Magazine designers: an endangered species?

Magazine craft is getting evermore neglected in the publishing industry, and soon those skills could be lost forever

Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash

I have always enjoyed recruiting. Maybe I’m naturally nosey, but I love reading CVs, trawling through portfolios, thinking up questions. And I really like meeting people who want to work in design. To hear someone get excited about a piece of work they have agonised over and poured their soul into is both special and humbling.

Over the past 5 years or so I have interviewed candidates for several roles, ranging from digital designer and art editor to acting art director. Each time I have been struck by the same realisation: there are hardly any young magazine designers. I’m not just talking about the fresh-faced recent graduates; I mean anyone under the age of 35.

I’m sure we can all work out the reasons for this – it applies across the magazine publishing industry: if you’re a designer, writer or photography enthusiast, you aren’t going to make good money working in magazines. Not this side of the year 2000.

Nope. Those of us in magazines stubbornly continue to work in this industry because it’s what we’ve always done, what we’re good at and because we love it.

The result of this ageing magazine design population is that as our peers retire or (very commonly) get paid to shuffle off in favour of someone cheaper, we, as an industry, should probably be asking a question: who will design magazines of the future?

Because designing print magazines isn’t about throwing pictures on a page and pouring text into a template. Proper magazine design is a craft. That may sound wanky, but I don’t care. I was mentored over a period of years by excellent art directors, in person. They taught me how not simply present content, but to express it so that readers understand what the journalist is trying to tell them in a better, more digestible way.

When designing a print page, the aim is to catch the eye of the person flicking through the magazine; to stop them in their tracks and capture their attention until, before they know it, they’ve read the whole article. I learnt beautiful, technical, geeky ways to make excellent magazines.

Those brilliant art directors taught me all about grid systems, column widths, colour, image choice, size of headlines, kerning, page furniture. They encouraged me to have the confidence and to make time to ask questions of editors and sub editors. ‘Is there any chance we could take this par out of the body copy and put it in a boxout?’ ‘Would this work as a graphic?’ ‘Can I have a shorter headline please?’ All these wonderfully collaborative and intelligent conversations that would end up making the content more engaging for whoever ended up reading it.

Watch any magazine art director get misty-eyed talking about a particularly good grid system. They’ll probably want to talk about it for a long, long time

There is an argument that a lot of magazine craft is transferable to digital platforms and to other areas of design. But that all-important best practice specific to print magazines is currently only held in the brains of the few hundred remaining magazine designers who have crafted issues month-in, month out; basic, yet crucial skills, passed down through generations of art directors, like blacksmiths teaching apprentices to make horse shoes. And as these old-school magazine designers start to depart from the business, there is a very real danger that their knowledge will leave with them.

It’s not just the technicalities of magazine design that is in danger of extinction, but the pictorial side too. As the inevitable happens and many print magazines move to a wholly digital version, the way in which they present their content will change. The perceived wisdom is that in order for content to work well across digital platforms, you have to be literal in how you present your articles. To stop someone from scrolling, your picture choice needs to loudly shout what the piece is about, without nuance, challenging concept or double meaning. It needs to be Ronseal: Does what it says on the tin.

Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash

Magazine designers are nearing extinction. You’ll miss us when we’re gone. Even the snappy ones

Does this mean that the use of conceptual imagery or an interesting typographical treatment is a thing of the past? Is asking your audience to look, to pause and to think such a bad thing? Perhaps with the rise of Apple News and the associated interest in linger time, conceptual illustrators may still have a role to play. I bloody hope so.

For the past few years, I have art directed a monthly magazine for the over 50s. With the audience, along comes subject matter of features that is at times, erm, challenging to make glamorous. There was that fascinating article (and it really was interesting) on how to improve bladder weakness. I ended up using a stock image of water running from a tap, with the headline ‘Leaking secrets’. Or the piece we published on the rise of older people sleeping in separate beds. I illustrated this with my daughter’s Sylvanian Families rabbits (see below). If you apply the rules of ‘must be Ronseal’ to either of these features, the images you’d end up using would be boring at best, and in the case of the bladder story, really icky. We also lose the playfulness, the creativity that taps into culture and makes the content appeal to real-life humans.

Whoever came up with this headline deserves a pat on the back. Bravo subeditor, bravo

An entire weekend was dedicated to making a rabbit house out of cardboard – all in the name of magazine craft

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for expanding our content over digital platforms. I have always embraced the online presence of magazine brands and how video, social and audio can enhance content. When I was at BBC Focus Magazine, way back in 2008, our editor, Paul, was exploring the possibilities of YouTube and podcasting. One of my last issues working on the magazine was hilariously interrupted with a day of building and testing a potato bazooka all in the name of creating content (we called it ‘filming’ back then).

Magazine brands can exist across platforms, this is long established. We just need to ensure that we are still doing our best work, we are still writing and presenting journalism brilliantly and not patronising our audiences. Making that video showing potatoes being blasted across a playing field in 2008 didn’t stop us from having 132 pages of well-crafted, excellently written and thoughtfully designed editorial in the print issue.

So what’s the answer? The goal has to be to teach a new generation of designers how to make magazines. More junior designer positions on magazines would help. It’s true that 20 years ago there was more time, more staff and more money so we felt able to invest in teaching young designers magazine craft. But even as teams are cut to the bone and more output is expected, perhaps a few hours a year in a design workshop might help preserve some of this knowledge. Even if it simply inspires designers to question how their content design could work harder. Audiences and ultimately the bottom line would surely feel the benefit.

Perhaps the PPA and the BSME need to work with universities and art colleges more to promote magazine design. Because if, as an industry we sit back and allow magazine craft to become extinct, who are we to complain if our kids and grandkids choose to scroll bland, meaningless drivel rather than read an article.

And in 2026, as the quality of the content we consume becomes thinner, more immediate and more stupid, perhaps we need to take a look at what good content is and how we present it to entice an audience.

Surely we should be trying harder to nourish the minds of our audiences. In a world of brain rot, perhaps we should be making compost?

www.jesshibbert.co.uk