Louanne Welcome to “Covering the Spread, Magazine Design for the Next Age,” a monthly discussion of all things related to our favorite medium, magazines.

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Scott Whether you're a seasoned designer, an aspiring creative, an editor or publisher, or just someone who appreciates the art of storytelling through visuals, this is the place for you.

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Louanne  I’m your host, Louanne Welgoss from LTD Creative, a graphic design firm located in Frederick, Maryland, and I've been working on publications for thirty-two years. You can see our work at LTDCreative.com.

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Scott  And I'm Scott Oldham from Quarto Creative, who's been making magazines for twenty-five years. You can see my work at QuartoCreative.com. And on this podcast, we'll chat with industry experts, designers, editors, and production pros to uncover the secrets of all things magazine.

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Louanne  It's time to turn the page and what you thought you knew and reimagine the future of publishing.

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Louanne Welcome to our newest podcast with Matthew Lenning. He is a creative director who has worked on brands that we have all heard of, including Consumer Reports, Bon Appetit, GQ, Maxim. He’s also worked with Sotheby’s, Vanity Fair, National Geographic and Apple, and he specializes in editorial design, illustration and visual design systems. He’s a former faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York. And today, we’re going to talk to him about a lot of different things, but we’re also going to discuss design intelligence and how AI is shaping the future of visual storytelling. And so with that, I’ll let you, Matthew, introduce yourself to say anything more than I just said.

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Matthew Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here talking design. I’ve really enjoyed the podcast. Looking forward to having a conversation about what’s going on in print and what I’ve been up to, dabbling in AI a little bit and sharing that kind of stuff with the audience, that hopefully can take a little fear out of it. And maybe we can all learn how to leverage these tools.

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Louanne So this is a a timely episode because it’s probably going to come out at Halloween. And AI is scary.

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Matthew Good one.

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Scott Yeah, it’s a frequent bête noire on this podcast. We’ve talked about it, I think with pretty much every guest that we’ve had on so far. We’ve yet to have someone who took a twelve session AI course. So tell us if you would, Matthew, what you learned.

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Matthew Like everybody, I’ve been reading a lot about this on LinkedIn. And speaking of scary, LinkedIn can be a very scary, sad place. One thing that caught my eye in particular was: It’s now about a year out now where Pentagram had caught a lot of heat for using gen AI to produce icons for this website called Performance. You guys familiar with that?

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Louanne I remember this. Yeah.

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Matthew So I love Paula. I love all things Paula. So I was really interested in her take on it. And everyone should watch that. That’s available on YouTube. But I was so fascinated and impressed with the results of the work. And they used it to create icons for a government website which had hundreds of different departments to create icons for. I jumped into this and was really impressed with the consistency and the scalability of that system. Some of the icons were definitely generic, but in a good way. Generic kind of fit the bill for a lot of that assignment that they were given. So that kind of led me on that path. “How do I do that? How can I scale up on an idea like that with consistency?” Because up to that point, I couldn’t get that consistency of creating one visual voice. So that led me to a conversation with another creative friend of mine, and she told me about this course and got me interested in it over lunch, and I thought it would be fun to do it together. It was kind of a biggish check to write. It was twelve hundred bucks or something like that.

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Louanne That’s not too bad.

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Matthew Not too bad, right?

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Louanne It’s one hundred dollars. Just ‘cause it was twelve weeks, right?

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Matthew Yeah. Not bad. What I didn’t expect was we really jumped more into analysis and ways of thinking about solving problems. Getting smart on a problem is what the instructor was telling us about, using market analysis around brands, looking for weaknesses, looking for competition. A lot of it was demonstrations of all the incredible tools that are out there in the market. It seems like there’s one every week. And then some of the actual design exercises, we would build a brand. My objective was to figure out the scalability of design. I think I got fairly close to that and we were using Midjourney. That’s the platform I use, Midjourney. I use them as kind of my partners for helping me with creative thinking and in all other areas of life, too. It wasn’t like intense creative assignments. A lot of it was strategic thinking — which I got a lot of value out of, not just thinking about how to make Midjourney images — how to build better prompts, how to use Claude or ChatGPT to make smarter prompting. I think is helped me quite a bit. It really kicked me off into thinking about how this might be used in the industry. I definitely encourage people who are interested in learning about it to take some steps, get coursework or tutorials or what have you.

