THE TREND IS - There is No Trend

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 2004

Byline: Roger Black

It is tempting to use Napster as the metaphor for what is going on in magazine design. Pop music has been transformed by the Internet download. All genres and eras of music are available simultaneously, and you don't have to wait for the album. Golden oldies, unsigned wannabes, this year's Grammy winners - are all equally available. The barrier to entry is lower, but the market is cluttered. In this digital fog the audience is vastly more diverse and really global.

The record companies may have to wait for another cultural shift (or a giant hit) to find out what is really going on. In our business, we are suffering from a downturn at the newsstands and, like the record labels, we have no superstars to lead us. In the magazine world in 2004, no transcendent design trend, no Neville Brody, no Fred Woodward, no David Carson, no Rockwell Harwood are on the horizon. There are '70s design revivals, '80s revivals, and soon '90s revivals - just as everything from the Kinks, to, uh, Disco Tex and the Sexolettes, is floating in cyberspace, waiting for a download.

Okay, then, what are we seeing on the newsstand?

Celebrities: I keep thinking that, like the dollar, the market rate for celebrities will decline. But don't hold your breath.

Products: The still life rules. Forget models, we don't have the budget.

Blurred vision: For layouts, we are seeing multiple multiple-image pages. Instead of the simple presentations of Sam Antupit's Esquire (full-bleed picture on the left, three columns of text on the right, with an elegant headline across the top), we get the twitchy, irony-laden collage pages of Maxim.

The end of the single-image poster aesthetic is credited to our shrinking attention span, which must have the same inexorable cause as the obesity epidemic. Both are eminently curable but again don't hold your breath.

Retro Typography: Fonts are either retro or generic. The intricately hip typefaces of the '90s have evidently been deleted from our systems.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

In the early years of the Web, you'd hear the comment that Web sites don't really tell stories. The narrative is entirely in the minds of the users. This may be what is happening to magazines. Thirty years ago, a column was 1,200 words. Now it's 500. Then we had one item to a page, with a sidebar. Now we have six items. Then we had 40-page feature wells. Now seldom can you turn the pages without encountering an ad.

But the new news on the Net is blogging, which fills an evident need for storytelling (on the part of the reader as well as the writer). Maybe magazines will take the hint and return to telling stories. The New Yorker, once commercially dubious, has roared back to life with the narrative form. Now all we have to do is attach an art director to this idea. To tell picture stories. That might get people to pick up more magazines. Here's another novel solution to the newsstand (and subscription) problem: originality in design.

These days, designers seem as concerned with sales as circulation managers, and editors talk like publishers about product development, branding and market share. It's probably healthy that we've left the design-for-design's sake ivory tower. But maybe we've gone too far when all the magazines start using the exact same devices to heighten sales: Step back a few feet in the "main line" at the grocery store and the magazines blur. Celebrities, carefully retouched, smiling brightly, gaze at you, surrounded by colorful headlines (pushing great abs, carb-free diets and a better time in bed) set in contemporary, sans-serif fonts. Which magazine do we have here? Who cares?

We continue working the newsstand as if there were some kind of secret sauce that can be poured on the cover to make it sell. We know, for example, that numbers seem to get people's attention. (I like 101.) Then someone says, if one number works, let's try five of them. Or eight. And then pop them out in bigger colors and bigger type.

But if everyone uses the same trick, will it continue to do the trick? And who says it's all about newsstand sales anyway? Most of the revenue of magazines is from advertising - and that is based on circulation, and most of that comes from subscriptions. Shouldn't we be designing for the long haul - the satisfaction of the regular, paying customers and not the occasional impulse buyers? The usual explanation for exaggerating the importance of newsstand numbers is that they are the one indicator that there is good word-of-mouth for a magazine. Maybe it's time for one magazine to break out of the newsstand pack and do something original, striking and effective. And you know what? We'll all copy it.

Roger Black, chairman of Danilo Black Inc., has designed and redesigned magazines and Web sites for everybody from Newsweek to the National Enquirer.