Sasha Erwitt, Photographer & Photo Editor

Sasha Erwitt: The first magazine I fell in love with was YM, and it was a lifegoal, realized, when I got to work there as a Photo Editor in 2003. I was a fan of the magazine back in the mid 90s when I was at boarding school and frequently in search of personal grooming tips, quizzes to find out what kind of person I was, relevant celebrity profiles and social etiquette quandaries. Searching for answers on the Internet was not a thing yet. I loved the practical knowledge combined with entertainment and lifestyle info that the magazine provided. They always had the best celebs -- Liv Tyler, the 90210 cast members, Marky Mark... it wasn't edgy like Sassy or cheesy like Seventeen. 

I'm not sure who the creatives were at the time I fell in love with the magazine but when I got there in 2003 there was an amazing team in place - Elizabeth Kiester the fashion director brought so much passion and heart to every project and made things FUN. Amy Demas was the Creative Director who shared Elizabeth's vision & attitude and welcomed my photography input. 

I think I've always been drawn to photos with that same general vibe: dynamic, environmental, happy and natural, and not edgy-for-edginess-sake.

www.sashaerwitt.com

Ash Barhamand, Visual Media Director at WWD

Ash Barhamand: I discovered Sassy when I was in middle school - probably 1994. My family had just moved abroad to Hong Kong, and in those pre-internet days magazines were my regular dose of American culture, not to mention information about sex and bodies that I wouldn’t dare ask anyone. I loved many teen girl magazines (Seventeen, YM, Tiger Beat) but as all fans will attest, Sassy was truly special. The cover lines were smart and rebellious and articles featured the likes of Chloe Sevigny, Harmony Korine and Kim Gordon (who I only now appreciate for being so ahead of their time). Most importantly I trusted the Sassy editors. If they told me someone was interesting, I was interested. If they stated a fact, I believed it. And they never led me astray. Their articles were committed to authenticity, useful information and a healthy questioning of the status quo. 

I never thought that much about the design or photography at the time, but looking back I can see how the visual decisions reflected perfectly the purpose of the editorial. The type was loose and arranged with the photos like a scrapbook, the photography was raw and candid, especially by contemporary standards of the 90s high gloss aesthetic. As for the creatives, as far as I can tell the art side was done in Australia and I haven’t encountered that team- but the editor in chief was Jane Pratt who I did pursue knowing by working as an intern in the photo department at the eponymous Jane magazine which launched shortly after Sassy folded. I found the same irreverent spirit was evident in the pages of Jane especially in early editions - though as the magazine climate became more competitive I think the room for anti-establishment perspectives especially in the female market became squeezed and all but vanished. Now I think we are seeing authenticity and alternate perspectives being championed and demanded by young audiences again, but in media other than traditional magazines. So, I like to think Sassy was a pioneer of honesty in women’s media that is relevant now just as ever. 

In my own work as a photo director, I aim to uphold authenticity photographically by limiting retouching, seeking a diverse talent pool, and trusting my own instincts even when the easy route may be to copy the competition. Most importantly, I try to collaborate with creatives who share the same values so we can make something greater than what we could alone. Even if that’s something as superficial as a story about braiding hair, I think the audience can tell if it’s done with integrity, and that matters.

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Robert Newman, Creative Director at This Old House

Robert Newman: Ramparts was the first magazine I ever bought that wasn’t Mad, Creepy, or a comic book. Almost 50 years later, I still have that issue and I still draw on it for inspiration. Ramparts was like no magazine I had ever seen. Underground and political newspapers and publications from that time were filled with passionate, riotous design, multiple typefaces, scratchy artwork, and muddy photographs. This issue of Ramparts was simple, cool, and understated, using just one typeface and a generous amount of white space. The design seemed at odds with the magazine’ edgy political editorial content. To a 16-year-old infatuated with the New Left and the student revolution, this was a heady and intoxicating mix. I fell in love with the magazine and especially with art director Dugald Stermer’s strong, simple design and powerful graphics. It was the first real magazine that spoke to me and the first one that made me notice its design.

SPD: What year?
RN: 1969

SPD: What were you up to?
RN: I was in high school, in the suburbs outside of Buffalo. In my head I was wrestling with the big issues of the day—the Vietnam War, black power. And trying to reconcile the liberal beliefs I had inherited from my parents with the radical movements that were shaking things up. In a few months I was organizing anti-war protests and marches at school with my friends.