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Louanne So this course… They taught you to do A, B and C, we were all taught that when I went to school. But so basically, what you’re saying is what they taught you how to do all of that with the assistance of AI? Is that what you’re saying?

Matthew It doesn’t condense schoolwork into twelve weeks or good design thinking. To cut to the chase, you still have to have a high level of taste. You have to have good judgment. You have to understand if the output is actually solving the problem.

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Louanne Okay, okay.

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Scott Well, the that’s the future that we’re all going to be living in, is that prompt window. That’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives, whether we like it or not. So let’s talk about how to get better at being in that space. What are the keys that you took away to writing better prompts for AI? Let’s talk about imagery.

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Matthew First of all, I think you could just tell it like, “That’s a really corny idea.” Like that. “That’s too cliche. Think deeper. Go deeper with that thinking. This is too obvious. I want you to be more conceptual.”

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Scott You can be that vague with it?

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Matthew You can tell it to be more conceptual.

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Louanne Or don’t you have to be like, “I want the cat riding the bike, chewing the candy, thinking about politics while swimming underwater?”

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Scott I had to make that image yesterday.

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Louanne But you’re telling me I’m wrong. AI has to do the thinking.

Matthew You can spar with it. You can go back and forth. I’ll go into Claude and be like, “I have an idea.” It’s generally my idea. When I jump in to solve an illustration problem, I’m thinking about how to solve this particular problem. I see these elements being included in it. “Yeah, let’s kind of start there. “And then the important piece to this is my mood boards that I have built in Midjourney. So that was the big game changer for me about learning how to use srefs. Someone will post a quad of really interesting looking images on LinkedIn. It’s something they’ve developed so you can then reference that style in your prompt. “Right, right. I love the way that looks.” It’s like a filter, thinking about it that way. You can tag that to the end of your prompt and you’re going to get something in that style. I have different mood boards that I use depending on the type of content I’m trying to solve for. So I have my blog that I write. I have a very curated mood board for that and what I want that to look like. I only include things on there that fit that style. Then it becomes this sort of amalgamation of all those things on the mood board. That’s how I develop consistency. It’s a hyper curated mood board of things I like: color palettes I like, so we’ll stay in that zone constantly. But if you’re not using mood boards or particular reference, I haven’t even done that in so long. I’m not even sure what the default is. It may be that sort of fantasy-looking style that’s like kind of swatches, you know?

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Louanne Yeah. The stuff you find on stock, right.

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Matthew But yeah, totally like stock.

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Louanne It’s like the new Getty, basically.

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Matthew Yes, it is generic prompting as you kind of develop your style. It’s really good. I love that. And ninety nine percent of the time it’s some combination of a bunch of things I worked on that I put together to make one image. So more of a collage approach to it. I add that to the mood board. So I just kind of keep building on this idea and just keep iterating on it over and over and over again.

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Scott So when you are working on a new project that refers back to this mood board, you’re entering the link to the mood board as the first part of your prompt, so that it’s continually referencing the work you’ve already built up in Midjourney?

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Matthew Yeah, yeah. From the desktop version you can click on that and then you select which mood board you want to build the image off of. So you can have photo mood boards of a particular style that you like. Or if you’re jumping to do something else, like something from my blog — I had a very specific style development for that. You can kind of bounce around or you can combine two and experiment. That’s kind of what I love about the medium. It’s wildly experimental and controversial. Of course, that goes without saying, but I really try to avoid direct references and use my own stuff. Images I take or fair use stuff, which is a whole other line we can talk about.

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Louanne So instead of instead of referencing like an Andy Warhol painting, which is you could do that, but it’s a pretty obvious style.

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Scott Well, the learning language model that it’s built on is referencing copyrighted work, hither and yon. Everything that’s been ever been posted to certain parts of the internet, it’s using as its basis, unless you tell it otherwise.

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Matthew I think historically things were always mashed up. Andy Warhol himself was a master thief in a lot of ways. This is, to me, like the new mashup, the new the new mix of how to mix things to create art, potentially.

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Louanne So you’re speaking more specifically about creating art? I’ve never ventured further than ChatGPT. So I’m asking from the complete novice. This does not give you a magazine layout per se.

