilience, joy, and triumph amidst adversity, challenging societal perceptions and stereotypes.

In visiting schools for The Black Yearbook, what was a pivotal moment or encounter during your travels that deeply resonated with you and shaped your understanding of the complexities within the Black student experience?

AB: Traveling far west to Alaska to conclude my travels was such a reflective moment. The four to five months of travel were filled with the constant noise of trains, planes, and cars. My best friend accompanied me to Alaska, and it was the most peaceful moment I had experienced. Because The University of Alaska-Juneau is a relatively small campus, I interviewed only two students, which left me with a lot of time to relax—something I hadn’t really been able to do. On our second day in Alaska, my best friend and I hiked to see the Mendenhall Glacier, after which we found ourselves running back to our taxi in a snowstorm. The conversations with the 116 students were kind of like this – enthralling, and before you know it, you are caught in the middle of a storm trying to seek shelter. Work like this requires courage, and I learned I have no shortage of it while running into a storm head first.

The heart of The Black Yearbook lies in its dedication to honest dialogue. Each profile is a testament to the individuality of Black college experiences. Through stunning photography and compelling narratives, Bereal captures the essence of each interviewee, allowing their voices to shine through.

What struck me most about Bereal’s work was his design approach. Every page of The Black Yearbook bursts with energy and creativity, reflecting the diversity and vibrancy of the Black college experience. It’s a refreshing departure from the monolithic portrayal of higher education, offering a multifaceted representation that celebrates the richness of Black culture and identity.

You weave together interviews, photographs, and illustrations to capture the multifaceted narratives of Black students navigating the educational landscape. How did you approach the storytelling process to ensure that these narratives were accurately represented and celebrated in their fullness, capturing moments of joy and triumph alongside the challenges and adversities?

AB: Creating a book like this requires a lot of openness, and that’s at the core of each conversation. I went into each meeting with little to no expectations, knowing that the conversation could be as short as a few minutes or as long as a few hours. Had I approached this in a measured and solely quantitative way, I may not have been able to cut through surface-level conversations to reach a more personal and lived experience. Patience is a virtue.

The Black Yearbook has been described as both radical and reverent, offering a space for Black students to see themselves reflected while challenging societal prejudices. How can creative projects like yours contribute to conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion within educational spaces, and what do you hope readers, particularly Black students, take away from your book?

AB: The Black Yearbook continues work previously done by artists and scholars such as Toni Morrison, Monroe Work, and W.E.B. Dubois. The increase in digital technologies has created a lack of physical media to preserve Black existence. We must be the architects of our narrative, and that is what I’ve done. I’ve created a lasting document of existence to preserve our stories for future generations. Understanding – that’s the takeaway.

In a society where mainstream narratives often overlook or stereotype Black experiences in higher education, The Black Yearbook serves as a powerful corrective. Bereal’s work challenges us to reframe our perceptions and embrace the complexity of Black college life. It’s a testament to the resilience, strength, and beauty of the Black community and a reminder of the importance of amplifying diverse voices in the narrative of higher education.

Tod Lippy is the founder, editor and director of the Esopus Foundation, the entity that for 15 years published Esopus, one of the smartest-looking and smartest-reading magazines in the world. The publication featured contemporary projects by both established and emerging figures such as Anish Kapoor, Mark Hogancamp, Mickalene Thomas and Richard Tuttle. It presented personal reflections by creative practitioners—for instance, novelist Karl Ove Knausgård and theatrical lighting designer Jennifer Tipton—alongside short plays, visual essays, film excerpts, poetry and fiction. Each of the 25 issues concluded with a themed audio compilation of new songs by genre-spanning musicians. 

This is just the tip of the spear. Lippy spared no time, effort and money to make a pre-digital interactive magazine experience. He ceased publication in 2018, and the following year, the Esopus archive was acquired by Colby College Libraries in Waterville, Maine. Now, the Colby College Museum of Art has launched the exhibition A Lot More Inside: Esopus Magazine—and Lippy has decided to publish one final issue to accompany the show.

I’ve written about and interviewed Lippy many times over the past quarter century. He was an editor of PRINT (in its print days), editor of Scenario and organizer of many art and culture events. This probably won’t be the last time we talk, but with Esopus settling into its new climate-controlled home, this may be the last interview about this incredible journal.

Will you explain your reason for launching this ambitiously edited and designed arts and culture magazine; how it evolved over its lifespan; and your own feelings toward its final outcome as a printed entity?
I wanted to create an unmediated, accessible forum in which artists and the public could interact in all kinds of productive ways. And one which was resolutely multidisciplinary. Over the course of 25 issues, Esopus presented work by artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, writers, chefs, choreographers, lighting designers, cruciverbalists, mathematicians, theoretical physicists, playwrights, actors, show-runners, curators, translators, comedians, architects—you name it. I was also keen to make it affordable (the main reason I created the nonprofit Esopus Foundation Ltd. was to enable us to receive grants from places like the NEA and the Warhol Foundation, which were essential to its survival). And I wanted it to be “friendly,” I guess. That’s a word I’ve never used in relation to the magazine before, but it’s accurate. I didn’t want to scare off people with needless jargon or the air of exclusivity that is employed to reinforce the insularity of the art world, in particular. And I was hoping it would feel on some level like an artwork in its own right—something you hopefully wouldn’t toss in the trash the minute you finished reading it. It evolved in all kinds of important ways because I had the most amazing, loyal group of contributors, supporters, and readers whose participation, suggestions and enthusiasm constantly encouraged me to push it in new directions. 

You put the printed version on hiatus for a number of years—why is now a propitious moment for publishing its last issue?
The only reason for doing another, and final, issue, was A Lot More Inside: Esopus Magazine, an exhibition focusing on the Esopus archive that just opened at the Colby College Museum of Art. (Colby College Libraries acquired the archive in 2019.) The show presents a representative selection of items from the archive: original artworks, correspondence, mockups, press sheets, and a bunch of other process-related material. I co-curated it with Megan Carey, the museum’s Barbara Alfond Director of Exhibitions and Publications, and at some point during the process—probably six or so months ago—Megan and I talked about how nice it would be to do a “simple” exhibition catalog. I started pondering this more, and suddenly realized how much I’d missed putting together an issue of Esopus, and within a couple of months the “simple catalog” had become a six-part publication in a custom-designed slipcase with a removable poster, an eight-panel foldout featuring an artists’ project by Colby professors Gianluca Rizzo and Gary Green, and two invitationals. It was really fun to put together, and I think a lot of that had to do with my knowing that this would be the final Esopus publication. 

Did Esopus accomplish everything you set out to do? Is there anything more that you’d want to do with it?
I think so. As I already said, I set out to make an affordable, accessible magazine that would bring creative expression of all forms to a broad audience, and to do that with no commercial interference (advertising, etc.). Another goal of mine was to create a space in which artists and our readership not only could connect but also actually create things together (something that happened, particularly, with the many subscriber invitationals we did, like the “Imaginary Friends” CD, or Jason Polan’s “My Favorite Things About New York” artist’s project). I think all of that was accomplished to varying degrees, and a lot of other great stuff happened along the way, too. Most important, a community was created and maintained, and that community made the magazine better, richer and more inclusive.

What does the archive contain? How is it organized? And do you hope the public will be able to access the material?
The archive contains roughly 30,000 items—not to mention its digital component, which is vast. These range from more than 200 original artworks by artists including Kerry James Marshall, Richard Tuttle, Marilyn Minter and Robert Gober; hundreds of press sheets from every issue and other Esopus publication; a bunch of mockups I created during the course of production; correspondence with contributors (and with those who never heeded the call to contribute, despite my best efforts, like Stephen Sondheim and Jasper Johns); audio and video files documenting Esopus events and most of its press runs; signed copies; and, well, a lot more. One section of this final Esopus publication is a book called “Exploring the Archive,” and it features mostly items that didn’t make it into the exhibition. I wanted to include this as a kind of teaser for students and faculty at Colby, and hopefully for an audience beyond that, as well. The archive’s home is at the Colby Library’s fantastic Special Collections department, and the people there are committed to continuing to activate the archive in all kinds of exciting ways after the exhibition. My hope is that all of these materials will lead to other magazines, or books, or films, or any other kind of creative activity.

What has Esopus “taught” you … as artist, editor, cultural historian, etc.?
I sound like a Pollyanna here, but what doing Esopus has taught me is that, if you really believe in something, and are willing to go to the mat for it over and over, it is more likely than not you can make it happen. The key is to have a clear vision of what you want it to be, and never lose sight of that vision along the way. 

The journals included original art, poetry and songs that often dangerously took aim at the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators. Bloch, writing in both German and Dutch, mocked Nazi propaganda, responded to war news and offered personal perspectives on wartime deprivations. All this achieved not by a trained artist/designer, but a lawyer who was forced to flee Germany as the Nazis instituted anti-Jewish laws.

Bloch survived the war with all of the fragile journals intact. He brought them to his apartment in New York City where they sat on a shelf in bound volumes until rediscovered by Bloch’s daughter, Simone, a psychotherapist. Her efforts to tell the story of Bloch and his work led to a book, The Underwater Cabaret: The Satirical Resistance of Curt Bloch, by Gerard Groeneveld, which was published in the Netherlands in 2023. Last week, the exhibition “My Verses are Like Dynamite” (a collaboration with the Bloch family and the distinguished design historian and designer Thilo von Debschitz) opened at he Jewish Museum Berlin. Von Debschitz and his team of the creative agency Q are also responsible for developing an ambitious website dedicated to Bloch’s heroic achievements.

When von Debschitz introduced me to Het Onderwater Cabaret and Simone Bloch last year, I was excited to extend an invitation to interview both. They chose to wait until the opening of the JMB exhibition last week.

The Underwater Cabaret brings to mind the story of Anne Frank, although Curt Bloch survived. How was his incredible collection preserved and rescued?
Simone Bloch: Curt and the OWC [Underwater Cabaret] remained safe during the war. “Rescue” for both came with liberation in 1945. We’re not sure how extensively OWC circulated, but we do know that it was published weekly and returned. How many visits it made [to individual readers] before Curt got it back is uncertain. For a time Curt “published” a weekly magazine exclusively for Karola Saunders called Secret Service, in hopes of winning her love. She loved his words but not him. She kept Secret Service, and in 2023 her son Robert Saunders donated them to JMB. 

After the war Curt had OWC bound into volumes in Amsterdam. He brought them with him to New York in 1948.

Thilo von Debschitz: The magazines circulated within the resistance network of Enschede and were returned to Bloch after being read by other people in hiding and their supporters. Curt collected all magazines and took them with him when he emigrated to the United States. He had all the issues bound into four books. These books stood on the shelf of the Bloch’s home for decades.

It is clear where many of his collage materials came from. These are carefully cut from newspapers, magazines and books, and many of the images are valuable historical documents today. How did Curt do the actual work on these issues? Where did he obtain the raw materials?
von Debschitz: The supporters of the resistance network provided German and Dutch magazines and newspapers to him. Curt Bloch used glue and scissor to create the collages. He handwrote the poems with a fountain pen. Then, he thread-stitched the pages.

Bloch: There are also poems that complain about the lack of raw materials and poems that praise his supporters for having delivered a new supply of material to work with. To support the troops, Germans were asked to send their magazines “to the front” for the soldiers’ entertainment, so magazines were precious supplies. Curt mentions shortages of paper and of “news.” Also weakening of will. Some time in 1944 he says it’s the last issue. But then, a week later there’s another and he keeps going.

Who did he trust to show these one-of-a-kind magazines to?
von Debschitz: While the curators of the exhibition in Berlin assume that the magazines never left Curt’s home, the historian Gerard Groeneveld is very sure that the magazines were given to other people. In fact, his guess is that up to 30 people might have belonged to his readership. He wrote to me:

I had to derive about the readers from what I have found in the archives and in basis what Curt Bloch tells about that. The numbers are of course an estimation on my part. Bloch didn’t stay only in the Plataanstraat, he moved to other addresses as well. There are at least three people who testified about his anti-Nazi writings: Leendert Overduin, Jeronimo Hulshof (at whose house he stayed few months before he was liberated) and Annie Hommes, also from Borne.

He thanked his readers for the newspapers and magazines they delivered to him in the poem “Bedankje voor geïllustreerde bladen” (OWC, Tweede jaargang, nr. 35, 9 augustus 1944). And lastly, in a letter to his uncle Gustav Kramer, dated 28 May 1945, Bloch states about his poem production that he has read in small circles repeatedly his poems, which were “always a success.”

These findings are factual and more elaborated than the assumption that the OWC never left the house

Bloch: I wish I knew more than I do. I wish I’d asked more questions.

There is a decidedly tutored look to The Underwater Cabaret. When I first saw some issues, I was fooled that they were not printed. Was he a designer or editor prior to the Nazis?
von Debschitz: No. He studied law and was about to start a career as a judge. But the Nazis came to power, and all Jews working in the field of law had to quit their jobs. 

When Curt was still a student, he wrote some articles in the Dortmunder Generalanzeiger, Germany’s biggest newspaper outside of Berlin; so he had some experience in writing. 

Every OWC issue is handmade and unique.

Bloch: Curt had no formal training in design, but his father was a sculptor who came from a family of stone masons, I think. They were assimilated non-religious Jews but not upper crust. Art and design and aesthetics and an appreciation of nature were definitely a presence in the house but not consumerism. I think Curt’s eye was trained by exposure to the art and design of his time. I learned from him to look critically without being taught what I should see. Somehow I believe that is how he was taught to “see” by his father, but I have no proof.

As a teenager, I worked for American “underground” periodicals. There is a visual (and probably a philosophical) similarity. What was Curt’s motivating force? 
von Debschitz: I’d say … not to become silenced. Standing up against oppression. Commenting on fake news of the Nazis. Using satire as a weapon. Entertaining and impressing other people in hiding. Creating social interaction [while] being locked away in isolation.

Bloch: I agree with Thilo on Curt’s motivating force while in hiding. Curt was born in 1908 and came of age at a time when revolution of all kinds seemed possible and desirable. Dismantling inequity and rethinking power structures was in the air, very much like the ’60s, when you came of age.

Unlike my foray into contraband publishing, even though I was arrested twice I knew I would never be killed for it. But Curt faced terrible fates if caught. Why did he continue?
von Debschitz: He trusted in the network, I guess. On the other hand, he was fully aware that his editorial work was dangerous. In a certain poem (“Ein Ziel,” from issue no. 5, 2nd volume, 1944) he comments on a trial in Germany. Four people were sentenced to death because they distributed one single poem mocking Adolf Hitler. He writes:

Four lives for just one poem,
I ask myself with surprise,
What would happen to me,
I have nearly four hundred.

Bloch: To me it’s a more absurdist/existential/defiant stance. Why not continue? What else did he have to do? He was trained as a lawyer and ironically his existence had been made illegal by the stroke of Hitler’s pen. He had little to eat, nowhere to go, and if he was discovered he and his protectors would all be dead. Yet somehow he had all these rhymes in his head. Like Tupac—his existence itself has been criminalized. The only thing to do is call out the injustice. Just not too loudly.

Simone, did he ever talk to you about these things? You are a psychotherapist. Does this impact your work in any form?
Bloch: My father died suddenly when I was 15. At the time I was busy rebelling against him and the strictures he was trying to place on me as a parent. That’s one of the reasons I entered the field of social work and became a psychoanalyst; to understand where he (and therefore I) came from—culturally and otherwise. As an analyst I seek to understand with compassion, yet continue to probe pain and where it comes from. I learned that from my parents, and that’s how I share my inheritance.

What do you hope will be the result of making this material public? What was the response from the New York Times coverage?
Bloch: That’s a really big question. Now that the exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin has opened, in addition to the Times there’s been quite a lot of coverage in the European press, most especially German, but also Greek, French and Hebrew. I believe we’ve begun to fulfill my father’s wish that his voice as a poet could educate and entertain. He used creativity, critical thinking and humor as tools to face uncertainty and injustice, and I hope our website can inspire people in dire circumstances not to give up or feel forgotten. I wish he could have seen the way that Thilo has taken The Underwater Cabaret off the shelf and created curt-bloch.com to make his work available to anyone anywhere. 

*My criteria for choosing my top African American Designers were simple: a) I must love their work, and b) they must be older than I (born in 1966).

I do not intentionally exclude well-deserved and talented younglings. But I wrote this article as a call back to my younger self, to recognize that the path before me was designed Black and beautiful.

Now, read on and shine on.

Charles Dawson (1889 – 1981)

Best known for his illustrated advertisements, Charles Dawson (Charles Clarence Dawson) was an influential Chicago designer and artist through the 1920s and 30s.

