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One last design deconstruction

This last issue crashed in on me later and harder than we could have guessed, in large part because the advertising community which has supported us these last almost 13 years was gracious enough to allow us to go out in the style to which we were once accustomed. But for various reasons the whole thing was built in something less than two weeks, and no wonder I broke down in the process like an old draft horse.

The unanticipated byproduct of that kindness was to make the issue doubly difficult for me because I was writing the cover story at about the same time those ads came in (and they came to my desktop, where they could not be ignored). Many of them bore nice words about us and about the magazine, and the whole thing -- the writing and the adverts and the finality of it -- would come back to the foreground.

But in some ways it was also comparatively easy, because I knew what I wanted to say: Everything, and goodbye.

Which wasn't, as it turned out, necessarily what my two co-publishers had in mind. But we'll come to that.

I tend to be a pretty laissez faire art director, by which I mean that I hire from a small pool of photographers whose innate sensibilities I trust, who understand both the music and the magazine, and who appreciate the fact that I don't tell them what to do. My belief has always been that we don't pay enough to micromanage shoots (nor had we funds for me to be physically present at shoots, and on those few occasions when I was around I felt singularly useless). And I don't put type on photos, save for the opening spreads and the minimal type placed on the cover. Good photos don't need words to dress them up, and I've been fortunate to work with some terrific photographers over these last years. And it's more fun for me to take their photos and figure out how to work headlines and text around them, than to play it the other way.

Now...our magazine covers have always been spartan affairs, largely free of bulky slabs of text. Partly it's the contrarian in me: if every other magazine does it that way, stand out by going a different way. And partly it was my belief in ND as a brand, which, I suspect, other more bottom-line oriented publishers probably thought foolish. And maybe it was. No matter.

For this last cover, I knew exactly what I wanted. Which rarely happens. And the opening spread, I knew what that looked like, too. So I asked Thomas Petillo, one of my favorite of the Nashville shooters who return my calls, to mimic Richard Avedon; or, rather, to begin there and extemporize. He was kind enough to spend a few sheets of 8x10 Polaroid film to get the cover image (they've discontinued making the film; as several have noted, there's some poetry in that choice), and shot the balance digitally.

I wanted that starkness because it fit my mood, and I liked all the white because it suggested, at least to me, the deep and good spirituality which underpins Buddy's very being. And Thomas -- who has shot Buddy three or four times, once before for us -- concurred.

I hadn't counted on the sequence Thomas provided of Buddy walking through the set, but it was brilliant and provided the connective tissue the piece needed. If I'd written a few less words, I'd have closed with that last photo spread across two pages, and let it speak silently. But I was unwilling to trim that many words, which I may yet come to regret.

All of which was fine until Peter and Kyla saw a PDF of the cover. It wasn't what they wanted. Maybe they feel better about it now, particularly having seen and read the full story which went with it. In hindsight I should have understood that this issue meant different but difficult things to all three of us, and I should have more included them in the process. But they aren't often involved in the design of the magazine, for which I have always been grateful. This last time I think they felt a bit ill-used, though perhaps they came to love this cover as much as I do. And perhaps not. But I approached this final issue as an end point in my career, and it is no such a thing for either of them. (It may not be for me, but it's easier to assume that it is. They are both far more engaged in the possibilities of the web than I suspect I ever will be.)

Past that, I began with the organizing principle that I wanted each of the major features to include a handmade element. Partly because I think it important that the things we make look as if they were touched by human hands, partly because I find most modern design sterile and formal, and partly because it is helpful to limit my options, particularly as I came to realize we were going to have at least 32 more pages than we'd initially planned on. (One issue, and I'm not going to dig through to remember which, I decided -- because all the features were coming in late, and I had some things going on in the bargain -- to make all the headlines out of our default sans serif face, Knockout, which comes in a wide variety of heights and widths.)

And so the James McMurtry feature, the first one finished (and the last one finished, too, as it worked out), is built around some stencil letters Susan's grandmother passed along when she unpacked a few years back. I took an old, worn out marker to them, and then over-exposed the scan. And fought and fought with the letters and the placement and the color, couldn't quite get it to work. At the last minute -- when preparing the file to upload to the printer -- it occurred to me to drop a black shadow of the type beneath the red, and it held together after that. Most issues there's one spread I simply can't make right, and I end up having to live with it. This time I think I saved it. I think.

My old friend, though he's younger than me, Jesse Marinoff Reyes was kind enough to design the Billy Bragg spread from provided photos. We hadn't time, nor access, to Bragg once the piece was assigned, and I knew it would be helpful to farm out some of the work for a change. Jesse and I met at The Rocket; he designed my very first feature for that magazine, and then, after I was done setting the type and trimming out however many words we ended up trimming out, we went to the late and perhaps lamented Dog House to eat and drink a beer and talk about boxing and pro wrestling until our ten bucks ran out and it was well after midnight. Jesse also designed the opening spread for a Merle Haggard feature I wrote with Andy McLenon a few years back; I thought I was too close to the story to get it right. Those are the only four pages in the magazine's history (save ads) that I haven't designed; our mentor, Art Chantry, designed the Lizz Wright cover, the last to use our original logo. Otherwise, blame me, as Chris Knight sings.

