Session 62 summary
Editorial Design
Anand shares that editorial design is a discipline of communication design that specialises in publication of a serial or periodical nature. A more tangible way to define it would be; it is a discipline that deals with the design of newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. An editorial publication can entertain, inform, instruct, communicate, educate or be a combination of these things. A vast majority of editorial’s objective is to communicate an idea or story through the organization and presentation of words and visuals. Often questions like what is a newspaper, magazine or a journal arises; is it a publication defined by its physical properties such as print or by its content? So what would the periodical reading experiences created for the web or for mobile devices would be called?
Fundamentally the way people read is the same as what it was 100 years ago, but how people discover, sort, save, share and consume content has changed dramatically and it continues to change because of various factors like advancement, technology, etc. So in the present day one can start reading something on print, continue reading it on a computer, on a tablet and then on a smartphone screen or on wearable devices. Therefore a more appropriate way of defining editorial design is that it is about designing the editorial experience which redefines editorial design in a wider context.
Anand started working right after Design school in 2000 and his first job was with a publishing house called Dorling Kindersley, who are known for making really complicated and detailed publications. He got a chance to work there and his team worked on a travel guide for Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and those books have highly detailed exploded view of the monuments so, the complexity of information depicted is highly advanced. These kinds of publications have a very strict and a very well thought out guidelines and systems so that one retains the quality across all the publications and products they bring out. Right after 2000 Anand moved to an online space which was in the earliest state of web in India. He joined a start-up called ‘tehelka’ which was an online portal at that time and they made quite a stir with the kind of journalism they did. The web pages they used to design were very rudimentary, very basic and basically they didn’t have the understanding of how things worked as they lifted a lot of ideas and thinking from print design and replicated it on screen. With time ‘tehelka’ was relaunched as a weekly print newspaper in a form of a tabloid. Anand worked on the first redesign of the ‘tehelka’ tabloid in 2003. It continued to evolve, and in the same format it was redesigned, became slightly more refined and nuanced. After a certain years of being in a newspaper format it became a magazine, around 2005-2006. Anand worked on the redesign of it, changed the look, even the brand identity was changed and around 2008.It was further redesigned into something bolder and modern, making the cover pages more provocative, bold, using all kinds of illustrations, photo treatments, etc. to establish a unique identity. Finally in around 2014, Anand designed his last iteration of ‘tehelka’. Then he continued working in the space of newspaper and magazine design projects. His first newspaper design was financial paper ‘Financial World’, which he started from the scratch, from creating a brand identity to the entire structure of the newspaper. With his efforts it has turned from a weekly publication to a daily newspaper. A more recent project of his was designing a daily newspaper based out of Chandigarh which is still in circulation and is targeted to the global Punjabi audience mainly those residing outside India. He also worked in some magazine projects of different kinds, like financial magazine, career magazine, lifestyle magazine, wildlife travel magazine, etc.
Elements of Editorial Design
The different elements of editorial design are; format, time, identity, anatomy, typography, templates, prototype and production. Format is like choosing a canvas, i.e. selecting the most appropriate format(s) for publishing the content. It is the most basic and fundamental starting point. The type of content, the frequency of publication and expectations of readers all greatly influences what, where and how it is published. The next element that comes is time, which refers to the frequency of publication, it also dictates how a reader expects the publication to be and consume it ultimately. Presently, looking at time there are; 1 minute publications (websites, social media and RSS feeds etc.), there are certain requirements for those kinds of publications, there are 1 day publications (daily newspaper, tabloid etc.), there are weekly publications (1 week), monthly (1 month), bi-monthly (2 month), quarterly (3 months), bi-annually (6 month) and annual publications (1 year). The frequency of publication of these editorials will have a completely different treatment or expectations by the readers so, accordingly these design structures should be approached. Then comes the identity, which refers to creating something similar to a brand.The idea behind creating identity is to differentiate or to make a particular publication more identifiable, so that it can be differentiated from other publications. The identity will actually define the visual and textual tonality and so identity also becomes an important part of publication design process. There are various ways of doing this; one way is the writing style of the publication- how certain things are written, certain vocabulary used and a certain style of writing which would be different from others and that is how the reader starts associating the style with the publication, another way is the typography, i.e. choice of typeface(s) and creating a typographic system one establishes to create the unique look, then there is art- the whole idea of choosing a certain kind of images, using illustration etc. which is a good way of creating that unique identity, and finally the design layout which is a well-planned and structured grid system that goes a long way in affirming the character and the identity of a publication. Anatomy is another important element of editorial design. In a publication, a consistent naming and handling of editorial elements within a design system helps readers find and identify what is being read and how it relates to other content from same publication. Then comes an important part that is typography, good typography is one of the most fundamental and core elements of editorial design that helps communicate hierarchy, structure, tonality and identity of the publication. Hence, typography is the process and the art of arranging and organising letters, texts, words and sentences to aid the reader navigate and consume content in