He was born in 1898 in Georgia and went on to attend Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. After two years, he left when he became the first African American admitted into the Arts Students League of New York. Dawson abandoned the pervasive racism of the league when he gained acceptance to the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in his own words, their attitude was “entirely free of bias.” During his time there, Dawson was heavily involved and went on to become a founding member of the first Black artists collective in Chicago, The Arts & Letters Collective.

After graduation, he went on to serve in the segregated forces of WWI, where he faced combat in France. He returned to find a changed Chicago: one racially charged due to a slowed economy and trouble finding jobs. In 1922, Dawson began freelancing, producing work for other black entrepreneurs. Five years later, Dawson played a major role in the first exhibition of African American art at his alma mater called Negro In Art Week.

Dawson took part in two different Works Progress Administration programs under Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the National Youth Administration, where he designed the layout for the American Negro Exposition, a piece composed of 20 dioramas showcasing African American history.

He eventually returned to Tuskegee, where he became a curator for the institute’s museum and passed away at the ripe old age of 93 in Pennsylvania. Dawson will always be remembered for his great contributions to African American art, design, and advancement.

Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979)

Known as a key artist in the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas was a pivotal figure in developing a distinctly African style of art through his blending of Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles with connections to African masks and dances. His illustrations, published in Alan Locke’s anthology, The New Negro Movement, showcased his detachment from European-style arts and evolution into his own style, clearly communicating African heritage.

Douglas graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1922 with a BFA. He then taught high school art before moving to New York two years later to study under German artist Winold Reiss.

He became the most sought-after illustrator for black writers of his time after his covers for Opportunity and The Crisis, dubbed “Afro-Cubanism” by leading art critic Richard Powell. Among his other notable covers and illustrations are his designs for Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and God’s Trombone, James Weldon Johnson’s epic poem.

Douglas was well-versed in Harlem nightlife, where he spent many nights gaining inspiration for his designs and depictions of the black urban scene. His murals, adorning the walls of various institutions, cemented his name as a major artist of the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known work is a series of murals called, Aspects of Negro Life, which Douglas created for the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library.

He later left New York to become chair of the art department of Fisk University in Nashville, where he resided until his death in 1979.

Leroy Winbush (1915 – 2007)

One week after graduating high school, Winbush left Detroit for Chicago to become a graphic designer. His inspiration and mentors at the time were sign designers on Chicago’s South Side. He began creating signage, flyers, and murals for the Regal Theater, where he rubbed elbows with some of the most famous black musicians of the time.

Winbush then went on to join Goldblatt Department Store’s sign department, where he was the only black employee. In 1945, after years of working for others, Winbush started his own company, Winbush Associates, later Winbush Designs. Here, he landed accounts with various publishing houses, doing layouts for Ebony and Jet, among others. His ambition and charisma eventually helped him gain acceptance as a black designer and entrepreneur.

Later in life, Winbush began teaching visual communications and typography at various Chicago universities. He concurrently mastered the art of scuba diving, a feat that helped him land a position as part of the crew tasked with creating Epcot Center’s coral reef.

Winbush was adamant in his desire to be remembered as a “good designer,” as opposed to a “Black designer,” but was well aware of the influence he could have on the progression of the Black community. He designed a sickle cell anemia exhibit and exhibitions of the Underground Railroad for different Chicago museums to illuminate Black history, past and present, to the public. His accomplishments throughout his lifetime make LeRoy Winbush a notable African American graphic designer worth checking out.

Eugene Winslow (1919 – 2001)

Born in Dayton, Ohio, into a family of seven children, Eugene Winslow’s parents stressed the importance of education and encouraged their children to study the arts. Winslow attended Dillard University, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He then served in WWII as part of the revered Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, Winslow nurtured his lifelong artistic interest by attending The Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Winslow then went on to co-found the Am-Afro Publishing house based out of Chicago, where in 1963, they published Great American Negroes Past and Present with Winslow’s illustrations. That same year, he also designed the seal commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation for the Chicago Exposition. Throughout his career as an artist, designer, businessman, and entrepreneur, Winslow always sought to promote racial integration wherever possible.

Georg Olden (1920 – 1975)

Born in 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama, to the son of an escaped enslaved person and opera-singing mother, Georg Olden was a revolutionary designer who helped pave the way for African Americans in the field of design and the corporate world.

After a brief stint at Virginia State College, Olden dropped out of school to work as a graphic designer for the CIA’s predecessor, The Office of Strategic Services. From there, the connections he made helped him land a position at CBS in 1945 as Head of Network Division of On-Air Promotions. Here, he worked on programs such as Gunsmoke, and I Love Lucy and eventually went on to help create the vote-tallying scoreboard for the first televised Presidential Election in 1952.

Praised in his day and posthumously, Olden appeared multiple times in publications such as Graphis and Ebony. In 1963, he became the first African American to design a postage stamp. His design showcased chains breaking to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1970, he had won seven Clio Awards for creative excellence in advertising and design and eventually won the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) award in 2007. Celebrated for his talent, charm, and business intelligence, Olden was a revolutionary African American graphic designer who made advancements in the industry and for all African Americans.

Thomas Miller (1920 – 2012)

Born in Bristol, Virginia, the grandson of enslaved people, Thomas Miller’s talent, hard work, and ambition helped him become one of the first Black designers to break into mainstream graphic design.

Miller graduated and earned a Bachelor of Education with a focus on the arts in 1941 from Virginia State College. Soon after, he enlisted in the army and served in WWII, achieving the rank of First Sergeant.

After the war, Miller was determined to learn about commercial design. He gained acceptance to The Ray Vogue School of Art in Chicago, where he and fellow student Emmett McBain were the only African Americans besides the janitors.

After graduation, Miller searched for jobs and denied one offer in New York because he worked “behind the screen.” Unwilling to tolerate the company’s overt racism, Miller passed on the offer and eventually joined the progressive Chicago studio Morton Goldsholl Associates. It was here that Miller, as chief designer, worked on high-profile campaigns such as the design for 7-Up in the 1970s. As a supporting member of the design team, he also worked on the Motorola rebranding, the Peace Corps logo, and the Betty Crocker “Chicken Helper” branding, earning accolades for himself and the company.

Miller also freelanced, starting when he served in WWII and continuing through his work with Goldsholl. Through his independent work, Miller was commissioned to create a memorial to the DuSable Museum’s founders. This job resulted in one of his most well-known pieces, the Thomas Miller Mosaics, now featured in the museum’s lobby.

Miller’s hard work, dedication, and artistic talent helped him pave the way for many African-American artists and designers to come.

Emmett McBain (1935 – 2012)

Emmett McBain, born in Chicago in 1935, is lesser known than some other designers I’ve profiled. But McBain made major contributions to the advertising and design world and for all African Americans through his successes in the business world.

Emmett McBain, a true visual thinker and communicator, attended The American Academy of Art and the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he became a talented watercolor artist. Post-graduation, McBain worked for several notable agencies and firms as a designer, art supervisor, and creative consultant before co-founding Burrell McBain Incorporated. This advertising agency, which later became the largest African-American-owned agency in the States, aimed to serve their accounts while gaining the trust and loyalty of the Black community. McBain was key in running the agency, landing valuable accounts, and constantly developing new and fresh ideas. His former partner, Thomas J. Burrell, praised his leadership skills and ability to think outside the box.

McBain left Burrell McBain in 1974 to focus on independent art and design in his Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood, where he later passed away in 2012 at 78.

The University of Illinois at Chicago has a collection featuring his works entitled Emmett McBain Design Papers. You’ll find print ads, record album covers, and transparencies of Billboards, all McBain designed.

Archie Boston (born 1943)

Known for his blatant self-deprecation and humor, Archie Boston was a pioneer in challenging the racism of the 1960s and 70s through his designs and attitude.

One of five children, Boston grew up poor but well aware of the importance of education. In 1961, his artistic talent landed him acceptance to Chouinard Art Institute. While at university, he interned with the advertising agency Carson/Roberts, where he cemented his desire to work in design and eventually returned to the agency years later.

After graduation, he worked at various advertising and design firms before forming Boston & Boston with his older brother, Bradford. It was here that they created provocative pieces showcasing their race, as well as creativity, in pieces such as “Catch a Nigger by The Toe” and by selecting the Jim Crow typeface for their logotype.

For the majority of his career, however, Boston was an educator. He landed a position as a full-time lecturer in the art department at California State University, Long Beach, before creating their design department and eventually becoming head of the visual communications design program. He influenced countless young designers there, inspiring them through his encouragement and standard for excellence.

Emory Douglas (Born 1943)

The former Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas’ career in commercial art has been centered around civil and equal rights propagation from its beginnings.

Douglas’ first exposure to design came when his crimes landed him in the Youth Training School of Ontario, California. Here, he worked in the print shop and learned about typography, illustration, and logo design. Later, Douglas enrolled in commercial art classes at the City College of San Francisco after running into a former counselor from the center who encouraged him to do so

During this time, Douglas became active in the Black Panther Party after being introduced to the founding members, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Douglas offered up his design skills while watching Seale work on the first issue of the party’s paper, The Black Panther. He was well aware of the importance of having illustrations and artwork to help reach the many illiterate members of the communities the party was targeting. Much of his art and illustration for the paper initially focused on Black rights, but it soon expanded to include women, children, and community figures alongside the party’s focuses. While working on The Black Panther, Douglas coined and popularized the term “pigs” in reference to police officers.

In the 1980s, the Black Panther Party, as Douglas had once known it, was mostly dissolved by law enforcement efforts. Later, Douglas moved to care for his ailing mother and continued to pursue some independent design. His revolutionary artwork helped to educate and agitate repressed and suppressed communities of the time.

Sylvia Harris (1953 – 2011)

Noted for her unwavering desire to help others, Sylvia Harris was a graphic designer, teacher, and business owner who used her research and skill set to reach far and wide.

Born and raised in Richmond, VA, Harris experienced the desegregation of the 1960s directly. This experience provided the foundation for her interest in social systems and their effect. After receiving her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Harris moved to Boston, where she worked with various creative types. Through her work with WGBH and Chris Pullman, she realized the design field’s breadth and depth. After much prodding from her mentor, Harris enrolled in Yale’s Masters in Graphic Design program.

Two Twelve Associates was created with two of her former classmates in 1980 after graduation. Here, Harris began to explore how to use and grow her skill set to develop large-scale public information systems. Her work with Citibank set an early precedent for human-centered automated customer service.

In 1994, Harris left Two Twelve to create Sylvia Harris LLC, where she changed gears and began focusing more on design planning and strategies. Harris helped guide some of the largest public institutions, hospitals, and universities with systems planning. As creative director for the US Census Bureau’s Census 2000, Harris’ rebranding efforts helped encourage previously underrepresented citizens to participate.

Harris was awarded the AIGA medal posthumously in 2014, three years after her untimely death at the age of 57. Harris will always be remembered for her contributions to the design field and far beyond.

Art Sims (Born 1954)

From his first foray into the art world with the “Draw Me” test from magazines and TV of the 50s and 60s, Sims excelled. He attended Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, known for its dedication to the arts. From there, Sims gained acceptance to the University of Michigan on a full scholarship. During the summer between his junior and senior years, Sims landed a job with Columbia Records to produce a series of album covers. After graduation, the Sunshine State called his name, and Sims headed to LA.

Sims scored a job with EMI, but he was ultimately let go for pursuing freelance work. He went on to work for CBS, where he continued building his independent portfolio. When he was let go this time, Sims was prepared and already had the office space for his firm, 11:24 Advertising Design.

After seeing one of Spike Lee’s films, Sims knew he had to work with the director. He went on to design posters for Lee’s New Jack City, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and most controversially, Bamboozled.

Ever the entrepreneur, Sims is developing a greeting card line and writing screenplays while teaching graphic design to African American middle schoolers. Art Sims is the epitome of talent, drive, and ambition, someone every graphic designer should know.

Gail Anderson (Born 1962)

Known for her uncanny ability to create expressive, dynamic typefaces perfectly suited to their subject, Gail Anderson is a designer and teacher with an impressive tenure in the field.

Born and raised in New York, Anderson’s ever-burning curiosity about design began with the teen magazines of her adolescent years. It was cemented while studying at the School of Visual Arts in NY. Here, Anderson began to develop her methodologies and no-holds-barred approach to design.

After college, Anderson eventually landed at The Boston Globe for two years, working with those responsible for pioneering the new newspaper design of the late 1980s. Moving on to Rolling Stone in 1987, Anderson worked seamlessly with AIGA medalist Fred Woodward, where their creative process always included lots of music, low lighting, and late nights. Her work with Woodward was always exploring new and exciting materials and instruments to create Rolling Stone’s eclectic design. They utilized everything from hot metal to bits of twigs to bottle caps to create their vision.

After working her way up from associate to senior art director, Anderson left Rolling Stone in 2002 to join SpotCo, where her focus shifted from design to advertising. At SpotCo, she’s been the designer behind innumerable Broadway and off-Broadway posters, including that of Avenue Q and Eve Ensler’s The Good Body.

Praised as the quintessential collaborator for her inclusive, expressive, and encouraging attitude towards working together, Anderson also admits that many of her “high-octane” designs occurred at night, solo. Whether it’s her collaborative work, solo projects, magazine layouts, or theatrical posters, Anderson designs work with and for her subjects, always emphasizing their highest potential.

The Unknown & Overlooked Designers

They are many, often invisible, but we feel the impact of their work throughout history, and we should acknowledge them. Many African American graphic designers worked behind the scenes and did not receive credit for their work due to the racist norms of the times. 

These include:

• The logo creators for the uniforms of the Negro baseball and basketball leagues;
• Trail-blazing entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, Annie Malone, Carmen C. Murphy, Mae Reeves, Anthony Overton, Frederick Patterson, and many more;
• The unknown graphic designer who painted the bold and sobering “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” flag, hung by the NAACP from their New York offices whenever they learned of a hanging;
• Those presently active (Black Lives Matter) are creating banners, posters, signs, and media protesting discrimination of all kinds. Graphic design, after all, is about communicating a message effectively.

The truth of all history cannot be understated. As a designer of the African diaspora (African-Jamaican-Canadian), I believe in knowing those who paved the way. These men and women boldly pushed past racial inequality with their talent and perseverance to help create the way for all.

Glenford Laughton is founder of Toronto-based agency Laughton Creatves, a design studio that believes design is a highly-collaborative endeavor (hence the missing ‘i’). This article was written and researched by Glenford Laughton and originally published on the Laughton Creatves website. Republished with permission of the author.

Sources: AIGA, The Design Observer, The University of Chicago Library, Atlanta Blackstar, The History Makers, Wikipedia, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Design Archive, and The Root.

As the sole designer of the publication, Lewis created the cover and interior. The ed​​itors of the new book did all the research and chose the illustrators and writers. Nonetheless, I asked Lewis to explain the process of making The New Brownies’ Book come to life.

Can you give the reader some background on this book? 
In January 1920, the civil rights activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) edited the original The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun. As the first periodical for African American youth, this was an important work in the history of children’s literature. The work included art, stories, letters and activities to inspire children, share Black history and celebrate their identities.

Regarding its purpose and design, the publication stated that “it aims to be a thing of Joy and Beauty, dealing in Happiness, Laughter and Emulation, and designed especially for Kiddies from Six to Sixteen.” 

A century later comes the updated version of the beloved magazine. The New Brownies’ Book revives its mission to inspire the young readers of today.

How did you go about resurrecting it for a contemporary audience? 
We included the artwork of contemporary artists across various disciplines. Each artist featured is a master of their craft and this is evident through their visually engaging and thought-provoking artwork. I was keen to go large with the artwork, whether on a double-page spread or a single full-bleed page. …

Also, I used two types of fonts. One serif typeface, Baskerville, for the body copy, and a sans-serif, Brandon Grotesque, for the titles. Both fonts work in unity to provide the reader with the perfect balance of elegance with the body copy, against a more modern feel through the sans-serif font. 

What were the main considerations you made to generate something contemporary? (Or, is the name W.E.B. Du Bois hook enough?)
Those who have read literature focused on empowering the Black community most likely have heard the name W.E.B Du Bois. However, this is not the case for the general public, and this book aims to attract a wide range of readers. This was my opportunity to use graphic design as an effective tool to engage different types of audiences. I wanted to design a publication that would entice today’s young readers as much as make them feel that they belong to a powerful and inspirational community.

The book feels precious and looks luxurious. It portraits what it means to be Black today. For the cover imagery, I was conscious to select an image that would best capture the reader’s attention. The chosen one shows a young Black girl dressed in a ballerina outfit staring confidently ahead. Hopefully, this distills the message of uplifting, which is the focal point that the authors wanted to communicate as the ethos of the publication.

Wednesday is quite an impressive magazine in its heft, design and editorial content. I’m curious about the name and subtitle. What does Wednesday refer to? And why is this mag “Pertaining to Dark Culture”?
The name Wednesday references a verse from an English nursery rhyme from 1838 called “Monday’s Child,” which says, “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.” This reference was also the inspiration for Charles Addams’ Wednesday character in his Addams Family cartoons. We felt the name was an appropriate and evocative title for the project.

