Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a three-part column by Allen You.

The most essential element of any magazine is design. It is everything that is not the mere choice of words. Design is what makes a magazine a distinguishable form, yet Northwestern campus magazines rarely reflect on what they’re doing design-wise.

The dominant design method of magazine stories is to fill any page space not filled by the story’s text with independent visuals. This is done by representing, in the most immediate way, the subject of the text through photography or illustration without altering the story’s essence.

For example, if the story is about football, the designer will draw a football or take a photo of a player and put it next to the text. There are, of course, better and worse attempts at this, but on the level of intent, this filler method has been problematic since the proliferation of web publications.

If a story in a magazine can be republished on the web with no drawbacks, then why even bother with the added difficulties of the magazine? A story can appear on the web with little or no visual flourish and still achieve the mere fact of publication, which is the primary aim of today’s writers — mission accomplished!

When the story and design are practically distinct, designs become pure decoration. While they may look pretty or cute, such ornaments are irredeemable when considering the sheer cost incurred by their production. The thousands of dollars spent printing these magazines could be better used elsewhere — on a better magazine, perhaps.

Ineffectual designs may have been fine 30 years ago, when there was no other place to publish certain stories, and this method could be justified on the grounds of bare necessity. Now with the web, these designs appear superfluous and lame, like gross excesses that persist just because they can.

Even designs containing amazing photography or illustrations without an effective arrangement don’t refuse the story’s potential publication on the web, which can more readily host most photos and illustrations.

The ineptitude of designs to justify their own existence actually points to the deeper issue of the subordination, during production, of designers to writers. In brief, writers don’t consider the design when they write, but designers must consider the story when they design.

Because magazines write and design the same issue all in one quarter, designers are forced to work with a story constantly changing through revisions, edits or even total transformations of the subject matter. And because designers can’t change the stories themselves, they are essentially forced into a position of constant reaction to fit a design onto a story.

This leaves designs in a precarious state up until the last few days before print. Writers are supposed to comment on how they would like their stories to be depicted. But on the one hand, they don’t have the requisite design knowledge to know what is possible or good, and on the other hand, they don’t care.

All this compounds and necessitates the use of the filler method by designers, since they’re forced to design around the story in order to preserve the story as is. So really, designers are discouraged from making creative visual choices that could impact the story. Thus, today’s magazine designs are, at best, the overly sweet icing on a mediocre cake, and at their worst, they look like quotas that were met begrudgingly.

What must change? Design, like any other craft, requires ability, judgment and creative ambition. Even if editors were to adjust their attitudes towards design, it would not significantly improve the situation without the hands of able designers.

Higher-level design methodologies are only possible with the right staff. At NU, we lack such concentrated talent, as designers are mostly inexperienced and unambitious. But every so often, a handful of relatively impressive spreads underline the fact that people are able and actually want to make effective designs. There’s an untapped potential, yet nobody wants to harness it.
The inadequacy of a design staff could be solved in a number of ways. The easiest is to simply make the recruiting process selective. Currently, publications will let just about anyone design a page, so it’s no wonder magazines look bad.

If a magazine wanted to immediately improve its designs, it could impose rigorous requirements to be considered for the staff. Of course, this would exclude a majority of potential designers, leaving a measly portion of actually experienced designers to run the ship. But it’s a tradeoff of quantity for quality. The designs would be better at the expense of the sheer number of pages a publication could produce in a quarter.

The much harder way would be to organize an actual system of education. Campus publications naturally have high turnover due to graduation, and it’s clearly unsustainable to rely on spontaneous talent to emerge and raise the average level of ability. What would be necessary is a passing down of knowledge from one staff to the next.

Many publications have a rudimentary system of teaching basic InDesign skills, but this is only an effort to procure the bare minimum knowledge for people who have never designed before so they don’t disrupt regular production. A substantial education would require the transfer of highly advanced skills in digital design and visual art. At the moment, this is essentially impossible, as not even a single current designer at NU could really claim to be this learned.

As such, the true path forward must be a process of self-education. Only through legitimate efforts of experimentation, discussion and persistent external education could a designer or group of designers advance their design abilities. This could risk the production of disastrously failed designs in the development of a new design method.

Yet the publication would likely have to promise to print these designs anyway if there is to be any real motivation to realize them. I would argue that even failures would be more pleasant to look at than most current designs, but that may be optimistic. Either way, this seems to be the only way to cultivate the abilities necessary to move beyond the inadequate design ideas that dominate the status quo.

Perhaps the only publication that could initially support such an endeavor would be a design-oriented magazine, which would sharply emphasize the primacy of design in their modus operandi.

Such an environment would support and, in theory, embrace the risk that their designs would want to take in order to experiment and progress. A staff structure where the designers are at the helm would mirror – and therefore be motivated through – the actual necessities of magazine production in the face of the web.

It would be dismissive to say that such changes are simply not happening. A new crop of NU magazines are advancing the issue of design in a rudimentary but organic fashion. nuAZN (since its reestablishment) and CRUSH are both producing pure photo spreads, designs that cannot be replicated on the web because they uniquely work within the limits of the magazine page space.

I’m not privy to the exact rationale for such a decision. But whatever the reason, it’s a welcome (but still insufficient) development. Whether the concept can be developed further will be up to these magazines, and I wouldn’t write this essay if I wasn’t a little optimistic that they could.

To do so, they must register the question of design as a crisis posed by the web. Only then can they do something no NU magazine has done before: design effectively.

Allen You is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.