New York Type Magazine

Trying to get involved in the design community here in New York, I was visiting the MFA in Interaction Design studio pretty often to check out the lectures they offered during the school year. I was impressed with SVA and heard great things about it around the city. There were a ton of courses that peaked my interest, but I was finally able to choose one. I decided to enroll in the Editorial Design class taught by Don Morris. I was hoping that editorial design would help me work with images and text and give me a different perspective from the usual web design. I was right.

I was surprised when I first walked into the classroom and there were no computers. I assumed we were going to be spending a lot of time in InDesign. Quite the contrary, this class might have well have been called a Course in Art Direction. Most of the discussions that we had in class were conceptual and Don really focused on the storytelling aspect of designing a magazine.

The project requirements were pretty open ended. The magazine had to be focused on New York City, obviously a pretty broad topic with a lot to pick from. I decided to focus on type in the city. In the short time I've been here, I have been able to surround myself with design and with designers. At first I thought I may have really limited myself to a tight category in type, but the more that I thought about it, the more I realized just how in depth a magazine solely focused on type could go. 

The first step was to define the magazine. That meant writing a mission statement for the magazine:

New York Magazine is written and designed for the typophile, both young and old. This monthly magazine will feature stories focused on type in New York City, but will capture the interest of type lovers everywhere by highlighting type designers, foundries, letterpress studios, and graphic designers.

We were required to create a mood board to reflect the look and feel of the magazine we were imagining. I hung this board on the wall next to my desk to keep me reminded of the aesthetic that was decided. I wanted to keep a clean and modern look to the magazine, giving it an exciting but elegant feel. I used a lot of imagery from GQ and Esquire when assembling the mood board.

A mood board developed to establish and maintain the aesthetic value of the magazine.

I wanted to give a fresh look on type. I wanted the reader to get really excited just be reading the headlines on the cover. I think type can be as exciting as you want to make it. I really enjoy diving deep into a typeface and learning all of its nooks and crannies. I designed this magazine for people like me (hoping there's at least a few other people out there as nerdy as I am).

The layout started with the department pages of the magazine. This allowed me to establish the tone of the magazine. I was able to play with typefaces and color combinations to get the right message across. After a few too many iterations of the navigation system and the overall look and feel of the magazine, it was time to move on to the feature well. 

Progression of a department page from first draft to final, left to right.

The first feature I put together was based on a walking type tour with Tobias Frere Jones that Jason Santa Maria took and wrote about. I adapted the story to lengthen in and to include some more of the history of Gotham, but I tried to stick true to the original idea. The tour involved Tobias Frere Jones taking a group around the Lower East Side and showing them his inspiration for the typeface Gotham. After Jason suggested it for the magazine, I felt like I couldn't ask for a more perfect story for this magazine; a native New York type designer takes a group of New Yorkers on a tour of the Lower East Side to talk about type, perfect!

I hung all revisions of my wall to watch the progression of the magazine.

The second feature was not based on reality nearly as much as the first. I decided to create a scenario that would provide a good story for the magazine. The idea of the story is that the author is on an airplane on the way back to New York after spending a few weeks in Europe. He was so impressed with the type that he saw while over there. All of the sudden the plane starts shaking and everyone is freaking our around him. To calm himself down, he picks up the safety card and starts dissecting its design. He realized that there are no serif typefaces anywhere on the card, he looks around and slowly realized that he can't find on piece of serif type anywhere on the plane and begins to write this story. By the time he looks up, the plane has righted itself and everything has returned back to normal. But he has seen the light and wants to share his experience in Europe and on the plane with other typophiles.

Designing the cover was tough. I wasn't sure if I should feature a type specimen, or a type designer or something completely different. It turns out that high-res images of type designers are not all that prevalent on the Internet. Apparently they are not the most frequently photographed people. I decided to go with Jeffrey Zeldman as the cover photo. I wanted this magazine to not only be for print designers but also for people who design on the web. Jeffrey is an advocate for getting real type on the web. He's also a New Yorker. I felt like it was appropriate to feature him and the future of type on the web as the cover story.

Overall, the class was really intense and I loved it. I'm really happy with the way the magazine turned out. I plan on creating another one in the near future, just for fun. I met a bunch of great designers in the class whom I hope to keep in touch with. I'm really glad I took the class, I got a ton out of it and I am excited to take another Continuing Ed class at SVA.