The magazine itself was created to explore darkness as a catalyst for creativity in music, art, film, fashion, literature and beyond. Darkness is having a moment in our pop cultural landscape, extending well beyond Goth. Perhaps it’s because we’re living in such dire times, but from fashion to [a quote] from artist Gerhard Richter that says “art is the highest form of hope,” a sentiment we really agree with, we see the artistic expressions documented in Wednesday as inherently positive, a sort of light in the night.

The reference to Edward Gorey in the Founder’s Letter suggests a sense of lugubrious satire. Is this the intent of the magazine, to make the dark side a little lighter?
Absolutely—it’s like taking lemons and making lemonade. There’s a bit of gallows humor in the mix: When things seem bleak or hopeless, sometimes all you can do is laugh. It’s empowering in a way.

Why publish a magazine, even a fairly exotic thematic one, at this time in the digital age?
Digital expressions continue to underwhelm me on the whole—I crave tangible expressions of creativity. I think lots of people can relate to that, hence the renewed popularity of vinyl, for example. And as we reference Wednesday as “The Bible of Dark Culture,” we wanted the book itself to be hefty, like an actual bible. The texture and blind embossing on the cover also invite a more sensual interaction with the magazine than you’d have if it were all digital.

I am not sure how to categorize Wednesday. What do you say: Is it fashion-literary-art? Is it Cult? Where does it sit on the magazine rack?
We see it as what you might expect if Edgar Allan Poe was brought back to life and guest-edited an issue of Kinfolk. In a way, it’s a lifestyle magazine, like many others that focus primarily on art, music and fashion, only through a dark lens.

It’s also being distributed by Gingko Press as a book, so it’s not actually appearing in a magazine rack setting in most instances. 

What is your mandate as editor-in-chief, and how does that translate to your contributors?
Wednesday follows two previous publications that I founded, GUM (with Colin Metcalf) and Lemon. My intention now is quite similar to what it was then—to create compelling experiences in print. When I open up most magazines, I’m usually disappointed. Many follow conventions that are quite predictable. With Lemon, we were able to collaborate with such icons as David Bowie and Daft Punk, based largely on the uniqueness of our approach and our expression. They sensed we were making Lemon purely for the love of it, a true passion project. Wednesday’s contributors are motivated by the same or similar aspirations.

I would like Wednesday to become a brand. In addition to the annual book, my collaborators and I would like to create products—scented candles, fragrances, apparel, perhaps our own absinthe—all building on the theme. Potentially it could expand into music as well.

Who comprises your ideal audience?
I’ve joked that Wednesday is a magazine for mortals. Which is a pretty broad audience! But it’s true, we all have to grapple with our finite nature, and this is at the core of so much of Wednesday’s content. People who identity with Goth culture certainly have been quick to appreciate Wednesday, but the interest extends beyond that initial core. Almost everyone loves a good ghost story, regardless of demographics.

Most of our writers are quite mature as well, so there’s a lot of life experience packed in our pages. One story, by head writer Robert Bundy, is particularly poignant and involves grappling with the dementia and death of a loved one. Another feature, by Wednesday creative director Adam Larson, presents art he made following a painful breakup. People of all backgrounds can relate to topics like this.

You call this the “New Bible of Dark Culture.” I admit I am not familiar with any of the contributors or the work included, other than Aubrey Beardsley, who represents an older dark culture, and Richard Brautigan. Where do you draw your content from?
There is a very broad subculture to draw inspiration from. It perhaps starts with musical luminaries such as The Cure, Joy Division and Depeche Mode and extends into the work of contemporary fashion designers like Rick Owens and Jun Takahashi. There’s a renaissance of original, intelligent horror films like A24’s Hereditary and Midsommar, and no end of fine artists who delve into morbid content. Inspiration can be found almost everywhere.

How do you plan to keep an ambitious and presumably costly work such as this sustainable?
By not quitting our day jobs! We’re prepared to grow this organically over time, as an extension of the creative work we do professionally. So there’s less of a “make or break” aspect to it than there would be if we were trying to make a living from it. That’s pretty liberating. There’s still a lot we need to figure out, but it helps that we’re an annual as opposed to a monthly publication.

Remo Giuffré—the Australia-based creative director, entrepreneur and founder of REMO and the General Thinking Network—has been triangulating the trivial and consequential parts of life. Accordingly, he has produced a record of it—a biannual book series dubbed REMORANDOM that features 90 snack-sized stories, ideas and observations designed to inform, entertain and inspire a global community of curious readers. The content is a curated mix that draws on a diverse range of topics: culture, design, history, ideas, nature, people, science. Uncommon knowledge. Brain candy. Everything interesting. Collectible.

REMORANDOM, writes Giuffré, “has been marinating for a long time.” His guidelines? Content must address: How did the thing come into being? Who was responsible for its development? What’s their story? In the final analysis, this is a series of fun facts and uncommon knowledge that is not a catalog of products but rather what Giuffré ungrammatically calls “catalogs of interesting.”

As the primary public venue for the Bob Dylan Archive collection, the Center curates and exhibits a priceless collection of more than 100,000 items spanning Dylan’s career, including manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence; films, videos, photographs and artwork; memorabilia and ephemera; personal documents and effects; unreleased studio and concert recordings; musical instruments and many other elements. In short, a treasure of riches.

Three weeks after ravenously consuming Mixing Up the Medicine, I solved the problem of what to ask Callaway, Davidson and Fishel.

(Pages and content courtesy Callaway Arts & Entertainment.)

I am sitting at my desk with Dylan‘s iconic face staring back at me on the cover. I know why I want to possess a 608-page book drawing on Dylan’s personal archive, but Nicholas, why did you decide to publish it?
Callaway: The book has been 58 years in the making. In 1966 I first saw Dylan in concert at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia when I was 12, on his way to the U.K. tour that formed the basis for a D.A. Pennebaker’s doc Dont Look Back. He has been my North Star as a musical artist ever since.

And why, Mike and Parker, did you two decide to devote your time, intellect and labor to building this archive?
Fishel: Mark and I are both big Bob Dylan fans, so having the privilege of working with his archive is really a dream job. He’s at the top of the mountain, and his archive reflects and embellishes that impression.

Davidson: But Dylan is just a part of our professional lives. I’m the Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions at the American Song Archives, which includes the Bob Dylan Center and Woody Guthrie Center. Those institutions house the collections of not just Dylan and Guthrie, but Phil Ochs, Cynthia Gooding and many others. 

Parker is an independent archivist and curator who runs his own company, Americana Music Productions, which works with artists, estates, record labels, museums and other entities interested in sharing the important stories found in archives.

What are your respective backgrounds in terms of Dylan scholarship?
Fishel: I’ve been fortunate to assist with several volumes of the Bootleg Series, but this is both my first book and my first book on Bob Dylan. My other published work is on American music, with participation in projects ranging from the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival to obscure jazz pianist Garnet Clarke.

Davidson: I’m a trained musicologist and I wrote my dissertation on folk music collecting in the Depression-era U.S. I’ve contributed essays and presentations to various Dylan books and conferences since coming aboard, but this is also my first book.

How was the archive established and developed?
Davidson: The body of material that Dylan collected over the years is the core of the archive. As we note in our preface [to the book], it’s one of the most remarkable archives in existence that is dedicated to a single artist. Since the Bob Dylan Archive was acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016, the collection has expanded in important ways. There has been the addition of significant pieces, like Bruce Langhorne’s tambourine, which inspired the song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The archive has also acquired rare recordings, like “The Bailey Tapes,” which contain the first known version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” And finally, two massive fan collections from preeminent and longtime Dylan collectors Mitch Blank and Bill Pagel are also destined for Tulsa. Through strategic acquisitions, including a set of generous donations, the archive has expanded the stories that can be told about Dylan’s remarkable career.

Does anything produced on or about Dylan require your oversight?
Davidson: The Center maintains access to the Bob Dylan Archive, but Dylan’s work is still administered by his management, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Publishing Group.

What was the process of selection and editing?
Callaway: The Bob Dylan Archive & Bob Dylan Center has a hundred thousand objects in it—manuscripts, lyrics, notebooks, photographs, musical instruments. We worked side-by-side for more than three years with Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel.

What was the input of the designer in such a massive enterprise?
Callaway: I was the creative director, as I had a clear vision of what the book should be, but we assembled a world-class team of designers, editors, researchers, archivists and imaging experts.

My vision was to create a book as a conversation between a vast array of elements, both written and visual, that were in deep conversation with each other, usually in a book, either words or images predominate, and my goal was to have it be a true marriage between the two.

Fishel: I can’t verify whether it’s actually true, but Bob Dylan is often touted as the second-most-written-about American after President Abraham Lincoln, with over 2,000 books dedicated to his life and work. With so many words already written, we thought long and hard about what we could add to that story. Since nearly all of that scholarship and writing on Dylan to date has been produced without access to the Bob Dylan Archive, we decided to focus on that body of materials and what it might reveal. 

What emerged was an almost “inside-out” biography, with various albums, songs, tours and other episodes explored through the items that Dylan kept and collected across the years. To do this, we went page-by-page through the contents of the archive, each lyric manuscript, piece of correspondence, notebook, photograph, and other ephemera, to select exemplary and representative items of the archive’s voluminous and rich holdings. This material was supplemented by additional material like film stills, tape boxes, previously unpublished excerpts from the archive, interview outtakes from the documentary “No Direction Home,” and original interviews conducted by the Bob Dylan Center. 

Taken together, all of these elements form a prismatic portrait of Dylan’s creative life, revealing themes and connections that cross Dylan’s long and still-evolving career, while also shedding new (and often surprising light) on specific songs, projects and events. 

Whose idea was it to include so many different creative voices in the book?
Callaway: The book [team] commissioned 30 different writers and artists to come to the center, pick one artifact and use it as the starting point for an essay or meditation; those essays became our breakouts between the nine chapters that frame the full arc of Dylan’s life.

Davidson: The book had its origins in the years immediately following the arrival of the archive in Tulsa in 2016. Michael Chaiken, the first curator of the Bob Dylan Archive, and Robert Polito, poet and professor at the New School in New York City, began bringing writers, artists and musicians to Tulsa in 2017 to engage with the archive and to do a public program in Tulsa. While here they were asked to choose an item from the archive and to write a short essay about it in a style of their choosing. 

The book was initially going to be a collection of these essays, but once we started working with Nicholas Callaway, the scope enlarged immensely. To accommodate Callaway’s vision, Parker and I made the editorial decision to include more voices, expanding on the approach that Todd Haynes took to Dylan in the film I’m Not There. We wanted to include Dylan’s own words, through interviews and excerpts from the archive, as well as those of his collaborators and contemporaries, again taken from the archive as much as possible. This allowed our own authorial voice to be more of a skeleton of a story where others could fill in the detail. We tried to present the available evidence and allow people to make their own interpretations, like the question of what really happened at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

What is the influence of design on such a massive enterprise?
Davidson: Callaway Arts and Entertainment has been producing books of the highest quality for decades, and they had an immense impact on the design and overall trajectory of the book. It’s in many respects a visual biography, with photographs, manuscripts and other images providing the jumping-off point for illuminating Dylan’s working career as a musician. We all worked very closely day after day, Zoom after Zoom, carefully honing the layout. We would explain how images related to one another and to the larger narrative, and they’d somehow find a way to make it work. It’s a design that reflects the rawness of an archive, but is also somehow very elegant. And their attention to detail was second to none. The intricate tracing of the edges of ripped manuscripts or spiral notebooks just makes those images feel like they jump off the page.

Did Dylan have any input whatsoever?
Callaway: None.

Davidson: This book is the first fully authorized deep dive into the Bob Dylan Archive.

Is the Dylan material at the Tulsa center all there is, or are there other archives in other places?
Callaway: There are several other smaller archives, assembled, primarily, by obsessive collectors, in Hibbing, MN, at the Morgan Library and elsewhere. 

Fishel: Obviously no collection is complete, and individual items and other small collections (sometimes of some importance) exist in other institutions or in private hands. There are also wonderful fan collections around the world. But in terms of the size, scope and incredible depth of the Bob Dylan Archive, there is nothing comparable.

What did you learn from this material that you did not know beforehand?
Callaway: I learned that the depth and scope of Dylan’s creative achievement is monumental, even more than I realized from a lifetime of listening and studying.

Fishel: When someone has been creating art at a consistently high level for 60-plus years, and continues to do so, I think we have a tendency to flatten that into words like “genius.” What gets erased is the considerable labor that goes into the act of creating. Dylan himself has talked about songwriting as a mysterious process, and I don’t think the archive does anything to dispel that observation. But the archive does give glimpses into Dylan’s songwriting processes and how those have evolved throughout his career. 

In his 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley, Dylan speaks of his early songs as being written with a kind of penetrating magic. You can see that—a song nearly fully formed—in the draft of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But you can also see different creative processes jostling around in a draft of “Tangled Up in Blue” from one of the pocket notebooks in which Dylan wrote the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, and still different approaches to writing in a draft for “Tempest” from the 2012 album of the same name. Dylan employs different methods at different times for different reasons, and it’s fascinating to see.

Davidson: The archive reveals the depth of his work ethic from the earliest drafts of “Chimes of Freedom” and the songs from Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited through the songs on Tempest, the last album of original material he worked on prior to the sale of the archive in 2016. We can see that he was a judicious and sometimes malicious editor of his own work and that he would not release material he didn’t feel was finished. 

It’s clear that for Dylan, a song isn’t finished with the written word, and that’s sometimes even true of the studio recording. He’s constantly working and reworking the words and music, whether it’s in the studio or in live performance after the song has been released. Just look at the recent approaches he took to his early songs on his most recent album, Shadow Kingdom.

Is it true that Dylan has never visited the Center?
Davidson: Bob Dylan has not visited the Bob Dylan Center, though he did visit the Woody Guthrie Center [next door] several years ago and seemed to enjoy his visit. He hasn’t played a concert in Tulsa since April 2022, and the Center opened in May, so who knows.

There is a lot of art, painting and sculpture that he’s produced. A few of the familiar things (e.g., album art) are in the book. But is this a separate archive altogether?

Fishel: Dylan’s work in the visual arts is maintained independent of the Center. However, Dylan created the ironworks portal to the entryway of the Center, and through generous donations the Center also has the Face Value painting series and a 1968 painting that was Dylan’s first—both currently on display.

What would you say is the ultimate value of having all this material in one place? Is it scholarship, nostalgia, fandom or a bit of all?
Callaway: The value and importance of having the vast majority of such a great artist’s body of work preserved and archived in one location is still rare and of inestimable value for this and future generations. The book is one expression of Andre Malraux’s idea that a book can be the virtual museum, the museum without walls.

Davidson: I think the answer differs based on who you are and where you are coming from in relation to Dylan and his music, but surely scholarship, nostalgia and fandom are three factors that come into play. Whatever the motivations for picking up the book, Parker and I hope that the way the story is presented furthers the mission of the Bob Dylan Center in using Dylan’s work to inspire creativity in us all. 

Fishel: As an active artist, Dylan’s music continues to have a profound impact on our culture. Bringing together these elements in a book hopefully sheds new light on the extent of that influence, but there is one crucial limit to the printed page: You can’t hear the music, which Dylan told us in his Nobel Lecture, is the way he thinks of his own work. So that’s where I’d encourage everyone to visit the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, OK, where visitors can have a rich multimedia experience that is really complementary—and I’d say almost essential—for the full enjoyment of Mixing Up the Medicine.

Included among the rarities: a four-volume set of the Newgate Calendar (1824), a sensationalist publication on criminal activity; the first American edition of The Memoirs of Francois Vidocq (1834), the world’s “first” detective; the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892); and Agatha Christie’s first novel, featuring the debut appearance of the little Belgian Hercule Poirot (1920).

I interrogated collector Jeffrey Johnson, who organized this exhibition from his vast stash of Whodunits.

How did you get involved collecting Whodunits?
My love of mystery novels started when I was about 8 years old with The Hardy Boys. I enjoyed reading them but I really liked them lined up in order on my bookshelf. When I was older (and had more money), I started collecting the Edgar Award winners for best first mystery. I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar and was told that using somebody else’s list was just “shopping.” So I decided to begin collecting the beginnings of detective fiction. I concentrated on the 19th century.

I wasn’t raised on murder mysteries but since COVID I love reading Agatha Christie, especially the short stories and, of course, Hercule Poirot. I was introduced to the writing through the BBC TV shows. So now, I’m exploring C.K. Chesterton. Who is your favorite author in this genre?
Poe’s early Dupin stories are excellent, and as a boy I went from The Hardy Boys to Sherlock Holmes. Donna Tartt and Paul Auster are favorites today.