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Matthew We don’t have layout modulators, yet.

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Louanne Our jobs are saved.

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Scott Yet: that is the crucial modifier.

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Matthew Yeah. It’s still like some template you have to buy or make on your own.

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Louanne Have you done this for a client yet? The creating?

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Matthew No, I have not. But there’s a handful of clients who still want to show original curated art in their magazine, their website, whatever it is that they’re doing.

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Scott Well, we’ve had guests on here who have taken a very hard line about the threat that this poses to photographers and illustrators and all visual artists, and what is our ethical responsibility as vendors of those artists or as members of that community ourselves? I don’t have an answer for that.

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Matthew Yeah, it’s a great question. I have clients where I can’t even load Midjourney up onto their machine. It’s hard lined more because they’re worried about lawsuits more than any ethical reasons. I really don’t know. You guys get it. You’re in the business. Resources just keep shrinking. I’ve been to so many staff layoffs where I was asked to lay people off for my staff. Or someone leaves, and then they want a lot for rehire. So the pressure is still there to produce the content. And it’s a question like, well, “How are we going to do it? Are we still going to do these really heavy service publications with limited resources and time?” It’s an open question, depending on how you look at it. Will it solve some of those problems? Yes. Ultimately, I think it will. What does that mean for the landscape of the industry? God, I don’t know. Is it just something that’s leveling the playing field for everybody, making it easier to enter into? It takes out a lot of the barriers of money, like having a four year degree. Maybe, maybe.

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Scott But as you said, it still requires the eye of an expert to determine whether the AI has generated something that’s worth using or is not riddled with errors.

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Matthew Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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Scott Well, let’s face it, we are awash in a sea of mediocrity, particularly in publishing, because there are so many strapped publishers who will accept whatever is good enough. They’ll work through Canva, they’ll work with generative AI. They’ll do whatever they have to do in order to get the product out there. Never mind whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, or if it reflects the needs of their audience.

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Matthew Yeah, I just think we’re going to go through that. I think we’re going to get flooded more with garbage until the results don’t work for them. C-suite level people like, with Facebook’s plan to roll out this big platform, right? Just to name check them. People are calling it an agency killer. You’re going to be able to upload your product on the white background. It’ll create all the environments that you want. And the entry level is one thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars. It’s going to automatically generate ads for you. Is that going to look good? I highly doubt it. There’s so much slop online now. It feels like seventy percent of it’s just trash. Like low quality AI or just unthoughtful creative work.

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Scott Exactly. They didn’t need AI to make it mediocre. That was the entry point.

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Louanne We’re getting to a point where: “Was that AI generated? Was that real?” You know, we don’t even know what’s real anymore.

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Disclaimer The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization, employer or company they may be affiliated with. Covering the spread is intended for informational and educational purposes only. While we explore topics such as design trends, industry practices, and future predictions, the content shared should not be interpreted as professional advice or a definitive guide. Listeners are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult relevant professionals before making decisions related to magazine design, publishing or business strategy. We may reference or discuss third party content technologies or companies. These mentions are for context and commentary purposes and do not imply endorsement or affiliation unless explicitly stated. Additionally, given the ever-evolving nature of media and technology, some discussions may become outdated. We strive for accuracy, but we make no representations or warranties about the completeness or reliability of any information shared. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the spread.

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Scott To level the playing field for low budget players in, let’s just say the publishing game, since that’s what we’re primarily talking about, being able suddenly to compete — creatively, at any rate, not necessarily in distribution — with the Condé Nasts of the world, in the same way that social media originally did for corporations — for small companies to be able to compete with big corporations via Facebook, because everybody’s Facebook page looks pretty much the same. It’s the question of how much you’re willing to commit to it, to get your recognition and your brand out there —that’s the problem, right?

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Matthew It’s still a difficult business. The cost of print, the cost of mail. It doesn’t solve for that. I would argue that the creative has been on both sides. Edit and art has been really … The budgets are so low, it’s hard to produce high quality work. Often, you know, it’s like something that’s worth printing and spending. You’re so squeezed. It’s just continues to be a very difficult business model.