SPD: What magazine?
RN: Ramparts. The first issue I bought featured a young kid on the cover holding a Vietcong flag and a headline that said “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” I later found out that the boy on the cover was the son of the magazine’s art director, Dugald Stermer. The magazine blew my mind (as we said back then). But it was really hard to find anywhere in my town; nobody would carry it because it was such a radical magazine. So I went downtown to one of the cutout bookstores, a place where newsstands dumped their magazines after they went off sale. The news agents would rip off the front cover logo/masthead and return it to the distributors for credit, then they’d sell the magazines for pennies to the cutout store, who would sell back issues for 10 cents or a quarter. I bought all the old copies of Ramparts that they had, most of them luckily still with the cover logos. And I started my subscription a couple months later. [You can see one of those cutout issues here, featuring the Diary of Che Guevara and a cover illustration by Milton Glaser.]

SPD: What was it that so enthralled you?
RN: The Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Chicago 8, Che, women’s liberation… I didn’t understand all of Ramparts, including the design, but I spent hours and hours reading it and trying to deconstruct what they were trying to say. The design was probably the most disconcerting part of the magazine for me. All the examples of underground and radical newspapers and magazines that I had seen at the time were raw and funky, with edgy (or untrained) design and imagery that matched the passionate content. Radical publications were supposed to look like The Black Panther newspaper or the East Village Other. Ramparts was the opposite—totally understated and sedate. Stermer used only one typeface—Times Roman—throughout the entire magazine. The cover headlines were quiet; sometimes they appeared in small type above the logo. And there was a generous use of white space on the feature openers. The result was a simple, powerful design where the text and images felt heavy by comparison.

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were?
RN: Dugald Stermer was the art director until mid-1970. His deputy/production manager was John Williams, who became consulting AD after Stermer left, and produced some striking covers. Williams went on to be the first art director of Rolling Stone, and did a lot to establish the basic DNA of that magazine. Rolling Stone’s studied (and limited) range of typography posited against bold photos and illustrations is straight out of the Ramparts design playbook. Williams’ assistant AD was Louise Kollenbaum, who went on to be the founding art director of Mother Jones. Of course it was only years later that I discovered Stermer’s earlier Ramparts work, from 1966-68. His covers rivaled George Lois at Esquire for creativity and provocation, although his were done with a fraction of the budget. Great illustrators graced the pages of Ramparts: Milton Glaser, Ed Sorel, Paul Davis, even Norman Rockwell. And Stermer did illustrations himself, including a cool cover portrait of Huey Newton. 

SPD: How does that inform your creative now?
RN: I’d like to say that everything I do has felt Ramparts’ influence, but realistically you go where the magazine and circumstances (and the editors) take you. However, left to my own devices I do go back to that simple design palette of type, color, and design that Stermer developed at Ramparts. And the idea that a magazine’s design is so essential to its overall voice and identity (or what we call “the brand” today). More importantly, I think Ramparts inspired me to realize that working with magazines gives you the chance to reach an audience with a message, to do something groundbreaking and provocative and maybe even change the world for the better. And times being what they are right now I think the magazine world could use more examples like Ramparts. We need all the inspiration we can get!

Follow Robert Newman on Twitter: @Newmanology

Dawn Sinkowski, Photography Director at Martha Stewart

SPD: What year?
Dawn Sinkowski: 1999

SPD: What were you up to?
DS: I was in New York, living on 21st St & 10th Ave. This was my sophomore year at Parsons. I would've been working three jobs, hanging at Mona's and Max Fish and dragging myself to class on occasion.

SPD: What magazine?
DS: Nest

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SPD: What was it that so enthralled you?
DS: I loved that this publication was wholly unconcerned with depicting sanity.

It was an unbridled celebration of eccentric living. The images and stories did not anesthetize their subject's aesthetics and did not pander to taste. It was decidedly not about decor. Each story was like peeking in the window of a crazy, fascinating character's home. There was commitment on every page. I love the energy in the pages and how it didn't try to appeal to everyone. In a way, I think it would be right at home with the niche journals being published today. I have to mention the physical, printed object of it: die cut pages, abnormal, irregular shapes that would never fit into pockets. Luscious thick issues with scant ads to be found. The whole venture was decadent and completely over the top.