From a cover and jacket design perspective, are there any authors who controlled what their “brands” would look like?
Len Deighton and Ian Fleming had the most consistent looks, but they are more spy novels than detective. Two of my favorite covers are The Hound of the Baskervilles and Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide.

Was there a genre graphic style that you noticed?
I have my collection arranged by date of publication, so one can see the changes from leather to pictorial cloth to dust jackets. I really love pictorial cloth.

Are there any taboos that you can pinpoint, other than not giving away the killer? Were certain clues deliberately included in cover art?
Love stories are not big factors in detective fiction, nor are cliffhangers. Also, last-minute solutions are not acceptable. The murderer can’t come from left field. I can’t think of any examples of cover art giving away the killer except on Ira Levin’s novel A Kiss Before Dying. The dust jacket does predict three victims.

Do you continue to collect Whodunits?
After I retired from a 45-year career as a designer and architect, I made a deal with my wife that my expensive purchases were over. But, I did purchase a couple of “stoppers” for my exhibit, with my wife’s approval.

What is the most prized possession in your collection?
My most prized possession is not one of the most expensive. It is a sheet of letterhead from Vidocq’s French detective agency, the world’s first. My Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle signed notes are close behind.

Jeremy Leslie, the London-based founder of magCulture, is on a mission to cover and discover the world of print-on-paper magazines that continue to publish despite the major obstacles in producing them. On Nov. 16, Vitsœ will host magCulture Live London, a 10th-anniversary event showcasing the best creative editorial projects, with guests from across the industry spectrum. Speakers include Debra Bishop, design director of The New York Times for Kids; Neville Brody, formerly of The Face, Arena and City Limits; Maya Moumne, co-founder of Journal Safar and Al Hayya magazines; Charles Baker, editor of The Fence; Oyinkansola Dada, founder of Dada magazine; James Gallacher, editor-on-chief of Ton; Linda Nubling, publisher of Gurlz with Curlz; and more. If you read the MagCulture Journal, you’ll have a sense of the scope and focus of the fete.

With the event only a few weeks away, I asked Leslie about his dedication to print journals and the new entries in the field.

Why are magazines so important to you, especially in this fungible publishing environment?
Several reasons; first, I can’t avoid the fact that we grew up during a period where magazines simply were culturally important, a central element of our media diet. In particular, my teenage obsession with music was fed by weekly print such as New Musical Express.

But it’s more than nostalgia. Magazines and the way they are created and produced are time capsules for the period they are/were made. In terms of content obviously—that story, that person, that idea—but also in terms of photographic style, illustration style, language, typography, the way design and content interact, etc. They absorb subconscious influence from every person involved in the production to reflect so many aspects of a given time. And the result is baked into a tangible thing. A print magazine cannot be corrected or altered. It is stuck in itself and can be examined and critiqued from a future context, and learned from. Whether naive or hugely professional, a magazine reveals much that wasn’t intended.

By contrast, digital channels are mutable. From a cultural standpoint, the text may remain intact but its presentation may at best change, or worse become unreadable or lost. What we gain in immediacy and easy access online we lose in the reduced value of bespoke design and art direction. By their nature, websites are about function and UX and not about a designed response to the meaning of the text. Everything online is flatly efficient and smooth rather than special.

And in a broader sense, humans want actual things. We see this every day at our London shop—a growing minority of people who want to interact with a physical magazine.

Is there a real chance that magazines will be an extinguished species, or is the digital era a thinning of the herd?
I believe we’ll come to look back at the post-second world war consumer boom and the advertising-based rise of the mainstream magazine as the outlier. I can remember major magazine publishers launching new titles just to mop up the advertising they were being offered! That species of magazine is long dead. And although those magazines were a reflection of their time like any mag, do we really miss them? Sure, some were great, but the majority were average. Those middle market titles are dead.

Before they became such huge money-makers, magazines were a useful form of communication shared between communities of like-minded people. They were a club for people sharing the same interest/hobby/obsession. We’re heading back that way, with publishers building tight relationships with small devoted readerships rather than encouraging the late 20th-century promiscuous get-as-many-readers-as-you-can model.

You produce live events. This is refreshing, especially since online venues are at best disembodied. Why do you do real-time, real-life activities?
As a design student, the best teachers were the working designers who visited once a week to run projects. They brought real life and all its ups and downs with them. Since then, I’ve always been interested to hear people talk IRL about what they know.

When I came to launch my 2013 book The Modern Magazine, I wanted to bring together the interviewees from the book to bring their words to life. That was our first big, live event. And it hit a nerve. Most magazine publishing events are based around the business of publishing—ours was unique in highlighting the creativity of the form. Simply, it’s inspiring hearing people’s stories laid out live in front of you in real life. During the pandemic we moved online but the novelty factor soon faded. It worked but the experience wasn’t as powerful.

Magazine-making can be a lonely activity: lots of time alone on your laptop. Come out and meet your fellow print lovers! Get together in a room and talk! Compare and contrast!

What will be your focus in the forthcoming London event?
As with our New York event in July this year, the focus is “Format.” Reminding people how print media can be any scale/size, produced to any schedule, and operate its own frame of reference. And to highlight the technological aspect of print: a well-produced print mag is a brilliant piece of engineering. Quite different to an iPhone or whatever, but still a piece of technology.

Have you seen your audiences grow, shrink or remain the same?
Our online audience is larger than ever, via online posts, Instagram and podcasts. The event audiences took a tumble over the COVID lockdowns but are building back now.

Are magazines ultimately sustainable? And does that matter?
This year’s magCulture Live London marks our 10th anniversary, and as part of the planning I’ve been looking back over those 10 years and further back. I noted that in my 2001 book Issues I discussed the prevailing idea of the end of print. And I spoke at our first conference in 2013 about the same thing. Today we are no longer pondering the end of print, but celebrating its continual reinvention. magCulture is inundated with brand-new magazines and new issues of existing magazines. Are their makers running hugely successful businesses? Generally not (though some are). But there’s a creative imperative behind every one. People feel compelled to make another issue.

Perhaps a useful analogy is the wider world of the arts. Do you produce a movie to make money? Do you paint to earn a living? Can you live on your ambition to write a novel? Not everyone can be, or wants to be, Spielberg, Hirst, Grisham.

Judging by the design, journalism and other students I meet, the desire to make magazines doesn’t look like fading any time soon. And since the pandemic we’ve seen a significant uptick in new indie launches and people buying them—both supply and demand has increased.

“Canal Street has been home to our office for a few years now,” the team announced on their vibrant website. “It’s been a tremendous source of energy and inspiration. We’ve channeled it all in a new broadsheet newsprint that pays homage to this wonderful New York oddity.”

Pagan was an engaging speaker at the recent AIGA conference “The View From Here,” and having been introduced to his work I wanted it to be more widely disseminated. I asked Pagan and the team to share their thoughts about CANAL, and they enthusiastically obliged.

Juan, how and when did you start your design career and the studio Sunday Afternoon?
Juan Carlos Pagan: I became a working “professional” designer in 2006 after graduating from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in communication design. A decade later, and after completing my post-graduate studies in typeface design from The Cooper Union, Ahmed Klink and I founded Sunday Afternoon, a design studio and artist management agency.

The name comes from our belief that Sunday Afternoon is the most precious time of the week. A special time where you enjoy doing and making things you love with the people you love.

Why did you settle on Canal Street as your studio’s venue?
Pagan: To be completely honest, we happened upon a lovely studio/office on Canal Street a little over a year after we started Sunday Afternoon. We were a bit smaller back then than we are now, and we really didn’t require much space, so it was a perfect fit. The studio was kinda old and run down. It had no private rooms. We used to take some of our client calls in the hallway for a bit of privacy. The floorboards had these large holes which would swallow any small object that hit the floor. The heat was always an issue, but it had a lot of character.

In a way, it perfectly encapsulated the tone of Canal Street. We really loved that space. As a studio, we kinda grew up there. We also loved the fact that we were located on such a vibrant and iconic NYC street, where there is so much activity happening all the time.

¥our self-published magazine is named for your locale, but is all the content about it, too?
Pagan: Yes, CANAL magazine started as a way of paying homage to the NYC oddity that is Canal Street. The history of the street, how it just cuts through the island, but more interestingly what it has evolved into. It’s a New York City treasure.

Audrie, Rich and I all grew up in and around the city, and even in this ever-changing environment, somehow Canal Street remains itself. It’s so incredibly New York. The first issue was really all about Canal Street, and our personal adventures and interactions being on this street. Lots of stories are born on Canal Street. The latest issue expands a bit to capture a larger area of the neighborhood. Which was necessary to help tell some of the stories we wanted to tell, but it really is still anchored around Canal Street.

Audrie Poole: CANAL No. 2 is a 108-page dual-language print and digital broadsheet that’s a true convergence of photography, design, typography, film and creative technology to pay homage to the quintessential NYC main street in lower Manhattan. The magazine is a playground to capture the vibe and energy of Canal Street, using AR and film to build an experiential project that pushes the boundaries of mixed media in a highly engaging way.

What is the foremost factor in creating CANAL? Is it design experimentation or community building?
Pagan: We like to think it’s both. It is an opportunity to explore new design ideas, collaborate with the brilliant artists on the Sunday Afternoon roster while also building community. The latest issue of CANAL is a perfect example of that. This installment includes a lot more stories and ideas than the first issue, which was much more of an experiment. In the first issue we really leaned into pushing design and technology. Breathing new life into the magazine cover by adding an AR filter, which lifts the typography of the front and back covers. CANAL No. 2 has that, but it also has more content that helps tell the stories of the people who make up our beloved neighborhood.

We worked with Geoff Levy, who is one of the directors on the Sunday Afternoon roster. He created a short film called “Chasing Light,” about the everyday people who call Canal Street/Chinatown home. It features Chinatown Partnership director Wellington Chen and five Chinatown businesses, who reflect on the neighborhood’s evolving identity, the imperative to document its change, and the importance of bolstering future generations while honoring its heritage.

We embedded that short film into this issue so viewers of the physical magazine can scan a QR code and watch the film on their phones via augmented reality. It is a true convergence of design, community, print, technology and film.

How do you distribute them, and to whom?
Poole: We print a limited number of copies, and they are sent by mail to a mix of friends and potential partners. Some copies are available to the public in our shop.

How much creative capital do you use for the publication?
Rich Tu: CANAL is exploratory by nature, so we end up using a lot when all is said and done. The beauty of it is that the goal is not to problem-solve, as we do every day in our commercial work. We’re free to wander and experiment a bit, and collaborate in a new way. The drawback in that process is that it can take some time to develop the full issue, but in the end it’s so rewarding to see a pure artistic endeavor that’s unlike anything produced by our peers.

If anything, the capital on display is the work of our artists and the studio, and the ability to push the boundaries of traditional mediums and tech. Everyone involved is personally invested in creating something wholly unique.

Do you contemplate trying to engage a more general audience at some point?
Ahmed Klink: CANAL magazine started as a passion project, a labor of love that was created in our “off time” from client work, so there were some natural limitations to our time and resources. That being said, we can easily see a path to where the magazine grows and reaches a general audience through some kind of distribution channels.

Rich Tu: We also brought CANAL to the local community by way of a large-scale AR filter that will live for a set amount of time on the famous red dragon-adorned NYC information kiosk at the intersection of Canal and Walker Street in Chinatown. The AR filter emulates the CANAL No. 2 cover, but on a massive 8-foot by 8-foot banner visible to all passersby. A companion AR experience for the embedded short film was also installed around the corner.

What do you want your audience to learn (and enjoy) from CANAL?
Pagan: I would like anyone who flips through the pages of CANAL to become interested in this little pocket of NYC. Perhaps get a mental snapshot of all the wonderful and odd things, places and people who work, reside and pass through Canal Street.

Tu: I want everyone to get a repeat viewing experience. The sheer density of the issue demands multiple reads. One moment you can enjoy the curated and designed spreads, the next you can uncover an augmented reality easter egg. There’s a lot to uncover.

A reproduction, on the other hand, is an obvious copy of any artifact. (It should go without saying that anything printed is a copy of something, but there is a fine distinction.) A facsimile is the reprint of something rare in order to capture all the minute original details—akin to forgery but without the implied intent of a criminal act—while a reproduction is an example used, let’s say, for reference.

Facsimiles are in many ways more practical than the real article. Although a superb facsimile is usually costly to produce and increases in value over time, it is never as expensive as the original. More importantly, for scholars, facsimiles can be handled (with care) without climate controls, armed guards and a librarian’s watchful protective gaze.

Which brings us to Letterform Archive Books‘ Die Fläche (Facsimile Edition): Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911. It is one of the most exquisitely beautiful, expertly crafted facsimile editions I have ever held in my hands.

However, before we get too deep into the well-deserved praise, it can be argued that this volume is not exactly a facsimile (the way, say, Depero’s Bolted Book is). This Die Fläche is simulacrum-reproduction; it recreates every page of the formative Austrian periodical in “full color and at original size, preserving even the accordion foldouts of the second volume.” It also includes a Vienna Secession–inspired typeface for its cover design. Finally, it is bound as a sole volume rather than individual issues. It may seem like a hairsplitting distinction, but for connoisseurs it is important. Yet not as important as the final result—a production masterpiece.

The decision to print Die Fläche (“The Surface”) as a single edition makes it cost-efficient. Pricing this standards bible of the Jugendstil/Secession (Art Nouveau) reasonably more affordable trumps pristine facsimile fealty anytime. It is, moreover, the only complete run I’ve ever seen of this incredible publication. The reader is also rewarded with in-depth essays contextualizing the work created by pioneering women designers, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann—Secession modernists all. With complete translations, a glossary and selected artist biographies, this book provides unprecedented access to a major document of design history.

Die Fläche is the first in the Letterform Archive Facsimile series, and it has already set a high bar to reach for the next one, whatever it may be.

“We chose the title Signal for its obvious metaphorical implication: A signal is something concise and directed, a pointed communication that spurs action,” the editors add, “but signal is also a verb, an idea in motion.”

The magazine combines a lot of disparate political events, philosophies, artifacts and time periods. MacPhee admits it is not easy to compile and edit, but Signal:08 has come together as they hoped it would.

One of the most distinctive stories is MacPhee’s interview with activist artist Dread Scott, who for years has been raising awareness of what his namesake stood for. (Dred Scott was a former slave living in a non-slave state, who unsuccessfully sued for freedom for his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case of 1857, known as the “Dred Scott decision.”)

Over nine days in November 2019, the artist Scott recruited Black and indigenous men and women wearing period clothing and carrying muskets to recreate the German Coast Uprising of 1811 outside of New Orleans. Called the “Slave Rebellion Reenactment” (taking a page from popular Civil War historical reenactments), Scott and 400 descendants of enslaved people marched 26 miles over two days. The action vividly raised the shroud that had hung over this forgotten fact of history. Choreographing the event took six years for Scott to arrange. MacPhee’s interview is thorough and illuminating.

In an issue filled with fresh knowledge, most surprising was this story on children’s book author/illustrator Vera Williams, who for me was sadly unknown. For 10 years she was the cover artist of the socially radical, “non-communist” Liberation magazine. Williams was schooled at the Bauhaus-related Black Mountain school, directed by Josef and Anni Albers. She was a “red diaper” baby, whose Jewish parents were involved with labor and civil rights causes after World War II and throughout the McCarthy-era Red Scare.

Dunn does an excellent job of capturing the period during which the “old Left” was an umbrella for social justice. The milieu included the visual and performance artists John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauchenberg, Jasper Johns, Julian Beck and others. Born out of Resistance, a strikingly graphic magazine that I have studied, Liberation and Williams work on it left me in awe. Liberation‘s editorial was equally, if not more, impressive, featuring the first publication of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” as well as writing by social critic and reformer Paul Goodman and The Catholic Worker publisher Dorothy Day (influential thinkers of the ’50s and ’60s).

Williams’ graphic approach was sometimes polemical yet not in a social realist manner. Often it was downright abstract yet always representing issues of import in nuanced ways (reminding me somewhat of Lorraine Schneider’s “War is Not Healthy …” print that became an icon of the anti–Vietnam War movement).

Williams’ last Liberation cover was published in 1966, closing out a 10-year run. The magazine continued until 1977 (featuring at least one cover by Robert Grossman), and Williams went on to work with the War Resisters League (WRL), which helped fund this germinal protest magazine.

A feature on “Writing for the Revolution: Publishing and Designing Black Power” books is a unique contribution to the history of radical print, not only in the U.S. but distributed throughout the world. The most famous of these was Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, Blank Panther leader and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for President of the United States. But coverage of other authors, including George Jackson, imprisoned in Soledad, CA; Stokley Carmichael, leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and Angela Davis (who remains active and outspoken today), add to the untold story of how Black Liberation ideas were spread through mainstream and alternative publishers.