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Louanne So, when you were learning about prompts, is there anything that you can share with us about … like if somebody’s listening to this and says, “Well, I want to I want to try something on my own.” What advice would you give anybody for starting out with some prompts? Smart prompting.

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Matthew Claude. And then pick your gen AI platform. I use Midjourney. You could just type in bullet points of what your idea is into Claude and say, “Help me develop a prompt for Midjourney. For this idea.”

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Louanne So bullet point: theme, cat, politics, Halloween candy. I’m gonna stick with this cat vision. Swimming, running.

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Scott She’s only good for one image per podcast, so we gotta go with it, right?

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Louanne Okay, I’m going with this.

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Matthew Yeah. You just type in, “I have an idea.” You’re just driving. “I want it to be based on my kid’s drawing.” If you upload the drawing, take a photo, add it as like a reference, you’ll get something similar to the cat driving car underwater in the style of your kid’s handwriting. Yes. That’s possible. So you are directing.

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Louanne So Midjourney is the illustrator and Claude is the communication tool?

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Matthew It’s helping you because Claude understands how to build effective prompts so you can kind of just go back and forth.

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Louanne Let’s say you build an illustration. You like it. Can you get it at a certain size? Will it become high resolution?

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Matthew Oh for sure. Yeah.

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Louanne Okay.

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Scott They’ve integrated. It wasn’t so good at first, but they’ve integrated that since then.

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Matthew That was a big barrier, right?

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Scott It was. Yeah.

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Louanne Do they charge when you save it? Do they charge based on the size?

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Scott No, no, no. It’s a flat monthly fee for Midjourney in the same way that it is for Adobe. You’ve got Firefly now that is churning out pretty decent stuff, which is just thrown in with your Adobe subscription, which we all have because we can’t live without it, can we?

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Matthew Seventy bucks a month now…

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Scott Yeah. Yeah.

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Matthew All this stuff is cheap, too. I feel like it’s cheap and it’s going to get expensive.

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Scott I fully agree

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Louanne Firefly. I’ve used, I think, it’s either in Getty or Adobe or iStock. One of the two. I can’t remember which one, where they did have an AI. I think they’re charging for it now, but they had an AI prompt feed, so I was playing around with that to try to get a concept across to a client so that we could hire an illustrator, because sometimes clients have trouble visualizing when I talk it through, and they want to see it so they can approve it before they hire the illustrator. And I was using AI to get my point across. Have you found yourself in a position where the client’s like, “No, that’s what I want. I don’t want someone to do that. I want what you showed me.” Unfortunately, they’re very straightforward thinkers. And we didn’t even go in that direction. That was fun to do. Putting prompts in was probably the big the biggest challenge because I got some wacky stuff. I mean, it was sometimes amusing. And we all know, just by looking at stock photos, prompts mean everything. I was just digging through something yesterday and I would type in exactly what I want. It would give me more pictures of one of the words and I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s not what I want. How do I say this differently?” And it was just really frustrating. I think that’s where we’re headed in terms of learning is learning how to be better. Prompters; is that a word? So that gets into our next topic, because you have been teaching design for a very for a long time. You’ve decided to take a break. And I’m curious now, when you go back to it, how do you see AI fitting into teaching all that?

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Matthew You’re asking all the tough questions today. It’s been a year since I taught at SVA, and we were at that crossroads where no one really knew what to do with it. Students were scared. They were like, “Am I not going to have a job? Is this a waste of time?” That was the loudest voice: the fear. Right? And there’s a lot of fear around this subject, for good reason. As a department, we didn’t have any strong guidance around it at that time. For myself, I was teaching editorial design. We built magazines from the ground up. So that means from idea to building out the departments, how this thing walks and talks, the sections of it, the features, everything. So they were asked to do an entire issue, based on this concept. In the beginning, you know, I wanted to be very thoughtful about what the concept is, who the audience is. We were spending weeks on that, getting people to the outline. I mean, they just wanted design, right? That’s what they’re there. So you’re trying to teach that deeper level, like, “No, you need to understand this content. Like you’re going to be the steward of this brand.” It’s a big thing, right? It’s like swimming in the ocean. So I started at some point introducing shortcuts to them to just say, “Okay, we have the idea. Work with one of the LMS to develop five story ideas that make sense. And let’s look at those. You show me. What do you think is a good five story mix for the magazine?” It did a very good job at that part of it. And then you talked about pace and how to create different types of features. Oftentimes, that means different lengths of stories. So instead of using Lorem Ipsum, have it write a story based on this book plan that you’re putting together. It did a pretty good job of that, and I think that helped ground them — center them a little bit. It freed them up to get to what I was really trying to teach them, which was just good foundational design work — how to build out a magazine the right way, how to develop the grid systems, how to scale type, what’s the difference between the front of the book and the feature well. So it sped up my process quite a bit. And then to get to things that AI can’t solve yet, which is the aforementioned layout modulator. So I found myself just naturally doing that. It just seemed to make sense to me. I’m still talking about headlines in week six — how a two-word headline is the best to design, you know? It allowed them to get to the content place faster. Was it like A+ content? Certainly not. I mean, we all know it’s just kind of generic, middling stuff, but for the point of education and teaching them about design, it was fantastic. And the magazines, without a doubt, got better because we were able to focus more on the art direction.

