Sig

nit

ure

1o

f5

A Typographic Circle publication

Simon Esterton

CO

NT

EN

TS

Contents

Page 05 06 10 12

Article Biography Esterton on Ethics Clients Esterton on Eye

Simon Esterton

Biography

ES

TE

RT

ON

Simon Esterson is a self taught designer. He started his career at the Architects Journal before co-founding Blueprint magazine, where his rational approach to design and layout won wide acclaim. Renowned for his editorial design, Esterson has shaped the look of many journals and magazines, including the Guardian newspaper, where he was consulting art director, and the international architectural mtagazine Domus, where he was creative director. He redesigned the film magazine Sight and Sound, and has consulted on The Times, the observer and the Sunday Telegraph newspapers. His book and catalogue designs include publications for the Royal Academy of Arts, the Hayward Gallery and Tate Publishing. Esterson is director of Esterson Associates and is a Royal Designer for Industry.

BI O G RA PH Y

Simon Esterton

ES TE R
ON
IC H ET

TO N

Is your work less commercial than some? I really just do editorial work - newspapers, books, magazines - a little separate world outside the mainstream of graphic design. Obviously the reader is paying towards the publication, but with newspapers and magazines the majority of the revenue comes through advertising sales. If you dont have enough readers you cant trigger the right advertising - a national brand wont advertise if the circulation is less than a few hundred thousand copies. The advertiser buys space and there are legal and ethical requirements about what goes in it, which is nothing to do with me. The idea that advertisers could influence editorial is clearly wrong, and so there are many people watching for this - publishers and editors andso on. But most magazines wouldnt exist without this revenue, so I cant claim that my work isnt commercial, its absolutely commercial. Are there political implications? I tend not to work for the Guardianss competetitors because you are compromised if you compete with something that you are involved in. Fortunately the Guardian is the paper I read, so there isnt adilemma there.

On Ethics

Are any types of work more ethical? The simplistic view is that any public sector or arts organisation is okay, as are charities, but anything corporate is terrible. But organisations that rely on public revenue are funded largely from taxes that are levied on corporate activity. Many of these bodies have corporate sponsors too, and even personal donations to charities are not necessarily clean. Lets suppose you only work for government departments - but every two years they spend valuable resources on redesigning their corporate identities. Then when it comes to being treated decently, Ive had just as much trouble with arts bodies as any corporate client. Is behaving well compromising? We all know people who do fantastic work, but are terrible business people or absolute shits. The kind of drive that gets your idea through is the same drive that makes you difficult to work with. You cannot disconnect the politics and aesthetics of somebodys work and the politics of the way they do their business, can you? But, for most designers somebodys rocky reputation isnt relevant when set against a stunning piece of work - its this that will live on. Do we have the choice to be ethical? A great deal is predetermined by the system you live under - in our case capitalism. What does a client do, faced with a quote from printer A, who uses recycled paper and waterless or alcohol-free printing processes, but is ten per cent more expensive? Then theres printer B, based in Britain, but a print broker. You get value for money but have no knowledge of who the printer actually is, and therefore no idea about processes used or labour conditions. Then what about printer C, in China and cheaper than A and B? Its a developing economy, but you know nothing about the environmental circumstances or the labour relations. The repercussions? One is that the British print industry will cease to exist.. and thats just the placing of one print job. Shoud we consider access in our work? Guidelines exist, and designers should be aware of them. There needs to be a balance though. There is a grey areas and good work can be rejected unnecessarily as a result. When I was working at the Guardian, we put the chess puzzle in colour in one of the sections. We has a letter from a reader who was colour-blind and couldnt do it anymore. The next day it was changed of course. Do we need solidarity with other designers? Lets take free pitching. We dont do it. Ideally nobody would, but thats each designers ethical choice. I think that a potential client should at least make a contribution towards costs. It makes it a more

Simon Esterton

serious enterprise for them, which is in everyoness best interests. The ideal is for paid competitive pitches involving only three or four designers. Should we be producing less? I think this is happening with newspapers and magazines, but more for a capital market-driven reason than for an ethical one. With increasing online information, the market for these products shrinks and becomes more specialised. Its concentrated on people who value reading as circulation declines and advertising dissapears to the web. The comparison now would be between the Sun, which is cheap, has a lot of advertising in it and is a mass-market product, and the London Review of Books, which has very little advertising and a high cover price, but youre clearly paying for its intellectual energy and rigour. Do we create desire that cant be satisfied? I suppose we have to recognise that unsated desire keeps us all employed, so we are understandabley protective of our skills in fashion and ideas - even if we dont produce it in the West, we can think it. Constant buying drives the economy, which potentially brings prosperity for all. Its odd that because of global warming we are telling Africa, India and China that they cant have what we have. Its an imperialist attitude. Im not saying that the solution to Africas prroblems is more branding of course. Undoubtedly there is a danger of a visual overload - just occasionally I think maybe we could just stop here and concentrate on something or somebody else. How do you think of money in our business? My mother was a teacher and she was applled when my second jobon Fleet Street yielded more than hers - we were both quite disgusted in a way. I think the more you get paid as a designer, the less control you have over the job. Thats my broad theory. Its not always true - you can get involved with a worthy, low budget organisation who will still interfere, but then you have the choice to go ahead, but absent youself from the design process - or to walk away. If you are paid lots of money its difficult to do that. Money is a fantastic corrupter of aethetic ideals. Beauty and ethics arent mutually exclusive... No, although beauty is subjective and very much about context. In this respect I admire Adolf Looss ideas about function and truth that say this door handle might not be in the Museum of Modern Art, but when you first put your hand on it its quite nice and it opens the door well.

