Magazine design was my first job as a creative. Almost every day, I genuinely miss that work. Had I been born thirty years earlier, I’d still be happily designing magazines and books. Sadly, it’s an industry that has struggled with the shifts of the advertising market and reader habits.
But none of that was a concern back in 2005, when I became Managing Editor for American Jewish Life. The publication had been a local, niche project focused on the Jewish community in Atlanta, Georgia. Then it was bought. I was hired, and the owner gave a simple brief:
Make it a national publication. Make it like a Jewish Rolling Stone.
As a writer and editor, I contributed to the content makeover for AJL, as it became referred to. (What can I say? GQ was an influence.) But I let my boss, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Benyamin Cohen take the lead there. Instead I focused on redesigning the look of the magazine.
Magazine Design Influences
In truth, I don’t think we ever really made it feel like Rolling Stone. It is much more Entertainment Weekly meets Esquire. My only goal was to make it look as good as I could make it. I wanted it to feel like a top-tier magazine design you’d see on a newsstand. It just so happened to be about Jewish life.
For me, that meant taking great photography and then playing with typography. I would weave one into the other. I loved molding text into shapes that would compete for your attention. That was definitely a part of “The Black Issue” cover.
Balancing Type and Photography
Another favorite technique was pushing the type into the photos themselves such as the “Women Who Rock” issue. I took that same approach inside “The Black Issue” for the profile of Rashida Jones. I painstakingly etched the letter “Q” from the title into the windows behind her, as she receded into silhouette.
I wanted the letter “Q” to compete with Jones as a focal point, with her on the left page and the type on the right. It took forever to etch that letter into the grime of the windows so it would look at least plausibly real. 
I was always (and still am) a fan of using type and photography to create a three-dimensional quality to a layout. We argued briefly about whether you would be able to tell the word behind him was “Maestro”, so I added into the bar of the initial letter “T”. 
A motif I would revisit a few times at American Jewish Life was the sort of baroque typography of old world biblical texts. This was, I think, the first time I took the ornate shapes to build an entire motif for a layout. 
I carried that emphasis on the ornate type into the interior spread for this article, using it to create a visually interesting frame around the central image on the right page. 
I’ve always utilized grid systems in my designs, and in this case I though it would be fun to make it explicit. I used it to fill in some of the negative space without losing the benefits of negative space, and to also create the sense of a travel journal. 
Another instance of relying on old world typography to connect a layout to its biblical roots. Here it seemed much more necessary, since the whole story was about an author spending a year adhering stritcly to biblical law. 
For the body of the article, I didn’t have much to work with visually. Just a couple headshots, frankly. So I built a timeline and just tried to let the typography carry the rest of the spread. 
This spread is fun, because it shows off one of my house ads for the magazine playing against the opening to the “Women Who Rock” series of articles. 
Type and using literal picture frames as a spotlight on just a wonderful collection of talented “Women Who Rock” was the visual motif for this issue. It was fun to see what I could do with script type, which I don’t work with as frequently. 
The picture frame and stylized typography came to a head at the end of the issue, when I got to build an entire wall of framed photos. Let’s just say, I went through lots of wallpaper options. 
The annual “Fall TV Preview” was a particular challenge. How to keep it fresh and distinct from what we’d done the last year. That we also did a winter movie preview didn’t help, because they fell close to each other. 
One year, I went pretty literal, using leafs and the shape of trees who’d lost all theirs, as a persistent motif from page to page. I always let the initial hero imagery guide my color palette for each issue. 
After doing pretty lush, colorful spreads the first two years, I wanted to do something entirely different for the third “Fall TV Preview”. I went with minimal, ultra modern, blocky type, which is more my comfort zone. 
It was always an extra bonus when I could design the layouts for features I also wrote. I was a big poker player at the time, so this is probably my favorite piece from my time at the magazine.
The Perspective of Hindsight
In the end, I think we succeeded in making a beautiful magazine. We won awards for it, though after three years, I moved on just before it closed down. Whatever we achieved creatively couldn’t survive the business forces in the magazine world.
I do think it holds up… mostly. That is a testament, I think, to how I approached the work. Having never spent a day in art school, I just consumed every magazine I could. Hours were spent at local newsstands and bookstores, flipping through publications to absorb inspiration.
Still, it was some really early work for me, and I was learning magazine design every day. From a distance of years, some of what I designed induces shudders. Everyone starts somewhere, right?