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Louanne I think that’s super important from a content standpoint, because when you just learn Lorem ipsum, you’re missing, you know. You can style dummy headlines or subheads in, but with real content, you can look out for the widows, look out for line lengths, look out for bad hyphens. You know, just be a good steward of the content on your page and that will take you … That will make you a better designer when you’re working with an editor.

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Scott Just in terms of marketing, there’s nothing that says student work or comp faster than Greek text, and now you can cover that up.

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Matthew I think it helps them create more polished pieces and they’re more respectful of the content, even if it’s not A+, but it’s closer. That was a big fast forward button for me for teaching, and I was able to build my curriculum each semester. I’d improve on it based on those sorts of discoveries. We didn’t touch Gen AI or anything like that. I made them look at real good photographers and illustrators. Educate them on that.

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Louanne Now, moving forward, if you were to teach again, would you incorporate Gen AI into that?

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Matthew I think you have to at some level. I don’t know what that means. Is this what’s going to be asked of us as creatives to do it? I mean, are you just going to hard line it and say, “No, I quit?”

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Scott You don’t even have the option today. It’s part of our workflow. It’s been thrust upon us whether we want it or not.

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Matthew What are you going to do? It’s a squeeze, right? We’re all kind of being squeezed. It’s not just magazine art directors. The entire workforce is being squeezed by this.

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Scott Entry level is gone. White collar entry level just is not a thing anymore. And I’ve used it in that respect too. I’ve used it to do admin things that normally would be done by an administrative assistant that ChatGPT can do. And it can do it very, very well — again, with oversight.

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Matthew Like what?

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Scott If you need a website scanned for accessibility, you could do it manually — and you should do some of it manually — but you can also tell ChatGPT, “Scan this for these for these five or six criteria.” And it’ll do a very good job with it and even spit out a report, documenting what it found.

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Louanne Yeah, we had an Excel document that needed — I don’t even know. One of my designers did it, and she saved probably a couple of hours by throwing it into ChatGPT and having them fixing the Excel document so that when she spit out the content, it made her job easier. And I just use it for cleaning up my word salad sometimes.

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Matthew Yeah, cut that salad down.

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Louanne Here’s another thought we always talk about: the end of magazines. And I don’t see magazines ending per se — print magazines — but the kind of magazines that are being published are being diminished. You don’t see the ones coming out twelve times a year anymore. You do see more niche magazines, but jobs like that are going to be fewer and far between. And yes, there are consumer magazines which is a lot of what you worked on. But then there’s also trade and association magazines. Not all of them get printed, though. A lot of people are just overwhelmed by the postage costs and the printing costs, not the design cost per se. It’s everything else after us. So are you teaching them anything else? Do you teach them also to be good web designers? I feel like they have to be everything now, and it’s so hard and overwhelming.

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Matthew I agree. Boy, I wish we could just go back to just making the magazines, right? It’s like really fun. All this other stuff started to seep in. All these other great boxes to fill up. I think, for students, that comes a little more naturally. They’re just digitally native. They get it. They’re excited to work on magazines. They can’t believe they get to make something physical that’s not on the screen. They really enjoyed it. The challenges remain the challenges, right? Unless the fundamental business model changes, it’s going to be harder and harder. I would love to do a magazine again. I’m freelancing. I’m working at a magazine now. I do some marketing work. But yeah, I would love to do a small magazine again, like just kind of throw a lot of these new ideas I have at it. It would have to be the right magazine. Those magazine jobs are harder to find.