On Ethica

It is possible for graphic design to delight and enrich peoples experience and to still work. Fashion and zeitgeist can cloud our ability to discriminate of course - something is wonderful one minute and pass the next - and if the focus is making special graphic design, then the value of function is demoted. Thats when you get designers saying to their clients, I know you wanted a leaflet, but I thought it much more fun if I took all your money and made a very big pink wall. I think there just arent enough pink walls in the world. I got depressed in that period when graphic designers justified illegible, visually experimental typography by saying, it doesnt matter, the copys rubbish. If it is rubbish, dont produce it. I like to think that this doesnt apply to the projects I work on. Editorial clients want people to read what they produce. Can work distract us from existential angst? All creative activity can. Do clients know its so personnaly important? No, wre usually making an object for somebody, but wanting it to be our object too. Of course theres the clients brief and the end-user, but theres your designer ego too and I think you have to be a very, very good designer to be free of it. Does your work make you happy? Sometimes it does, but if asked Whats your favourite project? it would be the next one. You live in hope that your next project will have everything. I suppose this is about wanting work to be perfect in the terms that you have set up for it. But I think you have to be slightly suspicious of the pursuit of perfection. The world is this kind of shitty, mixed up place. I think thats something about getting older, you realise nothings perfect and its actually fine to go with the flow. The most wonderful meal is at its most wonderful the moment its in front of you, before you eat anything. As the meal goes on youre enjoying it - but more in your mind, in the ordering and maybe the preparation, and certainly the delivery of it. As you eat it you get a but full, and a bit fed up, and you realise that everything is just transient really. Perfection is relative of course. If you design annual reports using eight colours and two spot varnishes, then newspapers seem poorly printed. But if you work on newspapers and see the Guardian, the print quality seems beautiful. Object quality is whats important, in the broadest sense, so an example is a fantasticially realised newspaper - a useful and attractive object. You have to consider the content. For me this often makes the annual report imperfect, if not unpleasant. Something that makes me unhappy is a waste of time, hope and energy. Theres nothing worse than a job that sets off in one direction and then somebody who hasnt been involved before changes it.

10

Simon Esterton

Bl

ue

pr int

Th

ua

rd

ia

Ey

CL

IE

NT S

Clients

11

12

Simon Esterton

ES TE R

TO N
O N

EY

Your company publishes Eye now but I know it used to be made elsewhere. Could you give a bit of background on the magazine and how you came to be involved with it? A long time ago I was involved with starting an architecture and design magazine called Blueprint. Wed been going for a few years and we were lucky enough to have Rick Poynor as deputy editor of the magazine. We did have some writing about graphic design in Blueprint, but it came and went depending on the interests of the people who were editing at the time. For example we did things like a British graphics issue with Neville Brody on the cover, and we did pieces about companies doing motion graphics like the Channel 4 identity where the bars swing around. But Rick thought there was space for a standalone graphic design magazine, partly because Graphis, which was the longstanding international graphic design magazine, had recently been sold to an American publisher. Peter Murray, who was our publisher, thought we could capture the European market by publishing in three languages, so we launched Eye and for a short while it was published with three languages French, German and English. There was a lot of text in the magazine because everything was repeated three times and it was a bit of a production nightmare because if you wanted to cut something in one language you had to cut it in the other two languages as well, but anyway that was the genesis of Eye.