a way it is intended. It is what brings text to life, by giving it a tonality, personality and certain emotions and convey specific messages. To understand typography one must understand what is a typeface, it is a family of letterforms for a particular script that shares a unifying design, features and characteristics. Each of the typefaces look different and are there for different purposes, e.g. Times New Roman was specifically designed for newspaper. Typefaces can be categorized into different categories, the most common categories are Serif and Sans Serif and then comes the type styles which are Roman and Italics. Then one can further look into type classification like humanistic/old style, transitional, modern, Egyptian/slab serif, humanist sans serif, transitional sans serif and geometric sans serif. In the type family there is weights and variations. The whole purpose of typography is creating hierarchy, to get into that one needs to know the various components of typography like; choosing the right typefaces, legibility &readability, font styles, weights & sizes, spacings, alignments, colour and embellishment. When one has figured out all these then they move to the template, it is a robust grid system which is essential for maintaining consistent and uniform voice throughout the publication. It helps create hierarchy, rhythm and flow of the content. There is a basic grid and using that grid one can put together an interesting layout which is pleasing while going through the content. Then there is a much more complex grid because of the type of content that is being dealt. Some people try to do some interesting grids like taking the column proportion and creating interesting layouts. Prototyping is part of the design process, similar goes for the publication design, like what is seen on the screen is different when it is printed out. Therefore there needs to be prototypes and dummies to take the fine decisions before the final production. There are several factors that dictate how an idea is brought to life so, understanding the production process is key to designing effective publication.
Anand Naorem recently did a publication design project of a magazine with the students of NID and the magazine is called ‘12’ and one batch of students bring up two issues of the magazine. Anand has been working with the students for the past couple of years and an interesting thing he noticed about this magazine is that, the student have a fairly open brief to this- they are free to choose their own thematic or the subject they want to work with and the only thing which remains consistent is the name of the magazine i.e. ‘12’ and every batch has their own interpretation of that logo, even the format changed a little in the later stages. Anand has been working with them on it as a guide and in this project the students do everything on their own right from the editorial design, to the content, to writing the content, to designing it, to producing it and finally publishing it. The process followed in making this publication is; firstly they start with brainstorming, where once they pick the subject or thematic of the publication, the students get into brainstorming and deep-diving into the subject and almost creating a kind of word cloud to understand the subject inside out. Then they start getting into more refined ideas and grouping those words into categories to start refining those ideas. Finally they focus on certain terminologies and ideas they want to work with. In the case of ‘12’ the issue was based on the idea of reality and so everyone came down to certain terms like simulated, fantasy, augmented, virtual and constructed which became a guiding light or a launch pad for the whole publication. After that they come to more functional things like really starting getting into detailed editorial structure, what is the kind of content they want and where they are going to source the content and who is responsible for what i.e. dividing the responsibilities. After this stage they get into flap land which is like a story board for a film where one starts assigning content to the spaces and see how the flow of the magazine or a publication is working and when this is finalized then one can get into design and layout of each of the section because it would be much easier and clearer for start doing the design after this. An issue of ‘12’, which is already published, was created with the idea of the students reacting to an incident of a student’s work being censored from being displayed on a public website/platform. The larger issue they were trying to tackle was resistance to the censorship that was happening. The cover page of that issue said, “… it seems that your browser just can’t handle the truth”. The whole approach for this particular magazine was that the students took images from different projects of different students within the community, which dealt with resistance or protest in some way. They wanted to decontextualize those particular images, for e.g. one of the student worked in Manipur and shot a resistance movement there but the team did not want it to be associated with Manipur particularly but juxtapose it in such a way that it becomes almost like a visual journey to convey the larger idea of resistance. They also wanted to look at the pace of the images so that it has a certain kind of visual movement and so it started with very calm yet disturbing images and then it became more and more dramatic together with unconventional typography. It did not have any of those conventional things like page number or title/headline, it was just created as a visual journey and none of the images were related to each other. Finally towards the end they put the work which was censored as the last spread and the only text there was a kind of interview with the person and then the credits of the magazine at the back. This was a very interesting project for Anand because they looked at different ways of approaching content and then presenting it, and it also suited the whole magazine feel.
About the Speaker
Anand Naorem
Co-founder & Creative Director
Brand New Type
Delhi
Anand Naorem, co-founder & creative director of Brand New Type, New Delhi, is a graphic designer, typographer and typeface designer with over 20 years of experience in creating brand identity, editorial and typeface design. Naorem’s work has been commissioned by clients including Dorling Kindersley, The British Council Library, Picador, Harper Collins, National Geographic Channel, Microsoft, Alliance Francaise, Nestle, Google, The World Institute of Slowness (Norway), World Policy Journal (USA) and Pebble Road (Singapore). He is a graduate of the National Institute of Design, India, and has attended the Type@Cooper program at the Cooper Union, New York City. Naorem is also a visiting faculty of Communication design at the National Institute of Design.