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were?
DS: Joseph Holtzman drove the bus, he was the founder, EIC and art director. Contributing editors included Simon Doonan, Todd Oldham, Catherine Opie, Martin Parr, Richard Tuttle and DJ Spooky, to name a few.

SPD: How does that inform your creative now?
DS: Wow. Well, Nest sets a high bar. It feels like part of the philosophy was to work with dynamic, talented people and get out of their way- to give creatives enough space to create. I strive for that when commissioning work.

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Lia Clay, Photographer

Lia Clay: I started reading TAR Magazine when I was 17 years old. A person that I had a rather romantic pen pal relationship with used to send me it from New York. As many teenagers finding their way into the spectrum of other artists and photographers, Ryan McGinley was god. Part of Ryan’s initial series “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” was in the first issue. I remember associating with the types of models he used — often with androgynous features. As someone struggling with gender identity, this new found rebellion against conservative body standards that I was taught growing up with in the South was sort of a revelation. In the spring of 2009, Tar released a cover with Kate Moss by Damien Hirst. It was a photograph of Kate with half of her face, revealing the muscles and tendons underneath her skin. It went along with this article that stated something like “Kate Moss is Never Going To Die.” It was a satirical piece on how Kate had an underground laboratory that was keeping her young forever. It was my last few months before I graduated high school, and immortalized the feeling of being young in the time right before I left home for college. It’s been almost a decade since I first started reading Tar, and even though I am looking forward more and more to growing older,  I will forever remember the feeling that magazine gave me as a teenager. 

SPD: What year? 
LC: 2008/09

SPD: What were you up to? 
LC: I was a teenager, wrestling with the ideas of gender, sexuality, and leaving home.

SPD: What magazine?
LC: Tar Magazine

SPD: What was it that so enthralled you? 
LC: There was a resonance of youth that I was drawn to. It really epitomized a lot of the things I was feeling, and gave me an association to something outside of what I grew up with. Growing up, I always felt out of place. I was grasping on to everything I could to help me find a sense of attachment to another world where I could start to understand myself. 

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were? 
LC: Evanly Schindler + Maurizio Marchiori

SPD: How does that inform your creative now? 
LC:  It was definitely a beginning. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. There’s representations of things I did when I was taking pictures at 17 because it’s where I began to grow artistically, but I think over the past decade, my work has changed so much that maybe it’s best as something to be nostalgic about, rather than inform what I do now. As much as I gravitated towards those images because it was similar to my body type, which ironically was categorized as ‘different’ from growing up in North Carolina, it also glorified an idealized version of youth and representation that is something we are trying to change now. 

www.liaclay.com/

Tom O'Quinn, Creative Director at Thrillist

SPD: What year?
Tom O'Quinn: 1986

SPD: What were you up to?
TO: 15 years-old. Living in Red Deer, Alberta, dying my hair black and sneaking into punk clubs with my older sister in Edmonton. Keep in mind the legal drinking age in Alberta is 18, so it really wasn’t that big of a deal.

SPD: What magazine?
TO: SMASH HITS

SPD: What was it that so enthralled you?
TO: At that age, all you care about is defining your identity. SMASH HITS was a UK magazine but we got it in Canada as well. It was so much cooler than any American magazine available to me at the time and was really cutting edge in terms of photography and type. The subject matter was mostly popular British bands with some American stuff thrown in. Looking at it today it seems almost cute, but at the time it was very “insider”. I found my escape from small-town life through this magazine and also through MuchMusic and MusiquePLus, the Canadian equivalent to MTV. Toronto was where it was all happening back then…but I ended up in Vancouver and then Los Angeles before coming to NYC.

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were?
TO: I have no idea, but it would be so interesting to talk to them. Patrick Nagel did Duran Duran’s Rio cover and had a huge influence on 80s design, so he was probably the first illustrator/designer that made me want to have a creative career. In the late 80s and early 90s, I started reading The Face, which was my second love…so Neville Brody was probably the first magazine designer I can identify who had an impact on me. And Vaughn Oliver of course for music packaging….

SPD: How does that inform your creative now?
TO: I tend to design big with lots of dramatic type and color… and then pull back. There was a period before magazines where I designed corporate annual reports, so I learned refined typography by reading The Elements of Typographic Style and by designing lots of financial charts printed on 100% cotton paper. My first Art Director job was with Out magazine, and that’s when I knew I loved working in pop culture and entertainment more than anything else. Now I am working 100% in the digital space, with a growing focus on video. So it some ways it’s come back full circle for me, using those initial inspirations of music videos to inform what I do now. Not a lot of typesetting beautiful paragraphs of copy anymore, but using type, image and motion to tell stories in different, exciting ways.