On Eye

13

Id actually left Blueprint by then and started a little editorial design studio with another art director called Mike Lackersteen, so I was no longer day to day involved with the magazine, but obviously knew the people who made it. So I went off with Mike and we did newspaper and magazine redesigns all over the world, and in the meantime, Wordsearch, the little publishing company that had published Eye and Blueprint, closed, and Eye was sold to one publisher and Blueprint was sold to another. Eye then started on this long journey around three different publishing companies, and John Walters became editor. I saw John quite a lot and we chatted about Eye and of course I read every issue and was still on the editorial board that met occasionally, and then about four years ago I bumped into John and he told me that Nick Bell, who was then the art editor, was leaving and they were about to start an issue. So I said, you need a guest art editor dont you? and didnt think any more about it until the following day when John rang me and said, Ive been thinking about having a guest art editor, and maybe this would be a good idea So the studio picked up an issue and pretty much the next day John was around with galleys and so forth, and we designed it and we seemed to keep designing it. At this point the magazine was owned by Haymarket, so there was no great redesign, partly because we thought we were just coming on for one issue. You know how every magazines publishing frequency determines the way you work on it; a weekly magazine is very different to a monthly and quarterly magazines are very different from those two, because you cant work on it for a whole quarter. You tend to work on it (especially a magazine like Eye, which you wont be surprised to hear doesnt have a huge design fee attached to it) in these very concentrated bursts. So I think we kept on thinking that we should redesign it, but we didnt do anything until an issue was right on top of us. We kept going in that relationship, designing it from the studio here in Hoxton but in fact the magazine was published by Haymarket which was where John and his subs and the advertising team were based, and of course Haymarket was based over in Hammersmith. If you wanted to choose the two most distant places in London from which to work on a magazine, that was it going to a meeting in Hammersmith was a days commitment really. Then one day John was having a conversation with one of the publishers over at Haymarket and it became clear that they might be interested in selling the magazine, and that was really the next big stage, where John and I and Hannah Tyson, who is my business partner here at the design studio, got together and bought the magazine from Haymarket. That was about two years ago. There were quite a lot of negotiations, partly because I dont think

14

Simon Esterton

Haymarket had ever sold a magazine before! They were very good at buying magazines but not so used to selling them they didnt have the paperwork immediately to hand and things like that. But once all that was done we had to get on top of the magazine as a business. And presumably that was also a time for your big redesign as well? Well not really because we were terribly busy trying to figure out suppliers and mailing houses and all that business stuff that, although Hannah and John and myself have all been around magazines and publishing, none of us had any direct experience in. We knew what things like advertising sales and subscription management were, but in the past youd tended to sit in meetings and there was somebody who looked after those things, and all of a sudden there wasnt except for Vicky McDougall who was in charge of advertising sales for Eye both at Haymarket and then with us. It also became very clear that although Eye had had a website for a long time, it was essentially an archive of past articles without pictures, and was old web technology, so it became clear that we needed a blog and we needed it quickly, and so in that first year of taking over, the emphasis was on moving the magazine here to the studio in Hoxton, sorting out the business side of it and trying to get a more responsive web presence. And its only in the last couple of issues that weve finally sorted out some of the design things. Its not as though the magazine, I hope, has ever been badly designed, but its only in the last couple of issues that weve changed things, and got rid of certain things we inherited rather than created. I think I probably came to the magazine three or four issues ago, so about a year ago, and one of the things that has always struck me is that the magazine seems very assured in its design. The way its laid out feels very controlled and like you know exactly what you want to do with it, but it sounds from what youve said like that might not be the reality when youre putting it together. Fundamentally for me its the work that people are interested in, so the actual magazine should be a fairly neutral container for the work. I dont think the design should be a big shouty design, saying, look at me Im a design magazine. I think that what people want is to look at and enjoy the things were talking about. Thats not to say that it needs to be the same every issue we now have a principle that we have a different typeface or a different typeface system for each issue, and weve done that for three or four issues now, but underneath it is a pretty structured grid. The majority of the energy spent on the magazine is on getting the work in and getting it at the best quality we can, whether thats getting high res files from people or photographing finished objects really well. Jay, who designs the magazine with me, spends a lot of time speaking

On Eye

15

with people who work on moving image pieces, getting them to re-render the image so that we can publish the pictures bigger than the standard 72dpi file that you get when you ask somebody for stills from their movie graphics. So theres a lot of energy spent getting good material, making sure its properly reproduced and then selecting the right stuff to use, because its always a balance you can choose hundreds of pieces of work and theyll all be quite small, or you can show a few pieces of work and theyll be quite big, and different authors and different articles require a different treatment. So actually when it comes to the pages it is for me a pretty clear process of just trying to make that content work. A lot of newsstand magazines have a completely different art direction problem, and for them what you have to try and do is make visual content for a magazine, whereas here what youre doing is taking the visual content and finding a way for it to work on the page. Thats true, but then a magazine like IdN also has lots of visual content but it takes the opposite approach and loads up every page with lots of images and employs all sorts of graphic devices and print processes. I agree, and I guess its just a question of the approach you choose. Its like a lot of design one sees there are lots of things I love, but I just wouldnt do them myself. And I think you take a route. We even try to be quite purist about the way we show the work, so it tends to be shown straight on we dont like showing books photographed from funny angles and things like that. Its a bit like if youre reproducing a painting, you dont want it photographed by somebody laying on the floor looking up at it, you want to see the painting as you might see it in a gallery. Im not saying the work we show is art, but I do think theres a discipline to how you show things if you want to talk about them properly. I want to get to the question of the cover price, because I was interested when you said that none of you had ever run a magazine before Eye, and it strikes me that having such a high cover price comes from a position of people who want to make a magazine saying, well if people want this quality magazine theyll pay for it, whereas a commercial publisher might have insisted on lowering the price to get more readers? Well you know what the economics of magazines is like. Most magazines you see on the newsstand pay the cost of production primarily through advertising, and then you have quite a high print run. Eye is in a different place there is some advertising but not very much, and its a small print run. And we try and produce the magazine and produce it properly, so inevitably the simple unit cost of printing is quite high. We see it more like being between a magazine and a book, and you dont, or at least I dont, think twice about buying graphic design books that have 30-40 cover