For everyone interested in the expression, repression and expansion of politics through mass communications and design, all eight issues of Signal—and those to come—are invaluable resources.

The one-word title seemed so ordinary. But like Life, Look or Time, PRINT spoke volumes. Printing something was not as easy then as it is today. Not everyone had access to a printing press, copy machine or even a mimeograph. To be in print at all was a sign of validation. Anyone could draw a sign or type a letter, but to be in print demanded some person—editor, art director, whoever the gatekeeper was—found some value in what you had created.

There were many publications that the print-wannabe could strive for acceptance. I wanted my work to be printed in Art Direction magazine—and came damn close, too. But PRINT was the creme de la creme of “trade magazines” for the field. When then-editor Martin Fox eventually opened the gates to me, I was so nervous and insecure that it took over a year to finish my assignment. I do not recall what it was, but I’ve maintained a full run of the magazine and hope during the next few months to find that first piece and much more.

In 2015, on the magazine’s 75th anniversary, I authored a book titled Covering Print: 75 Years. 75 Covers. It was not well advertised, barely distributed and quickly fell “out of print” (otherwise known as OP). Which is a shame. Not just because of the work that the editor and I put into it, but because it was an extremely valuable, if incomplete, record of the evolution of graphic style, form, content and personality. The 75 covers covered many areas of the social and aesthetic concerns of their respective years (and those to come); they addressed what was occurring in the commercial arts world and, by extension, the popular art universe.

Digging through my stacks and boxes, I pulled out a few early issues that seemed very current to me. The predictable white male dominance is, of course, overwhelming. Some of the typography and advertisements suffer from aged aesthetics and ideas, but that nonetheless is what gives them a scholarly curiosity and historical relevance, especially as they continued through decades of change and upheaval. I hope that someday these issues won’t just be stacked up in piles and boxes, but will be digitized and in whatever cloud is invented by then so that everyone can have access to the news, commentaries, critiques, profiles and overall wealth of mid-20th–century to early 21st-century material that, paradoxically, today is only in print.

Note: The magazine’s very first cover (1940), below, does not reveal the title “PRINT,” except on the spine.

The humorous and satirical magazine was published by the Center for Cultural Activity of Youth, the same center that later published the better-known Pop Express. Like many other youth magazines of the time (Studentski list, Polet, Omladinski tjednik, Tlo, Prolog), it broke away from the control of the authorities and began to make fun of the official policies of Zagreb and Belgrade and the general situation in Yugoslavia, and harshly mocked many politicians and public figures of the time—so much so that it was occasionally banned. Founder and editor-in-chief Pajo Kanižaj was detained for three months in prison, while co-founder Lazo Goluža fled to France. Before the final closing, 19 issues were published.

Paradoks was designed by Zdravko Tišljar, Zoran Pavlović-Zozo, Alfred Pal, Tomislav Premerl and Tomislav Kožarić. Due to low-quality printing and poor paper quality, the magazine utilized black-and-white line illustrations, DlY collage and other graphic techniques, Dadaistic, surrealistic, Fluxus and psychedelic play with letters, and cold type slap-down cut n’ paste composition.

The design and graphics were influenced by the ideas of the previously founded Cistezija group (1960) and the affiliation of Zagreb artists (Zlatko Bastašić, Milovan Kovačević-Koko, Ivan Pahernik, Zoran Pavlović-Zozo and Ratko Petrić, led by Fedor Kritovec) who made up the Zagrebačka caricature school.

Created at the same time, the graphics and layout of Paradoks was comparable to the Australian (1963) cum London–based underground magazines Oz (1967–1973) and IT – International Times (1966–1973). Paradoks did not shy away from the topic of sex, and was often attacked by the readers themselves, as well as the state authorities, for spreading pornography. The depiction of sexuality and the female body was often imbued with sexist tones, especially in cartoons.

Eggers’s most recent title, The Eyes and The Impossible, is far from your typical paperback. Eggers has written and designed a book for all ages that comes in a deluxe wood-bound hardcover edition, courtesy of his nonprofit publishing house McSweeney’s. Knopf Books for Young Readers is simultaneously publishing a traditional version for middle-grade readers, making The Eyes & the Impossible the first-ever book to be published in two editions, for two readerships, and from two publishers.

This first-of-its-kind publishing model isn’t the only standout aspect of the book— a real bamboo die-cut cover and gold gilt pages makes the physical wooden edition a thing of beauty unlike any book I’ve ever encountered. As someone enamored by innovative book design and the world of book arts, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with Eggers directly about the book’s design and his creative process to get there. His thoughtful reflections are below.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

Where did your idea for publishing a wooden, die-cut book come from? 

I began thinking about what this book might look like almost three years ago. I began doing some sketches which I usually start with, and then I was at the US Post Office one day out here in San Francisco, and I came across a greeting card that had been made of bamboo. It was a mass-produced greeting card that was probably $5 or $6. I’d never seen it done on that scale before, but it made sense that laser-cutting technology has gotten to the point of affordability and efficiency. So we sent that card to our printer and said, Hey, can you do something like this? And they said, Well, sure. That became a two-and-a-half year process.

While I was finishing the book and going through editing, we were going back and forth with the printer. I think we had seven different prototypes. First, it was an example of what the bamboo would look like; they made it much thicker than the greeting card I sent, for durability’s sake. Then we did an early die cut and realized they could do that very efficiently and make a really clean cut in the bamboo. 

We had a little bit of freedom in terms of timeline, and for any designer, when you have that much time, you can fine tune and troubleshoot every last thing and make sure that there’s no surprises. Usually when you get something back from the printer, there’s at least a few gambles you’ve made. But this is one of these rare occasions that maybe 14 months ago, we had this exact book in our hands. It’s really nice to see it finally making its way into the world. We think it’s the first wooden book!

You just never know how everything will come together. We’ve been in business 25 years, and you always look at a book object with certain reservations or certain things you would change, but this one, I can’t get enough of it.

This book features so many lovely design elements in addition to the bamboo covers, from the gold gilt pages to the red cloth spine to the rounded corners. What informed these choices?

The gilt edges, I’ve always wanted to do, and I don’t know if we’ve done it before. I did some sketches at home of the colors together: the red, gold, and brown. I have a lot of old books that have leather covers and gold foil stamp lettering and red end paper, so I always knew that that combination worked well. The old Heritage Dictionary is always that red leather with gold stamping, so it’s kind of a tried and true palette.

But it was also just what was going to work. We tried a black type on the spine, we tried a green spine, but I liked the boldness of the red against the 17th-century landscape imagery. Back then, all of the frames for those landscapes used to be so elaborate; eight-inch gold frames that nobody uses anymore. In that era, the frame was just as ornate as the landscape within. So there’s a little bit of the book that harkens back to that era of the ornate gilt frame.

What was the collaboration like between you and the book’s illustrator, Shawn Harris?

Shawn did all the artwork on the cover and inside. We’d worked together many times, so I went to him three years ago and said Let’s try to make the most beautiful thing either one of us has ever held, and I think Shawn really did that. We have a totally intuitive way to work together. He’s the most versatile, talented artist I think I know. He can just adapt his style to the needs of that particular project.  

I don’t know whose idea it was to use these old Dutch and Flemish paintings to paint the dog into. Originally, I tried to approximate the paintings and do them myself, but I couldn’t get it right. So we ended up using these open-copyright paintings, then he made the dog in each one of them look totally of that period and of that style; it’s remarkable. There’s no way you would be able to tell at first glance that that dog was not original to each one of those pieces of artwork. He managed to make it totally seamless.

Why are you drawn to these unique and non-traditional materials for the books you’re designing and publishing at McSweeney’s?

The materials will do so much work for you if you choose them right. The weight of this wood, and how the grain is totally different on each one of them since it’s real bamboo— you can do so much when you have that kind of tactile quality and you’re moving beyond just paper.

We work as much as possible with real materials. I’ve never been a faux-finish person. Whenever we’ve done anything, it’s always got to be the real material because I think that we really connect with objects. We have a tactile, chemical connection when we feel something that’s real, whether it’s real wood, or well-made paper, or nice leather, or you can feel that foil stamp, or the linen of a nice case wrap. All of that really matters, especially in obvious contrast to all of the digital stuff that we’re surrounded with. We realized how much we miss it. A heavy, well-made object gives us that bone-deep connection. Somehow that feels right.

I didn’t realize how heavy this book would be until we got it back and I was like, this feels like five pounds or something. It feels so good! 

The physical book really does affect your reading experience so significantly, and how you engage with the story itself. Even just carrying the book around in your tote bag or having it on your coffee table, it becomes a much more powerful or exciting experience when the book is this beautiful object.

We put so much time into these books when we write them— this, for me, is the culmination of decades of thought about this voice and this character, so you might as well spend a little bit of time on the vessel that it’s contained in. That’s always been our philosophy here at McSweeney’s. These authors are putting everything they have into these books. Books are souls. Each one of them is a soul vessel. It contains everything that the author feels. So that vessel, that container, should elevate, dignify, and exalt the work inside.

Our art director here at McSweeney’s, Sunra Thompson, and I sit here looking through materials and prototypes and try to do something that we haven’t done before, and try to elevate a book through the form that we put it in. It’s also a way to keep it new. We’ve been at it for 25 years; what would be worse than to be lucky enough to work in this business and then just do the same thing over and over again? What a waste of a gift. 

Do you think it’s possible for more publishers to innovate when it comes to book forms and materials? 

There’s something here called the San Francisco Center for the Book and they celebrate the book arts, and I would say many of the most beautiful books their artists have made as one-offs could be mass-produced in some form if you were to show it to the right printer. Then it’s just a matter of being accepting of a slightly different unit cost. I think so much could be done.

There are beautiful books made every day, but if you have a little bit of flexibility, you could make totally unprecedented book object every time around. A lot of times, it’s just taking inspiration from those one-off artists’ books and saying, Oh, wow, I think we could find a way to adapt this.

Is it hard to find printers and manufacturers who appreciate and understand bringing your visions to fruition? 

Our first printer was right outside of Reykjavik. I used to go to Iceland with an idea, and they wanted to experiment just as much as we did. Then we ended up printing at a place called Thomson-Shore outside of Detroit, and I got to know all the people on their press, and just seeing how happy it made everybody in the company to do something different was really invigorating. We realized that the printers take pride in having created something unusual and beautiful. When the designer has fun, the art director has fun, and the printer has fun, ideally that is felt by the reader too.

Your wooden die-cut version of The Eyes & the Impossible is intended for all ages. What is it like writing and designing a book meant for such a vast audience range? 

I love the all ages category. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the other categories— I think it can create unnecessary stigma. The books that I remember reading when I was younger didn’t have a designation on the back. They didn’t say this is for this age group or that age group. I don’t remember Charlotte’s Web or The Hobbit or so many other books having that kind of delineation.

I like the idea of books where it doesn’t really matter. I certainly didn’t write this for any one age group, and I would hope that adults could get just as much entertainment out of it as a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old. 

The Eyes & The Impossible book form does seem to combine design elements of very different kinds of book categories. The color palette and gold gilt pages feel very classic and academic, but the thick wooden cover, the almost-square shape of the book, and the rounded corners remind me of those puffy cardboard books geared toward toddlers. To me, this all drives home the un-categorizable nature of your book.

We also wanted to make it look a little outside of time. In the way that Shawn has taken these old, 17th-century paintings and put the dog into it, I wanted it to look timeless so that if you were to pick this up and somebody said it was made in 1732, it wouldn’t be totally unrealistic. Maybe some old German company used to make books out of wood or something— it has that old-world look, but then we forgot about wooden books for 300 years, and here they are again.

Are there any other book forms or materials that you’re interested in using next?

More and more, I’m trying to think of ways to make something that’s so apart from design trends, so apart from materials trends, and even lean into the weird. Sunra and I were looking at some prototypes and some materials today that were truly weird— weird slipcases that interact with each other in a way that comes from a strange place. Then you’re not really beholden to any era. You never really know— was this made in 2023 or 1892? I love those sorts of artworks and designs.

Sometimes, we’ll have a prototype for years without knowing what to apply it to. So it’s a little bit of a laboratory, where Sunra will fiddle with something and then three, four years down the road, we realize that it might work with a certain book or a certain issue. The prototypes are a source of unending joy.

It’s our 25th anniversary later this year, so we’re putting out a special issue that’s going to be really weird— we’re using metal. It’ll be our first metal object. I’ve also always wanted to make a glass book. We haven’t been able to get a prototype that’s durable, but we’re still working on it. It’s been 15 years or so, and every so often we’ll go back and try to get somebody to see if it’ll work.

I love going to the bookstore and finding somebody that created something I’ve never seen before, in some format that I didn’t know was quite possible. 

I was reading an interview with designer and paper magician Kelli Anderson in the first issue of Tangram, and she talked about how valuable analog experiences remain, even in the face of digital, well, everything.

“We’re physical creatures that have evolved to interact with the world and think about the world in a physical way,” she says. “You hear car mechanics or engineers or artists say that they’re tinkering with something. Well, what does that mean? They have a physical thing they’re fooling with, and they’re doing all these little cause-and-effect calculations by taking their fingers and poking at it in different ways. It’s a very primal way that human beings explore the world.”

And that quote genuinely gets at the heart of what design journal Tangram is trying to do— they’re tinkering. But they’re tinkering with play and wonder. Which I suppose you could say is the essence of all tinkering. There’s joy in the act of doing. 

I would share more from that interview— or the interviews with Oscar Ukoni and his hyperreal portraits made using only a blue ballpoint pen or Kensuke Koike and his surreal cut-up found photography or Polly Morgan and her immensely nontraditional but eerily enchanting taxidermy—but you’re really just going to have to buy your own copy. Because this is not only something you want to have on a bookshelf, it’s something you genuinely want to hold, flip through, and play with.

Founded by brothers Dan and Dave Buck of Art of Play, writer Adam Rubin, puzzle-maker Matthew Stein, and writer and magician Alexander Hansford, Tangram is a testament to discovery and digging deeper into our innate curiosities. But it’s also a journal for people who love puzzles but don’t yet realize it. Instead of finding a word jumble or a crossword in the final pages of a magazine, puzzles are weaved into the entire journal, creating a playfully immersive experience for readers that celebrates a philosophy of play as art.

Across four stunningly designed issues, Tangram pushes the limit of your imagination and will frustrate you— in a genuinely good way— with brain teasers that I am still trying to solve. But all the while, you will in fact be tinkering, and it beats living in your phone or scrolling through Netflix for something to watch. Essentially, it’s a digest for anyone that is curious or looking for joy or discovery. If you believe epiphanies are lurking around every corner or clues that tease out the connection between seemingly unrelated ideas or things, then you might want to get on board before they publish their fifth issue.

I spoke with Tangram’s founders about the magazine’s origins, “going into wonder,” and allowing their readers to feel like a “genius treasure hunter.”

So what kickstarted the idea for Tangram?

Tangram: The initial inspiration grew out of a desire to share our passion for wonder. The more practical approach would have been to start a blog, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. Plus, we all have fond nostalgia for beautifully crafted analog objects, so a printed journal seemed like a more exciting option to explore. 

It also gives us an excuse to learn more about a wide variety of esoteric subjects like taxidermy, origami, physics toys, architecture, and fine art. Those fields might seem unrelated at first, but each has the ability to tickle your brain. We wanted to show how wonder can weave its way into almost anything, that includes the physical act of reading a magazine. Since the beginning, we’ve incorporated optical illusions, paper engineering, puzzles, and even toys into the pages. 

The goal was for the reader’s experience with the journal to be as playful and surprising as the content in the articles.

Who is this for? What audience are you really going after here? 

Tangram: We took an “if you build it, they will come” approach, which is probably the exact opposite of how most periodicals get published. 

But the thing is, there’s nothing like Tangram out there, and yet, from our earliest conversations, we could all picture it so clearly in our minds. The fact that the vision was so easily shared by our closest collaborators and friends made us realize we were onto something. Basically, we wanted this dream to exist, so we had to bring it to life ourselves.

What kind of stories do you want to tell? And who is the ideal designer you want to profile in any given issue? 

Tangram: We want to tell stories of people who add magic to the world. Not only artists, but scientists, tinkerers, designers, and anyone who does things that spark wonder. Maybe what they create is awe-inspiring in and of itself, or maybe what they create provides a framework through which the things we normally take for granted suddenly seem amazing.

“Epiphanies await the curious mind. There is always more mystery.” That’s what greets readers with the first issue, and you pepper them with a lot of talk about wonder, curiosity, and magic. What is that for all of you, and how do you bring that to Tangram? 