Rachel Gogel, Creative Director

Rachel Gogel: I fell in love with GQ Magazine in 2005.

Who would have thought that six years later I would land a job at this iconic publication?

The truth is, I've always been drawn to editorial design, typography and layout. Since I traveled a lot with my family growing up, purchasing magazines at airports for long-distance flights happened often. In high school, designing covers and pages for our annual Yearbook was the next best thing to working in publishing.

Once I moved to the United States from France in 2005 to attend university, I read all kinds of magazines — Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and New York Magazine — but my all time favorite was always GQ for its cool visualizations, bold colors and witty custom lettering. And you may have guessed by now, but I chose to major in Communication Design.

I aspired to work for a magazine one day and became fascinated by Fred Woodward, who is being honored at this year's SPD Gala. In 2001, Woodward moved from Rolling Stone and became editorial design director of GQ, instantly transforming the publication and injecting his delightful, creative and innovative work into the brand's look and feel. I was lucky to land a few internships in publishing throughout my college years that would hopefully bring me closer to that dream.

When I graduated in 2009, I moved to New York without a job and spent hours in a Borders bookstore (RIP *sad face*) looking at mastheads and writing down designers’ and art directors’ names from my favorite magazines. GQ was my main target but the job market that year was not great and I had to keep my options open. (The best part about this sheet of paper is that I recognize or have met several of these people since, thanks to SPD and my work in the industry.)

Unfortunately though, after reaching out to as many people as I could, I only heard back from a handful. While disappointed, I remained optimistic. I worked at DVF and Travel + Leisure before GQ became a freelance client of mine (I built a site for them in Wordpress!) thanks to old contacts on the marketing team. Suddenly, I felt like I was getting closer to my teenage ambition.

Flash forward to summer of 2011: a former boss of mine from a Condé Nast internship had left GQ and there was suddenly an opening. I put my name in the hat, and soon after was hired as Associate Art Director on the business side. The role came with high expectations for quality and Woodward-like executions. Our clients came to us for what our sales team pitched as editorial-caliber branded content and infographics. My goal was to find a balance and create a complementary aesthetic that put our advertorials on the map without confusing our readers.

Other than Fred Woodward, who left the title last year after sixteen years, I now know that other creatives involved on the editorial side were Anton Ioukhnovets, Chelsea Cardinal, Drue Wagner, Michael Pangilinan, Rob Hewitt, Benjamin Bours, Andre Jointe, Delgis Canahuate, Eve Binder and many more. I learned so much and was inspired every day until I left as design director of marketing in 2014 for a new gig at The New York Times. 

Needless to say, I'll never forget my first crush, GQ Magazine, since it kickstarted my lifelong love of design.

Follow Rachel on Instagram

Nichole Washington, Visual Artist

Nichole Washington: As a young girl I loved the experience of reading a magazine from start to finish in one sitting. I would wait for the perfect time to lay out on my bed, turn on my radio and have a solo chill session. I always started at the beginning and gave my attention to every page, even the ads. Magazines like Seventeen were really great because there was loads of entertaining info packed in each issue. I could read a personal interview on the cover star, check out the latest fashion trends, and take a fun quiz at the end!

SPD: What year?
NW: Mid to late 90s

SPD: What were you up to?
NW: I was a young girl day dreaming of leaving Minnesota to finally live a cool and confident life.

SPD: What magazine?
NW: Seventeen

SPD: What was it that so enthralled you?
NW: I loved how fun and casual the magazine was and there would always be a cool pop star on the cover. The inside layout had a cut and paste feel and there were a lot of exciting things to look at on just one page. Every element was a part of the design from brightly colored text to the cut out images. 

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were?
NW: No, not at the time. 

SPD: How does that inform your creative now?
NW: Having obsessively flipped through pages of Seventeen Magazine for at least 10 years of my life has definitely influenced my creative aesthetic. My color palettes is usually very bright and I am more interested in the unique expression of a design rather than it being technically perfect. It is most important that my spirit and identity are present in my work. 

www.nicholewashington.com