AN APPRECIATION
By Adam Moss
Editor, The New York Times Magazine
(1993–2003)

I’m not sure that I ever saw Janet design anything. I mean that in the concrete sense, like with her hands. Instead of her hands, she used her brain, her gigantic brain. She is a designer of ideas. (My apologies to all the other designers who may be reading this, but she is the brainiest designer I’ve ever known.) And her heart is as big as her brain.

At the Times Magazine, she hired a bunch of wildly talented, well, kooks. And then she nurtured them, guided them. Sometimes, it seemed to me, she mothered them, to make something like the things she saw in her head. She was very much like an editor in that way. And then there is that eye. I’ve always thought that she sees differently from most of us. She sees with an artist’s eye, a minimalist’s mostly, entering through a door that we didn’t know was there. Reducing, then clarifying. And it is her original, just-exactly-enough, elegant vision that I think made her the design colossus whom you’re celebrating today.

I congratulate her and thank her as well for teaching me to be an editor, enthralled with the smart, complexly simple, and always gorgeous design that is her signature.