16

Simon Esterton

prices. If we were to double the amount of advertising or double the circulation thered certainly be an opportunity to look at a different cover price, but at the moment were just keeping our heads above water at that cover price. But I presume youve got it set up at a price whereby the magazine pays for itself, whereas I know there are lots of magazines on Stack that are published by companies that use the magazine as a calling card or a shop window, so then their other work subsidises the magazine. Thats the classic independent magazine, where people do it for no fee or little fee and its a calling card for the studio, whereas Eye has always grown up in a different tradition. Until the point where Hannah, John and I bought it, it was made by commercial publishers, so their attitude was always that this magazine had to try to make a profit. So for us this is a proper business and it should at the very least always break even. And thats partly because John has always had a very strong view about contributors being paid, so if you write a long piece for Eye you get paid for it. Theres a lot of text in the magazine and its properly edited and properly subbed, and those things are expensive to do. And you can tell the quality you pick the magazine up and you can see that its been properly subbed and printed on good paper and the rest of it. If we were starting Eye magazine again now, one might do it in a different way, but the magazine we bought had already got that structure, and one is always very nervous to take something that is working and radically change it. I think to suddenly turn around and cut the cover price of the magazine would change a lot of the ways people think about it. But its very difficult, and I think we all know its a tough time at the moment for any magazine whether youre a big commercial publisher or an independent small publisher like us or just somebody who wants to make a magazine because theyre passionate about it and if that means they have to do it for no money and trade favours for printing and photography then so be it. Thats the level that I came into it with Blueprint nobody was paid to do that and we ran it for a few years just to see what would happen really. This brings us on to a good question to end things, because I always ask people what theyd change about the magazine if they could, if they had more time or more money or whatever it is. What would you do differently if you could? I think at the moment, actually, quarterly is a difficult publishing frequency. Its mostly frustrating because you know that in a year youve only got four magazines and theres a limited amount of

Simon Esterton

17

things you can cover in that time. At the moment the thing that I would most like to do is get to grips with how you represent graphic design and how you represent the magazine online. We have a blog and we have a website and theyre good, but theyre nothing like the sort of stuff we could do with a bit of money and the right bits of technology. There are some incredible things you can do and thats what Id like to be doing now. Thats kind of the big question for everybody at the moment isnt it? There are lots of people coming up with their solutions for printing a magazine online but I dont think anyones hit it yet. Yes, I think for me the ideal is an amazingly printed magazine litho magazine on interesting paper, interesting techniques, and getting the most out of the physical experience of holding a magazine, and thats what were trying to do with the printed magazine now, as much as we can afford to. For example in the issue you sent out last month theres a gatefold, and wed wanted to have a gatefold for ages but we waited until we had the right content, and in this case we had a timeline that seemed to be an ideal thing to try as a gatefold. I remember the first publishing company I worked at was called The Architectural Press and we had a monthly architecture magazine called The Architectural Review, and it had gatefolds every issue with fold outs of drawings and maps and photographs, and then you could see at the moment that print production became commoditised and print production was moved to a bigger factory and became much more systematised, that all those things like gatefolds and special papers were taken out of the process. And I think that if print magazines are going to survive all those things need to come back into the print process. Look at what a magazine like Wallpaper is doing its a commercial magazine with a newsstand run, and yet its doing special colours and die cuts and fold outs, and Monocle too, with its mixed papers and supplements held in by elastic bands. I think given that the straight delivery of images and text is something that online can deliver very efficiently, the printed object has to be special, so thats the desire with the printed magazine. But then at the same time graphic design is not just printed images it is websites and moving images, and those sorts of things you can show in a printed magazine but you cant actually experience the two-minute title sequence. But if you have an effective online presence that matches the printed presence then you can, and thats the ideal.

18

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

19

20

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

21

22

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

23

24

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

25

26

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

27

28

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

29

30

Simon Esterton

Simon Esterton

31

32

Simon Esterton