Tangram: Anyone who has had a hallucinogenic experience can relate to the idea that perspective is the only thing that separates the mundane from the miraculous. But you don’t need drugs to find a flower wonderful, only curiosity. When you pay close enough attention to nearly anything, it can become amazing. That is how children experience the world. Some artists or experiences help us to wave away the cynicism of adulthood and reconnect with that pure childlike wonder. The goal for Tangram is to share that feeling. Maybe it’s discovering an obscure subject you didn’t know existed or solving a beautifully constructed puzzle that makes you feel like a genius treasure hunter. 

There are many different ways to achieve a moment of astonishment, and eventually, we hope to represent them all within the pages of our journal.

Puzzles are obviously pretty integral to the magazine—typically, you’ll find all of the puzzles gathered at the back of a mag or newspaper, but you’ve weaved them throughout the pages and into some of the content. Why did you guys decide to do that? 

Tangram: When most people think of puzzles, they think of crosswords, sudoku, or maybe jigsaws. But those puzzles all fit within the constraints of a two-dimensional box. There is a vast universe of artistic and brilliant puzzles out there. The variety is mind-boggling. Some are mechanical objects, and some are immersive and theatrical, but one thing they all have in common is that they offer an invitation to epiphany. That “aha” feeling might be the height of human consciousness. There is such primal satisfaction in the discovery of a solution to a problem. 

The puzzles in Tangram offer a richness and depth to that “solving” experience that will be new to most people. They are all conceived by Matthew Stein, one of the most clever young puzzle designers in the world.

How would you define a good puzzle? And what’s your process for creating them in every issue?

Matthew Stein: A good puzzle guides the solver through meaningful shifts in perception that lead them to see the world with heightened wonder, curiosity, and attention to detail. A puzzle— in the style presented in Tangram— is a highly dynamic experience contained within a static artifact. What may appear to be a series of words, numbers, or images can prompt the solver to venture down deep research rabbit holes, to transcend and physically transform the printed page, or even to find hidden treasure. The best puzzles have more layers than first meet the eye, with intricately constrained internal architectures that provide intermediate confirmation to assure the solver that, yes, they’re still on the right track. And when they reach the final answer, that endpoint should—like in many a magic routine—feel elegant and inevitable.

When designing the puzzles in Tangram, I always start from the end: how can the meta structure augment each volume’s core themes, how do I take solvers on an exhilarating journey that starts in their homes and then continues out into the real world in unexpected ways, and, most importantly, how do I want the solver to feel by the time the final pieces click together? From there, the metapuzzle establishes some constraints for any number of “feeder puzzles,” which contribute their answers (and sometimes more) to the meta. In creating each puzzle, I pull inspiration from the mediums and methods of the featured artists in each volume, sometimes even creating new puzzle artwork directly in their styles. I present a wide variety of puzzle mechanics and techniques that establish a shared language with solvers, bolstering their puzzling abilities across volumes while subverting their expectations at every turn.

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Who did the editorial design for the magazine? How did you envision it, and what did you want it to say? 

Tangram: The editorial design was done by Alex Hansford, with the intention of being bold but immediately friendly and engaging. Alex also suggested the exposed spine binding so the journals could lay completely flat. This way, the pages could be designed as individual pages or as entire spreads. Since the pages open fully, no details get lost in the spine, and titles often spread across both pages inviting a new way of interacting with the journal, an experience not common to publications of this type and price point. The physical and editorial design was created to push people to interact with the journal as an object, not just as another book.

What’s the creative process when you’re getting an issue together? 

Tangram: Each issue starts with a pitch meeting where we discuss artists, subjects, or experiences we are interested in covering. Often, a theme will emerge as we investigate and develop the stories. That loose theme will help us to generate further ideas for what we might want to explore for that issue. The concept that unites the articles will also inform the graphic design for that issue as well as the design of the puzzles and visual ephemera that weave throughout the journal.

The challenge with any literary or design magazine is just getting it into people’s hands. I’ll always argue that folks want something physical they can hold and connect with—and selling them on wonder and play and puzzles is certainly attractive bait for any audience. But how are you courting a readership? 

Tangram: Our new idea is to make a sort of Tangram discus machine that flings the journals through the air. If we place a few of these machines on top of buildings in crowded downtown areas, it could help us reach people in a whole new way. But really, our readers are our best evangelists, and they have introduced the journal to many of their friends. We’re trying to figure out novel ways to help them share the love. The nice thing is that none of the issues are topical, so the content won’t seem stale if you discover volume 1 after reading volume 4.

Now that you’re four issues deep, what’s next?

Tangram: Volume 5, of course. We have a big buildup that will take us through to volume 9, but along the way, we will be experimenting with format and playing with new approaches for how Tangram can bring wonder and beauty to as many people as possible.

Learn More about Tangram on their website.

By the time I arrived at The New York Times in September 1974, the diamond period had been gone from the newspaper’s nameplate since 1961, when I was 11 years old. Even today I recall the missing full stop. It had been part of the name for over 100 years. Until one day, it was gone …

My boss and mentor, Lou Silverstein, corporate art director and later assistant managing editor of design, was known as the “guy who eliminated the period”. As he wrote in his unpublished memoir, Some Call It Work: A Life in Graphics, Before, After and During The New York Times:

“This was done while I was promotion art director. I was discovering that the logo as it then appeared was too ‘lacy’ and rather weak as a sign-off in printed promotion pieces. To strengthen the logo, I redrew it, making the thicks thicker and the thins thinner. This provided a stronger, more graphic look. And, as a byproduct of this effort at modernization, I dropped the period. I drew the new logo on tracing paper and hired Ed Benguiat to do the actual ink drawing. Ed was perhaps the most accomplished letterer in the country at that time. Dropping the period caused much consternation and soul-searching at the Times, until finally the production manager came up with the calculation that eliminating the period would save some $600 a year in ink! That saved the day. The actual redrawing of the letters prompted no consternation at all.”

The design remained largely untouched until this year when Matt Willey, a Pentagram partner and magazine design expert, remade the NYRB to be of its time. In the proceedings, Leanne Shapton, who is an author, painter and narrative artist with a penchant for hand-drawing and lettering blocks of wood to simulate books and jackets, among other conceptual artworks, became NYRB’s first-ever art editor since its founding in 1963. It has been a major shift in aesthetics and philosophy for the periodical because not only has Shapton brought a cohort of expressive and impressionist illustrators to its pages, she is selecting enticing full-page artwork for covers, some of which provoke moods rather than concepts in the Levine tradition. She has also been sending out a series of Art Newsletters that she entirely writes and illustrates, related to the art and articles featured within each issue (available to subscribers only).

I’ve welcomed this premium enough to resubscribe to the NYRB. The text about the art in each print issue is breezy and interesting, but the impressionistic watercolors that punctuate the vertical scroll are simply delightful. I asked Shapton how she’s enjoying this new addition to her impressive resume, and why the newsletter began. (The images shown here are the pieces that lead off each installment.)

The NYRB has had art (in the form of David Levine, Edward Gorey and vintage cuts by 19th-century illustrators) since its inception. It has also had a designer (first Sam Antupit, who gave the brand its distinctive Clarendon logo). But it never had an art editor or, for that matter, full-bleed color art on its covers. When did you get the position, and what has been your mandate?
Emily Greenhouse, the editor, came to the job in 2019. One of the first things she set to doing was a redesign, focused mostly on type. She then created a position that would take charge of illustrations. It was initially going to be part time. I was offered that job in the fall of 2021, and we discussed my taking on the covers—I told Emily what a showcase each NYRB cover was, especially considering the tabloid shape. After a few weeks I argued that it was a full-, not part-time job. They were still in the middle of a redesign with Matt Willey and the type designer Henrik Kubel, and there was much to oversee and address in terms of its implementation. So a full-time position was created. 

My mandate, if I have one, has been to maintain the (David Levine–established) idea that illustrated portraiture and concept works well alongside opinion, ideas and analysis. Illustrations of authors and public figures are compelling and beautiful and worth getting the best illustrators and artists to execute.

As both a writer and illustrator, I value the authorship of both mediums. I like finding a human face behind words, and the interpretive, deeper study an illustration can deliver over a photograph. As the editors do with writers, I try to find a balance of genders and races and backgrounds, and an international mix of artists and illustrators. 

The full bleed on the covers was simply wanting the art to take up space, to art-spread. Our covers are so California king–sized! I like a poster, a strong graphic mix of image and type—a collision of information and inflection. And I like having as many coverlines and bylines as possible. I want writers to get their names and ideas out there. And the built-in balance the Review has always used: author and subject, with a colon as the fulcrum. In the redesign we created a place on the Contents page where the cover art is reproduced in full, without the superimposition of type.

I also love finding existing art to run with pieces and on covers—by emerging or established artists. The Review has always done this. One of my first jobs in NYC in the ’90s was finding the art to run in the Readings section at Harper’s Magazine. It was a dream job and I’m doing a lot of the same thing—finding a nonverbal complement to wonderful writing. 

Your own drawing style, often in watercolor or gouache, is abstract at times, impressionistic at others, representational in an ethereal spirit. You defy the current computer trends with a personal signature (literally and figuratively). How do you feel this approach has transformed the NYRB?
Since Levine, Gorey, Steinberg, the NYRB has always valued a hand-drawn line. So I’m not sure it’s transformed so much as naturally evolved. I’m glad my own particular style complements this. I’ve always loved illustrating portraits. We only have a small budget for a handful of commissioned illustrations each issue. So, if need be I pinch-hit myself to avoid using a publicity photo or agency image.

My mentor was James McMullan, who taught me to draw from life, the warmth and pulse in truly looking and depicting by eye and hand. I love all styles of illustration, but my tastes do skew to a hand-hewn but graphic tradition. A bit messy, warm. You can see this in some of our more regular contributors: Vivienne Flesher, Harriet Lee-Merrion, Yann Kebbi, Lorenzo Gritti, Ciara Quilty-Harper, Grant Shaffer, Johnalynn Holland, Geoff McFetridge, Ruth Gwily, Tom Bachtell. I love assigning McMullan too. I look for illustrators who are obvious readers, who love books and who often write books or graphic novels themselves. Seth, Carson Ellis, Jon Klassen, Juman Malouf, Adrian Tomine, Jillian Tamaki.

Coincidentally, the Review will be moving into Milton Glaser’s old building on 32nd Street, where I worked as McMullan’s assistant in my 20s.

You are a drawer, painter, designer and writer, often of simple everyday things yet with a nuanced irony. Is this how you see the NYRB as moving away from the 19th-century aesthetic?
Its 19th-century aesthetic was in large part dictated by Barbara Epstein’s collection of art history books and the economics of using images that were in the public domain. Editors would use Valloton woodcuts and Doré etchings to fill holes in the layout, as we never use pull quotes and don’t cut stories to fit. We now commission a series of abstract drawings in each issue to help with those layout gaps. 

Having a position dedicated to generating original and different art is a big part of the aesthetic change. We still use a lot of news, historical and wire images, and I like that the mix doesn’t feel too curated and feels up to date and urgent. I’m lucky that most of the time my taste in illustration and the taste of the editors align; they can sense my often oblique reasoning for a piece of fine art, and I can get a sense of and address their concerns. It’s very collaborative. Less designed and more about choices and discernment. The layout relies heavily on the template and the work and eyes of the editors and typesetters. In the course of mapping out and closing an issue I don’t touch the layout at all. 

We’re showing the titles for the NYRB digital newsletters, illustrated by you with a suite of patterns and impressions running in the body of the text. Whose idea was it to start this innovative complement to the magazine?
Emily Greenhouse asked me to write a newsletter about how I commissioned pieces and what I was looking at during the issue cycles. We wanted to showcase the work and talent of all the visual artists who are part of the magazine.

I’d never written a newsletter, and so to find my “newsletter voice” I suggested I always paint a series of what I’m looking at or where I am on any given issue close. This was more for my own bearings, so I could speak from a place of drawing and looking. It gave me a frame for taking a reader through the little quotidian details of the job.

When you conceive the art for the newsletter, what determines the direction of the imagery?
It is dictated by what I’m seeing or where I’ve been on a given week. Like a sketchbook. The view out my window: a work trip; my kids’ cat; city construction; a visit with my boyfriend. I’m painting a trapeze session for the next one, which is due in two days.     

You’re also using the cover art for the NYRB, making it into clothing. Where did that idea come from?
The fashion designer Rachel Comey is a subscriber and she approached us with the idea of printing some of our covers on her clothes and dresses. A number of women on staff are fans of hers, and we were flattered. We felt that her practices, standards of design, and aesthetics aligned with ours and the collaboration was an unexpected delight. We did book-drive events for prisons and libraries at Comey’s stores on both coasts.    

The job of a magazine art editor is different from that of an art or design director, however, it has deep roots in the history of publications. Is your job as art editor like anything you’ve ever done before?
A little bit. I rely most heavily on the experience I got art directing The New York Times Op-Ed page: reading closely, choosing the right illustrator to work with the subject, mix and deadline. In the early/late ’90s I was the editor of a culture page in the National Post in Canada. Both jobs were daily, which as you know develops a quick reaction time, and depends on a roster of fast and reliable contributors and good relationships with them. My time at Harper’s in the ’90s informed my sense of contemporary art and great journalism.     

I think the universality of food plays a part— we all need to eat and drink, and most of us enjoy it most of the time, so that gives a solid foundation for publishers to build upon. But more than that, food gives us a way to talk about ourselves, while apparently talking about something else.

Flicking through the magazines below reveals all sorts of personal food and drink recollections; whether it’s childhood memories of standing by a grandmother’s side while she cooks, or recalling an amazing meal out with friends, food slices through to the core of human experience and communicates something essential about who we are. Of course these magazines are all very different from each other and set about their task in very different ways, but they all go beyond simply writing about food and drink to touch something a bit deeper than their readers’ stomachs.

Swill — Sydney, Australia

This big, beautiful magazine from Sydney landed on my desk at the start of the year, and when I first wrote about it for the Stack blog I focused on the sense of fun that jumps off its pages. It reads like it was created by a bunch of friends who had an amazing time making it, and I totally want to be the sort of person who would hang out with them in one of their bars or restaurants. (I am aware that’s probably not my life, but that just makes the vicarious taste of it all the more intoxicating.) Take a look at that previous post to see some of Swill’s sample editorial pages, because for this short mention I want to focus on its adverts. I don’t think I’ve ever written about liking a magazine’s adverts before, but the group of brands that Swill has gathered around this first issue do a brilliant job of accentuating that feeling of being part of the club. I’ve never heard of most of them before, but I genuinely want to try The Grifter Brewing Co’s ‘Exquisite Piss,’ or drop into P&V Wine + Liquor. Swill is selling a very specific Australian lifestyle, and I want a piece of it.

Sandwich — London, England

A magazine dedicated to the art of putting tasty things between slices of bread, each issue of Sandwich takes a theme that allows it to expand beyond lunchtime basics. The latest issue is themed ‘Leftovers’, and it was perfectly timed to come out in time for Christmas last year, featuring chef and food writer Gizzi Erskine photographed on the cover with her “Muffuletta-style” sandwich. An entire loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with gorgeous-looking Christmas dinner leftovers, it’s a towering, oozing, slab of a sandwich that looks as delicious as it is impossible to eat. Elsewhere in the issue the theme is broadened out to include economist Ha-Joon Chang explaining why Singapore is the economic equivalent of a leftovers sandwich; chef Tom Kerridge picking his football team of Christmas leftovers; and photographer Matt Hass reporting from London’s massive Padworth IVC waste food processing plant. (The smell was apparently so bad, and so persistent, that he had to shave off his mustache afterwards.)

Cake Zine — New York, NY

A clever, playful magazine that uses cake as a way to explore some of our baser instincts, Cake launched in Spring 2022 and was an instant sensation, selling out in two weeks and picking up mainstream coverage in places like Vogue and Vanity Fair. That first issue was themed ‘Sexy Cake,’ and it was followed by Wicked Cake, released just in time for Halloween. I gobbled it up in one sitting, totally absorbed by stories that skip from Inside Sylvia Plath’s Oven, to baking with pig’s blood, to the surprising history of murder by cake. There’s also a short but very beautiful photo story featuring Very Wicked Cakes, which boast names like ‘Black Widow’ and ‘Spirit Summoner’ (served on a ouija board, of course.) The next issue sounds like it will see a change of tone, and a shift in baked goods, away from cakes and onto the Humble Pie issue. I can’t wait.

Farta — Porto, Portugal

Not so much a food magazine as a passionate love letter to Portuguese culture, one dish at a time, Farta dedicates each entire issue to a single menu item. Issue one explores the ‘francesinha,’ the obscure and completely mouth-watering sandwich created in Porto in 1952, and which is now served in many variations across the entire country. The classic francesinha is apparently adapted from the croque monsieur, with a filling of roast beef, pork sausage and linguiça (a sort of chorizo), covered in cheese and hot sauce. These days it’s common to also add an egg and fries, and I loved reading the individual accounts of cooks who proudly stand by their own unique constructions, created according to traditions that have been passed down through the generations. Part of the joy of this magazine is the deep respect it pays to a humble dish served in bars and cafes across Portugal, but which remains virtually unknown outside its home country. Issue two will devote the same lavish attention to the more famous Portuguese export of peri-peri chicken, and it will be interesting to see the difference that international reputation will make.