Anyway. Jesse's spread is handmade to the significant extent that he uses a complicated stew of computer skills and bad xerox to get the effects he's after, and I swept up the back yard of the piece trying to imitate what he'd accomplished.

I had hoped to use more illustration this last issue -- it's handmade, and out of fashion -- but for various reasons that didn't turn out. Jason Crosby, a good egg from South Carolina, I believe (we've not met, of course), turned in a splendid piece on Robert Forster. I don't know how handmade it actually is, but it looks it. The type went on easily, once I backed away and stopped thinking about it.

Along the winding way of this issue, I'd had an e-mail exchange with one of the Rocket designers who went way before my time, and has had a storied career in New York since, a fellow I've met only once or twice named Robert Newman. He's been AD at Details and Entertainment Weekly and Fortune and Vibe and I don't remember all what, but he's got a portfolio online (here: www.robertnewman.com) that I spent a little time looking at. It made me feel a little better about my work here to note that Bob worked with a staff of 10 or 12, and I was trying to compete (and, really, I was) in solitude. It was also interesting to realize that a number of the design touchstones I've been drawn to were also reflected in his work. Which, I suppose, is The Rocket tradition spun through.

Point being, the Old 97's opening spread is an homage to Bob, of sorts. Not a knock-off of his style, but I was reminded to play a bit more with the type than I sometimes do. Erika Molleck Goldring had been assigned to shoot the Old 97's for us, and, working with limited time and light, did a fine job. But I'd seen the opening shot on Amy Kincheloe's camera right after she took it at the New West party during SXSW. Amy's a friend of our Austin ad rep Trish Wagner, and they're both big Old 97's fans. And it fit the headline. So I used it instead. Sorry, Erika (and that's not flip, I really do feel badly over it).

And then there's Pinetop Perkins. Todd V. Wolfson, one of several aces working in and around Austin, had sent me one of those photos just to say hello. Britt Robson, a writer we'd just recently stumbled upon (too late, almost), had pitched Peter on that piece, but we didn't think there'd be room. I simply wanted to use those images, and argued that we'd find room. And then room found us. The lettering comes from my collection of vintage press type. Heh. Wonder what I'll do with all that now...

(A digression about computer-assisted distressed lettering: If you look at it, each letter is identical in its distress. Not mine, darn it. It's individual in its distress. As, I suppose, am I! Accept no fakes.)

A couple other notes about photo shoots. Alice Wheeler, who also goes back to The Rocket and was kind enough to show at my short-lived (co-owned, with Carl Carlson) gallery, Vox Populi, was also kind enough to shoot Sera Cahoone when we assigned that piece at the last moment, and wanted it made clear that Ms. Cahoone didn't have dandruff, that was an unseasonable Seattle snowfall. Though it snowed there some weeks after, as well.

The Dan Tyminski shoot, courtesy Milwaukee-based photographer Deone Jahnke, who was willing to drive to Nashville for this small commission (and, I hope, for other work!), ended up being a different kind of problem. Deone had shot Dan with his mandolin as a courtesy, as an extra, because he has a new sponsorship deal with the mando maker. It occurred to nobody, until the magazine was already on press, that we shouldn't use those shots since he doesn't play mandolin on his new album. Adam Steffey does that. Now...I'd chosen that photo because it was so at odds with his "Man Of Constant Sorrow" fame and the dreary seriousness of most bluegrass photos. And because this was an issue which could use some leavening. Management wasn't happy, and I'm sorry about that, but it was too late to fix it and I had managed to so over-use my mouse hand as to be unable even to contemplate redesigning such a simple spread, much less fighting the printer to stop the presses.

In the process of creating this last issue (and trying to date a handful of my old photos which intruded upon the pages as historical records, if not examples of good photography), I paged through a lot of our back issues. To which end an apology: I sucked as a designer, for years, and I handled photos badly, for years. I never could shoot a decent halftone on a stat camera, but had somehow been taught it was important to gray them back because the press would add ink and darken them back in. Only the press never did, and somehow I never learned better.

When we finally grew the magazine to sufficient size to get on a big, four-color press, and on the paper I'd always wanted us to be printed on (the thin stuff of a few years back, not the shinier paper these last six issues or so have been printed on), I was finally a tolerably adequate designer, and left the photos alone. And they look better for it. I'm astonished Jim Herrington, in particular, but all of my old crew, stuck with me through that.

And now, having achieved a level of tolerable mediocrity, I have a sore right arm and the lingering question of whether I'll ever design another magazine. Maybe I will, maybe not. Maybe print really is dying, but I didn't believe it when RayGun designer David Carson said it, and I don't believe it now.

But what matters now is that it's time to feed the chickens and hope for a few fresh eggs.

Posted by grant on April 29, 2008 7:49 AM | Permalink

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