flaws: Professional Context: How the magazine is created and the role of the Art Director.

Before I started this assignment, I didn’t know all that much about art direction. I knew that the art director was the person who created the overall look of the magazine and I knew that magazines were created using Adobe InDesign and that was as far as my knowledge on the subject went. Something I really wanted to find out was how it all comes together and how they help to create the magazine and how fundamental the relationship between the editor and the art director.

I looked at ‘The Art Directors’ Handbook of Professional Magazine Design’ and ‘Magazine Editing’ to inform my research.

From The Art Directors’ Handbook they say that the way that most art directors will start planning the issue is by sketching out a general plan of how the magazine will look. Some Art Directors like to start straight out on a computer however this can make it tempting for you to begin without knowing exactly where you want to go. It makes it easier and less time consuming to have a precise concept.

It’s important to consider all components of the page, the text, the imagery etc. Once the general feel and look has been planned out the flat planning begins. The flat plan is a map of the magazine indicating what goes where, from the cover to the back page advert. This technique is seen throughout The September Issue. It is where the editor and creative director and art director amongst others all work on the issue in small scale arranging the features, editorials and advertising. It is first set out by the art director and creative director and their teams and is then okayed and amended by the editor in chief. It allows complete control of the publication production process avoiding confusion. Without a flatplan, the production director and advertisement director struggle to control which pages go where. This makes signing off a publication very difficult and time-consuming.

Brodovitch would begin his layouts by designing the layouts as illustrations by hand. His assistant would receive these sketches to look over, but the photographers and freelance writers were often given little or no direction at all besides to come up with something new and unusual. When the photographs for the issue arrived, he would pick the most visually interesting and have a variety of sizes of reproductions made on a Photostat machine. From these, each spread would be made one at a time, and then arranged among the others to create a well-paced magazine. (1)

This is where a good relationship between the editor and the art director is fundamental; they should remain close allies throughout the entire process. Here is one art directors thoughts on editors:

The art director and editor must have a good working relationship based on mutual respect; their two disciplines, when combined in a magazine, are mutually dependent.

Publish fantastic content that is illegible or beautifully designed content that is poorly conceived/written and you’ll lose the reader rapidly.

The best editors understand design and the best art directors understand editorial. The editor and art director need to have an agreed agenda and work closely from the beginning of a project in order for a magazine to be seen by the reader as successful, confident and desirable.

Too many art directors today are seen merely as designer-decorators; a good editor expects more from their art director than mere decoration; an art director should be able to tell the editor ‘no’ just as often as the opposite occurs.

(Jeremy Leslie, magculture.com) (2)