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Louanne And then you dream big. So when I was in high school, in college, I always thought I was going to be the art director of Elle magazine, and that never happened. But ultimately, I still can. I think they’re still being published. Ultimately, I found trade magazines, and you have to try to make something beautiful out of something not so beautiful, you know? How do you make a magazine that’s beautiful when its subject matter is nuts and bolts or are random things like that? You don’t have the best content to work with. And that’s the kind of stuff that I feel like these kids need to be taught is how to how to work with not so elegant baseline materials, because it’s not all Elle magazines or GQ or Bon Appetit. That’s reality check here.

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Matthew Yeah, definitely. I personally love those types of magazines, but there’s just lots of type hierarchy challenges. And that has to be the beautiful thing, whether your audience appreciates it or not. You communicate the information through good design in that way. I love doing stuff like that. In the case like Bon App, when I was there, it was create a really clean design system that supports great artwork, and for most consumer magazine, that’s ninety percent of it. You throw all the money, all the thinking at the creative direction and curating that project, that issue, being able to create a palette, a story that’s contained in the magazine that they all play off each other. They’re all coming from the same DNA pool, but they all stand on their own. You can’t do that in a digital environment. It’s just not a thing. It’s just everything lives in these verticals and what really defines them? Sometimes color, but usually people just don’t engage with the content in that way. They’re like in and out of it.

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Louanne Right, right. So yeah, there it is once again: Print is not dead and everybody wants it, but nobody will listen to us. Well, some people will listen.

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Scott As you pointed out, monthly magazines, general interest magazines are not a thing anymore. Sad to say, but for a growing audience — and this has been another topic that’s come up on this podcast over and over and over again — it becomes a luxury item. It is a keepsake, a thing that is treasured rather than something that is thought of as disposable. I read a quote this morning on some article that “Literature is something written to be read twice. Journalism is something written to be read once and then discarded.” And that’s traditionally how we’ve always approached magazines, at least historically speaking. But now we’re in a new era where it is a keepsake. Everything can become National Geographic, where they are lined up on your shelf for eternity until your entire house is weighed down by this yellow weight.

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Matthew I don’t get that many magazines anymore, but I really love the ones I get. I’ll share that. I love Monocle. I just love their worldview and I love their design system. It’s twenty years old at this point, maybe. It’s still fantastic. It’s still works. It just has so much integrity. I absolutely love it. It allows you to engage with the content, but it’s just aged really gracefully and I think that’s very difficult to do. So shout out to that team there. And then, New York Mag, too, I think, still does an amazing job at being a magazine that’s come up a lot.

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Louanne I pulled up Monocle to look at their past issues. And you’re right: It’s dated, but it’s not, you know. So well thought out and they primarily use one typeface.

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Matthew They do.

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Louanne It looks like a Helvetica of sorts.

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Matthew And the way they build it, the hierarchy and the way they subtly use colors, it’s just it’s really terrific.

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Louanne It is. And their covers — they’re very different, too, but yet consistent.

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Matthew So it’s a great study on typography, I think, big time. And that’s the kind of stuff I’ll geek out on. Like no student wants to learn that, by the way. No one’s interested in that type hierarchy.

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Louanne God, I was totally geeking out on that in college. I love typography.

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Scott I mean, what else is there?

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Matthew Well, I don’t know. You’re right. I’m geeking out on it so we can have a whole geek session on typography. I think Monocle got a new subscriber today.

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Louanne All right. I’m just gonna geek out on it. Who cares what the content is? I just want to look at it.

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Matthew The content’s mostly design and fashion and travel.

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Louanne The other magazine that comes up a lot is The Economist. That comes up in conversation about good design.

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Scott Well, it’s also become more than just a magazine. It’s an entire brand in and of itself. It’s a lifestyle brand in the same way that Nike is.

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Louanne I like some of the sports and cooking magazines. I get golf magazines.

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Matthew Are you golfer?

