So What's Happening With Design?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2003

Byline: Katie Caperton

If you're looking for ingenious new ways to fuse paper into design, skip right over the edit pages and head for the ads. Tight budgets and high postal rates aren't leaving much room for magazine art directors and editors to experiment with daring paper designs, but advertisers don't have the same restraints.

At the big glossies, advertisers are opting for larger gatefolds, says David Matt, design director for New York Magazine. "I'm seeing tons and tons of inserts inside of magazines," he says. "It seems that the advertising market is going nutty with thicker paper inserts."

That's not to say that there aren't any magazines flirting with different paper stocks. Innovation can still be found among the smaller design-focused titles, says Steven Heller, senior art director for the New York Times Book Review. "Something like Nest will always do inserts, but it's an eclectic and eccentric magazine."

At Surface they are applying UV spot coating to a thicker stock for covers and supplements so the reader clearly sees a combination of high gloss and matte, creating the "subtle design," says publisher Richard Klein.

And architecture title Metropolis is using a thicker opaque paper for its feature wells. "We want to get the idea that [the feature well] was to be read," says publisher Horace Havemeyer III. "So we wanted that kind of book paper where you're not getting blinded by the reflection of the coating."

In more mainstream mags, Ladies' Home Journal upped its paper quality from 32 lb. to 38 lb. to avoid the bleed-through associated with cheaper pages. According to LHJ's creative director, Scott Yardley, "With the whiter and heavier paper, there's no show-through with what's on the opposite side of the page, so the pages of the editorial can be read much clearer." And competitor Woman's Day followed suit, also moving to a heavier, brighter paper in its recent redesign.