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SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT REDESIGN

Big Consolidated & Incorporated magazines pay teams of hired guns to create, conduct market research about, and implement comprehensive redesigns. Not really an option for us, eh? So I took some time away from writing for a few issues (mostly) and begged a little e-mail help (a lot of e-mail help) from the two real designers who have had most impact on the way ND looks, the legendary Art Chantry (now of St. Louis, MO), and one of my oldest friends, Jesse Marinoff Reyes (now of NYC). What I did isn't their fault, of course. In retrospect, I'm not even certain how much my partners saw of this thing before it came off the press, and so that, too, could prove interesting.

Anyhow. The original ND was intended to look like something you might have found on the coffeetable in the waiting room of a muffler shop in the late 1950s. Only of course it never did. It was and is important to me to ensure the magazine's visual identity is clearly rooted in the century-old traditions of U.S. graphic design, and particularly of the lower case and functional school now known as industrial design (vintage catalogues and such), where the enduring visual identity of the country was fashioned -- and not the fashion industries, where the imagery is intentionally transitory.

At least one academic took that rootedness as a pretext to charge the magazine with sexism. Which was an interesting thing to read, no matter how untrue. If one uses vintage clip art, sure enough, the sex roles of the times will hold fast. And since I can't draw a lick (ask my daughter, who'd think I was way cooler if I could only draw Lion King), clip art it is.

The 1950s are seen as a golden age, both for country music and for the U.S. in general, though how that can be with the Korean War blazing, the cold war chilling international relations, and the Army-McCarthy hearings going on I can't quite guess, but I was only born in 1959. As ND evolved, I found myself reaching forward, into the grace of the early 1960s (the late 1960s are a redrawn, garish revisitation of Art Nouveau), with ironic nods to the kitch of the 1970s (when I began as a typesetter), and, occasional visits to my punk rock roots. Though, in fairness, during the vital years of punk I was trying desperately -- and failing miserably -- to be a yuppie designer, so I'm glancing back at that tradition, as well.

So. The redesign. It starts a couple of places. Jesse did the cover for our second book (as he did the first, though with different instructions), and it ended up a kind of homage to Saul Bass. I don't know Bass's work all that well, and regret the absence of a book assembling that work, which would make thievery all the easier. I also went through a large stack of newspaper clip art books from 1960-61 and scanned in every single arrow I found that might be adapted to some purpose, not yet knowing what that purpose was. A conscious attempt to avoid sex role stereotyping in the new era.

And then I banged around with things for a long time. I had to fight through a Roger Black fixation (think early-'80s Rolling Stone), but that led to the distressed column rules which now hold together the front and back sections. (And, note, no two pages are alike; this is handwork, each one different from its predecessor; though, in the end, I did end up having to duplicate a couple frames to make deadline). I looked up Saul Bass movie posters on line (The Man With The Golden Arm is the launching point for many things) to try to get a sense of his rhythm, but...only so much. He drew, hand-lettered, and such, and I can't. Nor did I exactly want that level of handwork to show through, for I'm still more industrial than decorative.

There was also a long struggle with the text face. I began setting type in September of 1977, and have long had a prejudice against typefaces which were introduced after that point. The technology has changed substantially (I'll digress there another day), a lot of filters have been removed, and contemporary designers have an over-abundance of typefaces from which to choose. But they don't MEAN anything. They have no history, no resonance, and few of them have come to dominate an era in the way that one can date printed material from the late 1970s because it's in Souvenier, or the Eras era, or the Goudy resurgance, or that horrible moment in which I set an entire newsletter in Antique Olive and thought it look good. Art Chantry suggested Century Schoolbook, set more solidly than I typically do, and he was right. As he almost always is. The sans serif is another matter; it's a contemporary fake job, but it serves.

So. It doesn't look like 1959 anymore. It's sort of meant to look like 1962 or 1963, but it's also just supposed to look like No Depression, and like I did it. It's rooted in all sorts of points of visual evolution, whether I'm reaching back to the 1930s for a hand-lettered signpainting typeface, or running down to the local supermarket to commit some bad typography via xerox. It's meant to resonate, as is the content of the magazine, throughout the past of our music. Maybe into the present. Probably never into the future, for I strongly doubt anything I do will start a graphic design trend at this point. (Though we did once watch Art Chantry's labelmaker standing heads move from The Rocket to Nightline in six months.)

Posted by grant on August 31, 2005 10:22 AM | Permalink