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Louanne I am. We won’t talk about my handicap, though. And I do like the layouts, the clean visuals. I like a lot of the small little snippets. That’s what I look for in magazines. And so I like the cooking magazines for these little call outs that they may use throughout their magazine. A lot of the magazines I work on — it’s just a sea of content, and I want to help my clients figure out how to pull that stuff out in a unique visual way. You can only go so far with pull quotes, and a lot of those magazines have really neat ways of doing things. One thing that — I don’t know if it’s trendy anymore — but there was little arrows, curvy arrows, that were going on for a while. I introduced that in a redesign a long time ago. It’s little things like that that I think makes a better design.

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Matthew Yeah, those few things that you can carry across the issue and then kind of develop issue to issue. I think that’s what’s so unique about print is: It can continue to build on what you did the month before — hopefully improve it respectfully, and learn and grow as a team. It’s much harder in digital environment. You know, when you’re dealing with the style sheets and the templates and it’s a little more challenging when you get to do it all again.

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Scott That’s what I love about this medium — about magazines specifically — is that you’re doing it all multiple times. It’s a long conversation.

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Matthew It’s so much fun. Yeah.

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Louanne So before we go, though, Scott, you didn’t name your favorite magazines…

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Scott That I subscribe to?

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Louanne Even if you’re not subscribed, just that ones that maybe you’ve seen that you like.

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Scott I went out to the newsstand and grabbed a whole armful of stuff, to look at a lot of things that I haven’t looked at in some time. And I was blown away by a number of things, but I was also — I hate to say this — supremely disappointed in a lot of top-tier magazines that I thought I was really going to be blown away by. It’s the same complaint that we’ve been making here for the last ten minutes about an information hierarchy, and not taking advantage of the editorial opportunities to diversify the content for the benefit of the reader. It’s not just a matter of having design tricks in there to make our jobs more interesting. It’s all about appealing to different reading styles and keeping the readers who were there engaged with the content for as long as possible. And so many magazines that I was pulling off the newsstand just weren’t doing it. And I worry that — and Matthew, maybe you can speak to this with respect to the attitudes of your students — that there isn’t as much consideration for the utility of the product as there is for the experience of the designer making it. Everybody loves to make that splashy opening spread with the gorgeous typography and the magnificent photographs. And then you turn the page and what do you do? That’s where the design happens, as far as I’m concerned. Anybody can make a gorgeous opening spread. That is not hard. What is hard is carrying the thematic Ideas through the rest of the article, and finding new ways to activate that content from page to page to page. So that’s my that’s my stump speech for this episode.

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Matthew I have nothing to add.

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Louanne Yeah. That’s the trick. I mean, I usually do the opening spread last. You know, it’s funny. I do the inside. It usually comes to me after I’ve done the insides.

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Matthew I guess that’s the expectation to do that. Oh, you got to do the big splashy thing. But, Scott, like what you said, it’s carrying a theme through. That’s what I cared about more than those opening spreads. And we had the luxury of time. We’d work on them for days. Like, at GQ, weeks. There’s no time like that anymore to do that. And I’d emphasize more for the students design system integrity. Themes: carry those through. If we happen to land on that great type thing, awesome. But those are really hard to do, and it takes a lot of experience to nail those. Knowing that stuff is really key for a designer: just to pay attention to that. If you pay attention to that, that’s what a hiring art director is looking for. He doesn’t care if you can do this big, splashy thing, but he wants to know that your types lined up and you handle the type stack in a way that was smart and thoughtful and good for someone to read. That made sense. I think there’s tremendous value in that.

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Scott Well said.

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Matthew Thank you.

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Scott Before we go, Matthew, why don’t you tell people where they can look you up and what you’re doing?

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Matthew You can find me through my website. It’s matthewlenning.com. If you have any questions, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned about my process, potential projects, collaborations … I would absolutely be interested in connecting with writers or publishers … anyone looking to push into new spaces. My final point with AI — and I don’t know how this will land — but my hope is to create something better, not recreate what’s done. And I think that should be everybody’s goal: not to produce slop but to build something new on the technology. It’s pretty easy to replicate things, but I don’t think you’re going to get very far doing that.

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Louanne Let us hope. Well thank you.

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Matthew Yeah. Thanks, guys. This was a blast.