From creative director Scott Dadich:
[More detail on this post can be found on Scott's SPD blog, here and here.]
On September 15, I showed this layout—first to executive editor Bob Cohn, then to editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. Bob liked what he saw, which surprised me. I thought the sideways type might throw him for a loop, but he really responded to it. But when Chris sighed and put both hands over his face, I knew it was trouble. I tried to walk through my design moves, but sensing the coming rejection, I can't say it was my finest moment of rationalization. Chris asked where the photo of Charlie was. He hated the sideways type. He felt like we were being too confrontational with the design. I tried to explain that I had done that to reference Kaufman's work, but no dice. Chris wasn't buying what I was selling. He wanted something much simpler.
Back to the drawing board.
I slunk back into work on Tuesday and tried a new tact. I figured I
would go completely stark, something strange and awkward. I received anew headline: "Charlie Kaufman, The Director's Cut" and started toplay. I threw together a secondary spread, just to have something to work backward from. It looked like this:
Workingfrom there, I cleared the decks and started messing around with a bigswath of white and little articulating pieces of copy, like so:
Itfelt a little generic, so I went with a bolder version of my sansserif, Exchange. I also moved the copy blocks around a bit, looking formore tension and awkwardness:
Somewhatsatisfied, I emailed this version to Chris, who was traveling. He likedthe direction, but was concerned that we were overplaying the pitchletter (the fine print in the above layout) so I enlisted my associateart director, Margaret Swart, to take up the task of exploring thisidea and visualizing the turn pages. She's a tremendous designer,
really attuned to the intracacies of white space, finding tension andsophistication with the most banal of things.
She came up with some variations on this theme:
There were many more, but this last one was my favorite.
I have a design theory I've developed in my time here at WIRED. I call it "The Wrong Theory."
In my years in magazines, whenever I've been pleased with a layout atthe time I ship it to the printer, I'm usually disappointed with theresult when I go back to it after some time has passed. It's like witha record. When you buy a new release and you love it immediately, itusually has a short lifespan. You play it till your ears bleed and twoweeks later, it's discarded to a pile of CDs in the backseat of yourcar, never to be listened to again. But an album that's morechallenging--something you don't like on first listen--can often be themost rewarding given time and attention. I have albums that I've hatedon first listen, then let sit and age and when I come back to them withfresh ears, I've really enjoyed their complexity and novelty. I'veexperienced a similar phenomenon with design. Work (whether I've doneit or someone else has) that I've actively disliked tends to grow on mewith time and distance. So my theory is: Take a layout you like and fuck it up.
Ruin it. Add to it, take away from it, just do something that makesyour skin crawl, and go with it. Ship it, print it, swallow yourdiscomfort and go with it. (It doesn't work with everything;
sometimes you really can ruin a nice piece, so be careful.) With time,
you'll come around to it.
So what appealed to me about this spread wasall of the things that I've learned to be open to in practicing TheWrong Theory. Weird tension? Check. Awkward spacing? Check. Strangerag? Check. Placing photos against the bleed? Check.
So I
showed Bob what I was up to. I don't think he liked it, but heunderstood the situation and my strange propensities and shrugged hisshoulders. His one complaint was the echo of having "Charlie Kaufman"
in the headline and the dek, so we started working with a new headline -- "Puzzle Master" -- which I
did not like. But I knew I had just won a battle in the war, so I savedthat conversation for another day. There was plenty more work to do.