Guzzle — Dublin, Ireland

A new Irish food title, this first issue of Guzzle is themed ‘Mementoes of Food’, and it asks its contributors, “to relate their food memories while thinking about the significance of eating on both happy and sad occasions.” It leans into its Irishness, with contributions like Lara Hanlon’s memories of living in New York and being unable to find potatoes that lived up to, “the fluffy, golden Irish spud.” Or Ian Ryan’s review of A Pint of Guinness in Crouch End on a Sunny Monday Afternoon, for which he visited McCafferty’s, finding the beer, “solid and creamy throughout with a solidly domed head”. But of course there’s lots more on offer here too, including milky tea, toasties, burrata, and Ode to an Onion, and I particularly enjoyed Irish-Brazilian artist Rudy De Souza’s photography, including the cover photo of a bag of shopping turned into an impromptu still life.

Food& —Berlin, Germany

Always reliably the strangest food magazine on the shelves, Food& also turns to themes to give its issues direction, smashing food into weird pairings like Food& Aliens, Food& Bathrooms, and Food& Gravity. The latest one is Food& Spectacle, which takes big bites of philosophy and critical theory and chews them up to turn them into wider reflections on food. So for example we get Freshness as Spectacle, in which the apparent freshness of food and its provenance can be used to illuminate inequality around the world. Or there’s an essay on food for the eyes, and the significance of preparing food that looks good rather than tasting good. And since this is Food&, there’s also a load of other stuff that seems much less rational and harder to understand, but which has all apparently been incited by the spectacular theme.

Kitchen Table — Portland, OR

Reflecting cutting-edge food culture across the US and beyond, Kitchen Table is all about the people, ingredients, traditions and innovations that are shaping the way people eat. The fifth issue is the first one I’ve seen, but its theme of ‘Roots’ seems to fit the magazine perfectly, allowing it to dig deep into personal and culinary histories, like the story of Rodrigo Huerta and Mary Hatz, who serve fresh Mexican food from their truck Comida Kin. The article details how the two of them met; how they moved together to Portland and started cooking together; how they bought their truck in 2019; and how they’re now using it to help foster community across Washington County. It’s just one story of many in the magazine that emphasises the importance of the relationships that grow up around food, and the many ways in which producing, cooking and eating food is about much more than physical sustenance.

Midnite Snack — Los Angeles, CA

Displaying the most wide-ranging editorial approach in this selection of magazines, Midnite Snack is equally at home with a sexy shoot showing a deconstructed meringue, or a nostalgic trip back to see grandparents in Ukraine that remembers long summers filled with fresh food and hearty feasts. This second issue is loosely themed ‘Multi-Use,’ which allows the team to consider the different ways we experience food, or as editor-in-chief Lyudmila Zotova puts it in her introductory note, the magazine itself is intended to be multi-use: “A companion when you’re lonely; a quick thrill when you flip through and gaze at the photos and illustrations; a deep text when you spend some time with the essays and interviews; a reference and a tool when you cook its recipes.”

Eaten — Cambridge, England

A magazine of food history, each issue of Eaten takes a different theme as a way of digging down into subjects like ‘Salty’, ‘Processed’, and ‘Breakfast’. The latest one focuses on ‘Spicy’, with stories on the fieriness of chilis, and the British origins of curry powder, but my favorite article in the magazine considers the history of paprika and includes the theory that, “the entirety of Dracula is just an elaborate nightmare caused by a British person tasting one (1) spice”. The theory revolves around Jonathan Harker arriving in Transylvania and eating a spicy chicken dish before falling into, “a restless sleep full of ‘queer dreams’ that he blames on the spiciness of the meal.” Of course the theory doesn’t do much to elaborate on Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, but it’s full of fascinating reflections on the creation of paprika and its uses over the years. One of my favorite things about Eaten is its use of vintage illustrations and artworks throughout, with collaged photographs, paintings, drawings and etchings used alongside its historical musings.

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The magazine advocated the New Typography (more or less as Jan Tschichold codified it) and progressive approaches to layout, touted as a cure for passé printing traditions. This was accomplished by rejecting the constrictions of classical symmetry. It furthermore created a platform for discussions about the ideals of the European avant-garde while experimenting with functionalism, grids, asymmetry, white space, photomontage and offset printing processes. The contents were designed and printed during off hours at various presses throughout Italy.

Campo Grafico was on a mission to reinvent graphic design. The text and images were overtly polemical, with attacks on all aspects of antiquated design and printing. Campo Grafico also took aim at the more established Il Risorgimento Grafico, published in Milan from 1902–1942.

The editors of Campo Grafico had little patience for the old and musty. With the publication of numerous practical examples done with reference to specific aesthetic concepts, Campo Grafico brought these ideas to printing offices and all levels of the graphic arts industry.

Campo Grafico’s covers best illustrate the editorial principles. Each is an experiment in presentation that uses technical capabilities to demonstrate new ideas or new theories. The magazine favored Marinetti’s Futurism, but was also primed to work with photomontage and collage, as well as mixing in every other ‘-ism’ of the 1930s avant-garde.

Last spring, on the eve of the 90th anniversary of Campo Grafico, the 66 covers were exhibited for the first time in the exhibition Campo Grafico 1933/1939: nasce il visual design at the ADI Design Museum, curated by Gaetano Grizzanti, Mauro Chiabrando, Pablo Rossi and Massimo Dradi. The catalog published by AIAP Edizioni is now available. Ninety years later, there is currency in the geometric and dynamic harmony of the solids (titles, texts, bodies, typographical accuracy, threads, dithering, images and colors) and of the voids (so-called white space) that arise, today as yesterday. Campo Grafico quickly became the wellspring and springboard for the aesthetics that gave rise to an Italian style in typography and graphic design.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Lesbo, a Slovenian political, social and cultural magazine edited by Natasa Velikonja, published by Škuc-LL and designed by Irena Woelle, was part of wide resistance against homophobia and other forms of social exclusion. Lesbo is a successor to Lesbozine (1988–1989) and the Pandora Bulletin (1993–1996), and was published between 1997 and 2012. Despite its small print run, its influence went deep into the LBGTQ+ community. Former members of the editorial board are now renowned writers, poets, members of parliament and activists. “We never stopped being fierce defenders of a just society,” says Woelle, who designed Lesbo (1997-2000). Barbara Predan followed Woelle as designer (2000-2012).

At a moment when gender equality and safety are at risk elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Slovenian passing of an equal rights law is a beacon for the world (although there is still much more to do).

The printed version of Lesbo is no longer published, but there is a website featuring some English abstracts and the original site from 1998. I asked Woelle to reflect on the impact Lesbo had on LBGTQ+ politics, culture and society.

Although male same-sex relationships were decriminalized in 1977, Slovenia has just recently legalized same-sex marriages for the wider LGBTQ+ community.
On 31st of January, 2023, same-sex couples and families finally gained full equality in Slovenia. It took precisely 34 years and 23 days from the first formal initiative to get there.

Lesbo was quite strikingly and originally designed and produced. It was printed on excellent paper stocks and trimmed so that it was not a perfect rectangle, but a rather totally unconventional shape (when closed and opened). Tell me about  how the design decisions were made. What were your goals and influences?
In 1996, members of lesbian group ŠKUC-LL decided to upgrade their photocopied lesbian fanzine/bulletin into a printed magazine. At that time the lesbian community was not visible as it is today; they were easily ignored and important information about lesbian life censored.

I decided to help change that situation with the bold, large format of Lesbo—the magazine nobody would be able to ignore. Or hide. Or dismiss as unimportant. I wanted the design to be loud and inviting so people would read those important, smart articles.    

The production budget was very tight, so I volunteered some work in the printing house. When I also ditched the binding, we were able to print two colors and trim the format. The shape and background color were meant to ridicule the way women were presented in women’s magazines (covered in diamonds and colored peach).

My role was also to help with the visual materials from all sources possible: Californian and Canadian photographers, Parisian graffiti, German illustration, Slovenian art, global comics and record covers. All obtained from authors, without fees as support for the cause.  

The design was unconventional yet perfectly apt for the times. How often did you revamp the typographic and layout formats, if at all?
I was designing Lesbo from 1997–2000. After the first year’s surprise with the format and size, I decided to intensify the effect with voluminous paper and embossing, a logo redesign and different layout and fonts.

I would have added intensity and curiosity to the design in the following seasons, but at the same time I was entering mother mode and could not handle both tiers together. An arrangement was made with another designer, who chose a more conventional design.

On the content side, while I was working on Lesbo I could never use recognizable photos of Slovenian lesbians—it was too risky. Seven years later, when I was invited to design a new LGBTQ magazine, Narobe (Wrong), by another group, the situation for the LGBTQ community was already much better, so I was able to make a special double cover with photos of four people coming out in each of the 32 issues. The print run of this magazine was 800, and it ran from 2007–2016.

How did you distribute? Did your editorial material have any influence in countries like Hungary or Poland where LGBTQ+ rights are being challenged?
The print run was 300, copies were free and available on several social points. Each issue was also published online, and printed copies sent via snail mail to the subscribers. In spite of the apparently small print run, Lesbo was traveling far and wide and we established a lot of connections and exchanges of LGBTQ printed material. For this reason we soon added the English summary on the back page.

Slovenian LGBTQ activists were keeping personal and activist contacts both in Poland and Hungary throughout this whole period and Lesbo was one of the many parallel platforms or channels for creating this network.

What was the public response to the magazine?
The first (unexpected) response was within the lesbian community, when I proudly brought the first copies to a larger meeting. Quite a few people were very frustrated with the size of the magazine and complained that it would be impossible to hide it. Even though the basic idea of the entire endeavor was exactly the opposite—to not have to hide anymore. The realization that with my design I made life even harder for some people stuck with me to this day.

In the very beginning my personal email was the only connection with the readers of the magazine. I clearly remember a lady from a small village, who was 60 at the time and never came out to her family and friends. She expressed her gratitude for our work and wrote how we kept her sane.

People around the world were surprised, because Lesbo looked very different from the commercial LGBT magazines but also from the underground production.

Several times I got an angry response—how lesbians must be very rich if they can afford such a fancy magazine. They didn’t understand how many tricks I used to hack a tiny budget.

I am glad that the design of the magazine has provoked positive reactions. The design exhibitions and articles—including this pleasant dialogue—have positively contributed to the visibility of the LGBTQ community’s fight. This is what design is supposed to do.

What are the larger implications of Lesbo in Slovenian culture? Was it accepted as “underground” or mainstream, or somewhere in between?
With a surprising design, Lesbo was a vehicle for the lesbian cause and it also brought [the cause] to the straight population. 

One strange advantage of small countries is that there are unavoidable overlaps between all social strata and subcultures, so that in Slovenia, the mainstream is not an impenetrable bubble. Here you cannot live entirely marinated in the company of people exclusively like yourself, and that is a good thing.

With one big battle won, what’s next?
In general, human rights seem to be in bad shape, so we can’t put our guard down. Just like in so many places around the world, in our society we have shameless, opportunistic politicians offering simple and implicitly violent solutions to complex problems, generating hate against minorities and projecting medieval values in order to keep their tribal projects afloat.

Lesbo was a formative part of a decades-long struggle in Slovenia, but now we have one immediate and important task—to eliminate discrimination against single women’s right to medically assisted artificial insemination.

The lead story for each edition, “Is Creativity Over?”, addresses a disquieting buzz in the creative universe around the widespread introduction of AI. The rest of WePresent in all its forms is worth the time spent reading, but I’m focused on one feature in particular from Scher’s version on the intersection between place and creation, life and creativity.

That ain’t just any drooling K9. She’s Mimi the wonder dog (Scher’s pride-winning Australian shepherd), who through the digital sorcery of DALL-E (and illustration/manipulation by Bruno Begallo) has become a bone-a-fido cover star. In the magazine Scher and her team deploy AI to document her beloved tricolor Aussie’s morning walk.

During COVID, the introduction of DALL-E by Open AI gave designers something more to do than wash all those vegetables and groceries delivered by Fresh Direct. Members of Scher’s Pentagram design team took the opportunity to discover how well DALL-E could morph the already precocious Mimi into many exacting DOGG-E iterations. Fortuitously, the variegated results fit the theme that WePresent had planned.

It was also the first time I was introduced to the much-touted image conscription system, which would cause such consternation in the illustration and art education communities. But being in a COVID fog I was less concerned about the implication of all the ultimately important intellectual property breaches and more interested to know how Mimi felt about being the subject of DALL-E. The following is a brief (for reasons you’ll understand) interview with Mimi about her many iterations. (Of course, a dog whisperer translation program was employed to aid in this process.)

Heller: How did you like being DALL-Efied?

Mimi: (laying on her back, feet in the air) Woofff wooof (translation: Scratch my tummy).

Heller: Good girl! Now please respond to the question.

Mimi: WOOooooof (whine). Wooof (translation: Just keep scratching, and how about a treat while you’re at it).

Heller: Here’s your treat. Now sit! No more treats. Sit and answer my question …

Mimi: (Chomp, chew, chew, salivate) (no translation necessary)

Heller: So …?

Mimi: (Snort, huff, yawn) Woof woof … (translation: I’ve gotta pee).

Realizing I was getting nowhere with Queen Mimi, I turned my gaze to her lady in waiting.

Heller: Paula, throw me a bone … and please tell me, did Mimi have any response to seeing her portraits on this wonderful cover?

Scher: She thought the pictures made her look fat.

Sanchez’s covers for Metropoli will be missed for the inspiration they offered other magazine designers and for what they say about the capacity of the public to focus on a brand that is purposefully in flux. Here he talks about a few of his favorite covers (the captions are also in-depth analyses of each, so make sure to read them).

What is the process of conceiving, pitching and executing a cover?
A chaotic process. Full of doubts, obstacles, more doubts and unexpected solutions. More the fruit of intuition than of practical theory. Although the result may prove otherwise, I am not able to apply an aesthetic or practical theory to any of the challenges I face.

I put my mind to it and I do it. And it comes out. But it’s intuition. And that brings me problems when it comes to working in a team. Because it is difficult to transmit to a team something that I don’t know, that I just do it. Hit and miss, that’s how work is.

In Metropoli, for example, there is more intuition than reflection. A reflexive intuition, because experienced and trained intuition has a lot of reflection. There is energy, audacity and a lot of courage. These covers are a step forward taken with courage. Without fear of equivocation, looking the error in the face and being aware that the defect is beautiful.

Metropoli, its covers, are the work of an author, not of a team. There are many professionals, many techniques and many hands doing them, but they are instruments working for an orchestra conductor.

So there are no committees or editors to thwart you? But is there a brainstorming process?
There is no brainstorming to make a cover, there is only one tormented head, mine. Searching for an agile, ingenious, different, obvious or fanciful formula. Working on the concept of the theme, getting to the bone. And, at the same time, to find an object or a common referent on both sides, the author’s and the reader’s, so that the idea is recognizable and shareable. If we lose the common referent, we lose the essence of communication. That is why life experience is very important in this and in almost all professions. The more trips, the more films, the more books, the more years and the more experiences and the more resources to use.
What I have figured out over the years is that stress, lack of time and the fuss around me brings out the best in me. That is, a newspaper’s newsroom. I believe that in an isolated environment, to some extent aseptic of noise and movement, I would be a failure as a designer.

The execution of a cover has to be perfect, but that is only a matter of skill, ability and knowing how to handle tools correctly. The important thing is the idea and the management of that idea. The execution is incidental. Fundamental, but accessory. Metropoli feeds on ideas and is executed with craftsmanship.

What, if anything, is your philosophy about cover design for the magazine?
Normally, publications take their themes to their covers and adapt them to the shapes and forms of their magazines. Metropoli, on the other hand, took its cover to the theme and it is the cover that adopts the form, shape, color or smell of the theme it deals with. If no two themes are the same, no two covers should be the same. It is our obligation as communicators to adapt to the needs of that subject, to its shape, its sound, its smell and its color. It is the constancy and consistency of this treatment that makes a product identifiable over time, not the masthead. And the masthead has to be an active part of the front page, no longer a spectator who is oblivious to what is happening underneath it. Integration is also information. From there, the secret lies in fun, emotion and love for the work. Always do something better and bolder. Go where others don’t dare. To do what the competition never does (or doesn’t know how to do) and to think about the capacity to surprise, towards our readers and ourselves.

Every issue, every cover is different …
But our magazine is always the same, but the topics that make the cover are unique and unrepeatable. Why should we treat them all the same? Equality is sometimes the greatest inequality. An injustice and, in journalism, a mistake. Each subject must have the opportunity to stand out from the rest, to live its moment of glory, to stand out and become unforgettable.

