Magazine Design In An Interactive Age

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2000 by Jeff Garigliano

The well-known designer on why he sold his company to an Internet firm, the cost of a Roger Black redesign, and what he thinks about Talk, Esquire and the Inflights.

In the past decade, the terms "magazine redesign" and "Roger Black" have become almost synonymous. A one-time art director at both Rolling Stone and The New York Times, Black has reshaped some of the biggest names on the newsstand, including Newsweek, Reader's Digest, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and McCall's. On top of that, he started doing Internet design work in 1994 with the launch of his new media firm, Interactive Bureau.

Last November, Black sold both Interactive Bureau and his print design business, Roger Black Consulting, to a Baltimore-based Internet marketing firm called Circle.com. (It trades on the Nasdaq under CIRC, as a tracking stock of its parent company, Snyder Communications.) Black is now chief creative officer at Circle.com, and Roger Black Consulting is a freestanding division within the larger company. Here he talks about his reasons for selling and gives his take on the current state of magazine design.

Q: Your business seemed to be gaining more and more momentum. Why sell?

A: We were doing well, but we could not grow as fast as the Internet, and the jobs were getting too big for us. We were going to risk getting marginalized if we just stayed little and independent. And we started being denied certain jobs because of things we could not do. For example, we didn't have an engineering division that could do all the back-end work on Web sites.

Q: So what does the sale mean to magazines that want to hire you?

A: It lets us focus on our design work, but also gives clients the benefit of all of Circle.com's stuff, too--like new media marketing and engineers and programmers. They already do a lot of the interactive work for big companies like Volkswagen and UPS. We'll bring to them our publication clients who want to do bigger projects and figure out how they fit into the Internet scale of things.

Increasingly, we find that a lot of our clients are not working across just one channel. For example, we did Red Herring and we did their Web site. Newsweek was a long-time client of ours, and now we're working on the newsweek.msnbc.com site. With Circle.com, we can take what might have been a very interesting media client and offer them a marketing back end--a way of leveraging their relationship with their readers, viewers or customers, and offering products or services that they're likely to be interested in. And it's all under one roof.

Q: How much did you get for the transaction?

A: We're not publicizing the actual amount. Personally, I got a lot of stock and I also got some cash. I was extremely happy. I will say that we were in line with the revenue multiples that have been batted around lately, and we publicly stated we would do over $10 million in revenue last year.

Q: What does a Roger Black redesign cost? The number that's sometimes reported is $250,000 to $500,000.

A: That's for a major redesign of a big consumer magazine. But for a trade or a smaller title we'd charge a lot less. In the early days of my studio, we were doing only the big national publications, but now we're doing quite a few trades and special-interest publications, including Builder and PC Week. The fact that we're doing many different-size projects right now means it's not just the rich guys.

We don't normally price it this way, but on a per-page basis the cost is probably about $3,000 to $5,000 per page. In the case of a large consumer book, where there's research involved and we're running around trying out all sorts of things, the cost increases. But actually, I don't think the fee per page of a redesign has gone up,

Q: Your business grew pretty quickly, and I imagine it became a lot to manage. Does the sale now free you up to devote more of your time to actual designing?

A: Most of my design work now is talking--either working with our designers or talking with the client. I don't miss the hands-on stuff. Every now and then I'll haul off and do a redesign, just so I don't forget how it's done. But you get more results by managing than you do by standing at the design boards. Even when I spent more time doing it, I never got to do the nitty-gritty detail work. I'd be working on templates, and it was always some other designer who did the cover of the magazine.

Q: Which magazine design work do you like right now?

A: I like Esquire lately. I don't know if it's fully back, but it's kind of fun right now. In the March issue, the fashion stuff looked pretty good. And a lot of the typography that [ex-art director] Robert Priest did survived his departure. I thought he had done a very nice job. Esquire has been inconsistent, and I'm the first one to accept blame for that [having spent time in the early 1990s redesigning the book]. I'm not sure that the men's magazines have a valid formula right now, and that gets reflected in the design.

Other than that, the airline magazines look great. Believe it or not, I really like the United Airlines magazine [Hemisphere]. It looks great--I was sort of stunned. And I must say that Talk disappointed me astoundingly. I really expected that it would be great in design, and it just wasn't.