Recently in Design Category

Part 26: The Final Layout

Now that the back-and-forth with the hed and dek had subsided (settling on The Kaufman Paradox), I looked to making my final moves with the layout. Normally, I'd like more time to consider a design more carefully, but we had to make do with the remaining time we had. I took into consideration the pacing of the November feature well and the positioning of this story at the end of the magazine. It was definitely calling for a more impactful typographic hit since the well lacked a forceful piece of design done with type only, let alone big type. True, it's a cliché with designers, the "just make the type huge" move, but in this case, I felt like it was warranted. So I made the headline larger and the dek a bit smaller, looking for awkwardness in the way I ragged the copy.
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Part 22: "The Wrong Theory"

After my disastrous presentation to Chris, I slunk back into work on Tuesday and tried a new tact. I figured I would go completely stark, something strange and awkward. I received a new headline: "Charlie Kaufman, The Director's Cut" and started to play. I threw together a secondary spread, just to have something to work backward from. It looked like this:… MORE

Part 18: Opener Progress

Overnight, I thought about the opener and reread my previous post. I thought about how to make the content a little more front and center, how to make the opening spread a little more interesting and a little more visually dynamic. Typically, it's pretty easy to recognize a profile's subject--there's usually a photo or an illustration of the protagonist. In this case, there isn't a usable main image (by choice, obviously. I could have just commissioned an illustration of Kaufman, but chose not to. That's the easy way out, plus we were hoping to get a self-portrait of the man.)
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Part 17: Designing the Opener

Time for design. But first, a little about the WIRED design department and how we work. It consists of me, design director Wyatt Mitchell, art directors Carl DeTorres and Maili Holiman, associate art director Margaret Swart, senior designer Christy Sheppard, and contributing designers Walter Baumann and Victor Krummenacher.
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Part 16: Starting the Layout

On September 4, I started thinking seriously about the layout and what the design should look like. Given the troubles we had been having securing a photograph of Charlie, I started leaning toward a design that could live independent of a great portrait or a stylish piece of typography. The other thing on my mind was the GEB undercurrent Jason had tapped into and I started to wonder about running the rough draft in the layout. I put together a sketch and sent it to the gang to gauge their opinion and test its feasibility.  … MORE