There is little more to say about a work in which there are no rules, no conventions, no concrete guidelines and not even defined long-term lines. Eclecticism becomes a flag and it is difficult to define boundaries between styles, manners or working trends. Anything goes: shouting, whispering, caressing, singing … and for this we put colors, shapes, sizes, letters, drawings or photographs at the service of graphic journalism. Be flexible and unpredictable.

In its latest incarnation (No. 6), co-founder and designer Richard Turley has pulled out the leading. It is a tough read—if that’s what you want. There is a lot of meat in the coverlines: “$7 Yeezyz,” “Parties in Rap Videos,” “Tiny Egg Treats,” and the corner banner: “Hate List/Are You On It?” There are at least a dozen articles quoted on the front and back covers, with reference numbers to specific placement on the pages where texts are continued. There is a navigational method to the madness, but there is also maddening chaos running throughout the 16 pages.

Turley’s sly intention may be to take readability to the limit in our age of noisy internet babble. As stated above, if one is truly invested in squeezing out meaning, it is possible to read the stories, savor the factoids and enjoy the interviews, all while experiencing a printed publication that is taking current media (i.e. civilization) to task and taking its audience on a mindbending journey down the all-too-proverbial rabbit hole.

I am more than amused. I am in awe of the brutal and visceral wit pervasive within and without Civilization‘s decidedly complex, no-holds-barred layouts. But just in case my interpretation of the designer’s goal is total bullshit, I asked Turley to weigh in.

What is the reason for your up-yours-design?
—To do something unlikable, repellent, horrible, ugly.

—To do something that felt like the feeling inside. NYC 2022. A hellhole. A cesspit. Dimes fucking square. 

—To trade in unswerving negativity. Depths-staring. Naval-gazing. Staring into the mirror and seeing nothing come back. 

—To not delete anything. I forbid myself the use of the delete key. Any thought made had to be retained. Scribble out instead. Like paint. Chiseling through the mess. Layers upon layers. It’s not really about designing, it’s about making it. Scraping through the excrement. 

—To create a divine work. To understand that meaning comes from intent. That every gesture matters, every thought is sacred, and to keep them all. That each one of those thoughts speaks to someone, reaches someone. That those intentions ladder, grow, develop, knit together. Like roots of a tree reaching out to their neighbor. 

—Was about trying to do something new with something old. The paper in its physical form has always been about that. To take an archaic form and push some new meaning into it. 

—To make a product that is more about its production than its conclusion. 

There are some contradictions in this issue. The cover is enticing. The coverlines are engaging. The hate list banner is intriguing. But do you think your readers will invest the time to dive in?
I honestly don’t care. We’ve never produced that thing for anyone other than ourselves. It’s made to answer a need in me, not you.

Am I being too literal in interpreting this melange as your take on our civilization in 2022?
Absolutely. Bang on. See answer No. 1.

What are two or three of your Easter eggs? There must be surprises for the intrepid reader.
Not sure it’s an Easter egg, but a lot of the best text is by a porn actor having a breakdown. 

While it is chaos, it is beautifully chaotic. What can you do next to alter the paradigm of publication design?
I don’t know what I can do. But the medium still has legs. You just have to get over it needing to be useful or in any type of service to anything. All the best magazines are feelings. You pick them up and feel them before you’ve turned to the first page. 

Prior to this issue, I was unaware of Shrestha’s work, and was so impressed by the modest power of his art that I was compelled to know more about him and his process, resulting in the interview below.

Ironically, his depictions of our seemingly inevitable ecological disaster will doubtless put him on the map … assuming the map does not change too much, owing to the climate.

Where did you study, and what were your inspirations?
I received a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1999 and completed my MFA from the Illustration as Visual Essay program at the School of Visual Arts in 2005. I grew up reading Archie comics, then became captivated by the comics of the Hernandez Brothers and Chris Ware in college. He was also drawn to the socially conscious works of Goya and the printmaker Luis Jimenez. As a result, much of my illustration contains political overtones within a style that is line-oriented and relatively clean.

Let’s talk about your Times Magazine artwork. Tell me about the process of doing such an extremely detailed suite. How long, from start to finish, did you have?
We started the project back at the end of August, so it was roughly two months of work. We adhered to a weekly delivery schedule the entire time, which involved a relatively rapid process of initial sketches, revisions and then final inked and colored art. 

Have you ever participated in a project like this before?
I had previously worked on projects where my illustrations were eventually animated for clients, such as Pop-Up Magazine Productions and the creative studio Varyer. But working on a project of this scale was a new experience for me.

When I first saw the issue, I was impressed with the layout of the articles in relation to your images. Who assigned this to you, and how rigorous was the art direction?
The art director, Kate LaRue, and design director Gail Bichler initially contacted me with the proposal of a long-form illustration project that would involve a series of static illustrations for print as well as an animated version for mobile and desktop platforms. Kate set up weekly meetings in which we discussed the various art assets that needed to be created. Kate was adept at streamlining the schedule so the number of drawings that needed to be created did not feel overwhelming. Ben Grandgenett designed the layout for much of the interiors and fluidly incorporated my illustrations into each section.

The drawing style is so, well, nonchalant, yet the subject matter is horrific. Was your intention to create a sweet and sour experience for the viewer?
Since we had to create numerous drawings within a limited timeframe, I didn’t think so much about the grim nature of the content as much as I wanted to clearly communicate it visually. Maybe the nonchalant drawings make the bleak content more palatable.

Your artwork drew (no pun) people into the story—people like me, who are not deniers, but try to put climate change out of sight, out of mind. Did you think of it in that way?
To an extent. I think on some level many of us living in these times share a cognitive dissonance about the destructive and cumulative effects of late capitalism on the environment. I hope this project is part of a larger clarion call to the gravity of the climate crisis.

Who was responsible for the animations, and were you happy with the startling result?
I worked with animator Esther Cheung, and I couldn’t have been more satisfied with the way she made the drawings come alive. She expertly created looping movements in a clear and compelling way. Jacky Myint also provided further design and development for the interactive digital versions.

Milton makes me assume one thing but, in fact, it is another. Who is the publisher of Milton?
It’s published by Milton Academy’s comms department.

Why is a high school putting so much of its resources into a print periodical?
I’m a little mystified, too, though we are very efficient with our truly limited budget. Its primary purposes are recruiting, alumni engagement (i.e., financial support)—and their support of our work does suggest that the magazine gives them some one-upmanship over rival schools recruiting the same genius kids.

What is your favorite part of doing Milton?
Traditional publishing has gotten so depressing—the poor paper quality, super-thin issues, reduced frequency, combined with a real lack of imagination. These alumni magazines are small, infrequent, and have an intentionally limited circulation, but they care—really care—about quality. They’re putting themselves out there and, in the case of Milton, investing in this publication is a real competitive advantage. All of that allows me to do good work and to hire very talented photographers and illustrators, who also don’t get nearly the volume of magazine work they used to. We all win.

I presume that your staff is small, but the quality of everything—from illustrations to the layouts—is impeccable. What determined your design style?
My staff is essentially me. I’ve occasionally been able to bring on help when I get very busy, but mostly I work alone. I have good relationships with contributors, and the work we produce helps us continue to make new relationships with photographers and illustrators. The design style is usually simple—there’s no point in over-designing, but it always comes back to something the great Fred Woodward told me when I was just starting out: “I just hire great artists and try not to let what I do make them look bad.” It was something like that.

Well, the days of melting polar caps and radical weather fronts are now getting real and realer since planet Earth’s caretakers—in business and politics—have become dumb and dumber. The facts are in and the science is verified that if greenhouse gases, carbon emissions and the human errors that foster natural upheavals are not controlled, we’re not going to be in Kansas anymore—in fact, neither will Kansas.

Through the monthly indie magazine subscription service STACK I was recently introduced to It’s Freezing in LA!, the smartly edited and elegantly designed London-based magazine that scares the bejesus out of me.

Published biannually, it walks the razor’s edge between science and activism, inviting writers and illustrators from a variety of fields to share their views on how climate change (and its falling dominoes) impacts all our lives.

“We want to help untangle the environmental tensions and choices that humanity must navigate by platforming as many different perspectives as we can find,” state its editors.

I contacted the primary crew—editor Martha Dillon, deputy editor Jackson Howarth, art/co-creative directors Matthew Lewis and Nina Carter—top among an impressive roster of contributors, to collectively discuss this refreshingly written, conceived and art directed, intriguingly titled magazine. Their answers are fused together below.

I will say this: If we’re headed for disaster, the ratio of sensitive graphic design and illustration to chilling science helps to focus our attention.

What is the origin of the periodical? 
We started in 2018. The core team all worked on climate and ecology in our respective jobs, but there was little crossover or dialogue between fields. It was just before XR and Greta [Thunberg], and the renewed attention to climate in the mainstream in 2019, so we were all desperate to find reading that went into detail on climate, and connected it to the other issues our peers and colleagues were talking about: social justice, polarization, capitalism …

We realized a magazine was a perfect format to pin some of these conversations down. It invites lots of voices, it changes over time and it can be permanent and shared (rather than another tab to close or link to leave unopened). We’d also all done a bit of magazine or editorial work before, so as a team we felt able to make a tiny print run of hand-bound issue 1s. And people seemed to like it!

This is not a typical lifestyle magazine but it is about life and graphically it has style and personality. Does how it looks represent your editorial aims?
Our written content has always been aware of a polarization in climate communication between science and activism, so in the design, too, we have tried to find an accessible middle ground. Our design reflects on this by combining scientific visual elements with bold colors and an eye-catching visual identity. We also reference the design language of counter-cultural zines to reference the activist history of environmentalism. In all our issues, we feature a graphic motif through the pages that is derived from a different environmental pattern: maps of the earth’s temperature heating, microscopic images of ice cores that show global carbon emission patterns, smoke patterns from climate-exacerbated wildfires. The design of each magazine is this mix of information, accessibility and visually pleasing outcome.

This issue we looked at images of different pollutants flowing and dispersing. We use different scales of pollutants (from oil flares to microbes) so we were also very interested in the fixed, satellite perspective of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten films as a reference. The perspective offers accessibility, by flattening the view for clarity, with interesting and unexpected visual outcomes, by abstracting recognizable forms.

In the illustrations, we look for work that is approachable and humane. We want to center the text and ideas in the piece in real people and real spaces.

You have a pretty deep masthead. Where do you find your staff members?
We are a broad editorial team of activists, writers and everything else. We all work in other fields when not collaborating on IFLA!—as engineers, designers, lawyers and more. So we often find writers and illustrators through the people we meet in our “other” worlds. But we also find people through other climate projects we enjoy, through social media, and through other activist groups we work with.

One design decision you made and carried out from front to back cover and all stops in between is the phosphorescent green color. It represents various hotspots and unsafe zones. These swaths of green add up.
There has been conscious decision-making behind the green and blue graphics. We collected far more of these images than there was room to show so that there were plenty of images to select the most striking outcomes from. In this way they have been very intentionally curated. We think that there is something intriguing about the interplay between information and curated visual appeal in images about climate destruction. How we choose to tell a story affects the way it is received, understood and responded to.

How has the public response been to the magazine?
As we have essays that cover a mixture of topics (from art to politics to science), we get a broad range of responses. Some readers are also activists and engaged in their own work; they often get in touch with writers to continue a conversation, or absorb the articles in their own work. 

Others are people wanting to find out more about climate and get more deeply involved—we often hear from them that they find it a strangely uplifting read, given we make no effort to be “positive”! We think that’s because so often climate is treated with anxiety and distance, whereas we embrace the depth and try to untangle it bit by bit, which helps people have something to grasp. 

And often, we just hear from lots of like-minded people with ideas and drive to tackle the issue, which is how we’ve grown, and which gives our team a lot of hope.

Why did you start BLAG?
There is a growing and thriving international community of sign painters and, while magazines exist for sign makers at large, there is nothing specifically focused on hand-painted work. However, I see it as more than a trade publication; it will also appeal to those with related or tangential interests such as graphic designers, type designers, calligraphers, graffiti writers, muralists, etc. I refer to the journey I’m going on with the magazine as “adventures in sign painting,” and for it to inform and inspire these international communities.

Is there a translation for BLAG?
Taken literally, it is B[etter] L[etters] [M]AG, i.e., Better Letters Magazine. However, the word itself has meaning within the worlds of signs and sign painting. In the first instance, a “blag” can be a sales pitch, and ultimately that’s what most signs are. In British English, the verb “to blag” can mean to sweet talk, or to be “winging it.” Sadly, in the absence of many formal training and apprenticeship opportunities for novice sign painters, many are to an extent “blagging it” through the early stages; they have to “fake it until they make it.”

The word BLAG also has a nice combination of letter shapes, which UTILE Studio has worked up into the logotype. This will have its color switched per issue with respect to the cover image.

How will you populate the magazine? Is it all your own discoveries?
The first issue includes a mixture of external contributions and pieces that I’ve written, largely about other people and their work. I see the magazine as serving the international sign painting community, and so should reflect their needs. To that end, I am taking submissions and, in the future, will have more of an editorial role while still penning pieces myself. As well as the print magazine, there is a monthly email newsletter (free) and weekly articles published online at bl.ag. These also feature contributions from others, which will continue to grow in weighting over time.

Do you foresee it only being UK signs?
Absolutely not. I’ve covered topics from all over the world on the bl.ag site, and the print magazine continues with this international perspective. Issue 01, for example, has material from 16 different countries, including Austria, Panama, Peru, Poland and Singapore. I want to celebrate and share work from around the world with each issue, and the second one already has pieces lined up from Brazil, India and Japan.

Why are ghost and old signs so damn popular and appealing to people these days?
While there are ghost signs in the magazine (see the regular Ghost Sign Corner feature, for example) the focus of BLAG is contemporary sign painting and its practitioners. Many quickly dismiss sign painting as a “dying art” but the fact that there is interest and demand around the world for this magazine shows that it is anything but. I’ve just done the shipping data for the first issue, which is now on its way to locations in 29 different countries on five continents—Africa, where are you?!

This publication is clearly a labor of love, full of vibrant, high contrast hues with nostalgic fonts and irresistible pop art accents. This youthful, eye-catching zine evokes the sensation of looking through old psych records, a mid-century teen magazine, or a comic from the ’60s. While the text is written in Indonesian, its accompanying designs are beautifully vivacious that we imagine you’d have fun poking through it whether you can read it or not. Peek through the images below and you’ll see what we mean.

In 2019 we helped develop book design for Irama Nusantara’s report on Indonesian music during its most tumultuous decade in the 20th century, the 1960’s. Along with Norrm and Irama Nusantara, we decided to make this book accessible to public by repackaging it into a zine.

Indonesia during those times is not as globally connected as today. What perceived as ’60s design abroad is not the same as what it is locally. Adding to that, design archives from that era is not very well documented in Indonesia, so it took us a lot of deep-digging through research in Indonesian history and archives.

Published by Binatang Press, this zine is Risograph printed and available over at Tokopedia or select independent bookstores.

The covers are piled so high with lettering and hearts and insets and flowers and ribbons and cute characters that it extends up over the magazine title. You have to know what it is to know what it is.

Incredibly, the madness continues inside and throughout the magazine. Every page has layer upon layer of patterns, shapes kanji, English, and photos in a myriad of styles and sizes.

And if you think I’m going to lament this as an abomination of design, you don’t know me.

It is gorgeous!

Boys appear seemingly only as objects of fantasy, laid out in manga-style stories.

Inside the magazine is an uncoated paper insert, chopped down, and printed in one color with more boy profiles, horoscopes, lists, and more.

What I find particularly interesting about this aesthetic is how completely incapable most North American designers would be of accomplishing this. Every ounce of their training is to not do this: to pare back, be spare and simple. Most are tortured when or if they have to work on a regular trade magazine, with all of its inserts, sidebars, and asides that attempt to make it look exciting while pandering to short attention spans. To go further— further yet— far over the line of design decency and common sense— is something they are just not capable of. And I think it’s a pity.

Of course, the whole world can’t and shouldn’t look like this, but neither should it look like the sameness of “clean and simple,” as it often does.

Designers are trained to be inflexible; to follow a prescribed path. They love and hate— which is fine— but they love and hate the same things, and look to each other for guidance and “inspiration” (don’t get me started).

Design and design education should be a process of exploration across cultures and time. Steal this, steal that, mash them together see what happens. What is bad taste, and can it be used inventively? What is good taste, and can it be subverted? People often ask me where I get my ideas from, and my answer is always “everywhere.” Difference is good. Madness is good. What you think of as bad is often good. Give Joseph Muller Brockmann kittens— see what happens.

This essay was originally published on Marian’s blog, Marian Bantjes is Writing Again. You can keep up with her work here, or look through her archives on Substack.