What is Editorial Design? 12/04/2023

 What is Editorial Design ? 

Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7iCDWl2rNo

Personal Summary: 

Editorial Design is an artistic activity focused on communication and related to functional, aesthetic and commercial aspects. The video described Editorial Design is that it highlights Grid and Structure as well as the consistency of the elements. The hierarchy should be important and ensure the media correlates to the text content. The man stated that the title should in fact keep the importance in a page. Most of the content should be aligned in terms of text. He also states that images or illustration should stay on one side of the page. Some books can be flexible with the textual content whereas the images do the speaking rather than the text. The illustrations or the images will be more prominent and therefore the text would be the supporting detail. You can also layout a book with having two contrasting themes such as having one simple neutral color for the text and the entire book having an outrageous color instead. The color or theme would not need to follow the exact grid or consistent layout if the book is a more minimalistic or conservative book. One of the last details or examples he gives about a one page image to a grid layout page ratio is that in most cookbooks or instructional books would in fact ensure the pages are full bleed images into one side ensure that there is a visual guide in order to maintain balance. 

Article Summaries: 

1. Otl Aicher's Isny by dn&co : 

German designs have always seem to recreate a sense of minimalism from my personal experience. I genuinely love the monochrome look in lots of design and tend to lean towards very minimal or neutral colors. I find I like for my media content or textual content to be straightforward, keeping the reader to have less to look at, more what is at hand. Seeing this design being consistent in the entire layout was in fact very soothing. Something I found interesting was how instead of having all the pictogram prints to be scanned by machines, the dn&co team ended up taking high resolution pictures of each print and their biggest challenge was having the squares and grids to have straight lines and deciding to print the pages in an uncoated paper texture to have the pictograms of towns to stand out. The biggest takeaway from this section of this article is that having good filing was vital. They emphasize that organizing files and knowing where everything is, who took what photo and whether you’ve got something at a high enough resolution to print it is absolutely key. Developing a great editorial design of a printed book could not occur without having a great familiarity with the content of media and text. This would help with developing the tone or selecting great fonts to present the content in the way the artist would like to showcase themselves. Such as for this book it had to be quiet and unopinionated, while acting to frame another designer’s work and give it context, it was a sign of respect.

2. Mr B & Friends ‘Comfriendium’ 10 Year book

This book I found interesting due to the concept chosen for the book. This would be a useful book to showcase to clients as a Graphic Designer, Editorial Designer, or Artist or anyone who has an artistic portfolio to showcase. Having all your work go along with the entire theme of the book is something difficult to achieve. There's tons of ways to develop a signature artistic theme or color scheme but it's also difficult to maintain that consistency. This book focused more on colorway and ways to highlight imagery and have the reader feel like they would while scrolling in a website. They also gave the commentary of being playful with the images and the way the words can make the images stand out with having the supporting text. A secondary advice is that typefaces should work well online and in print. Good pairings that give light and shade to all communications, so you can tailor the editorial message to the medium. I learned something new was that I did not know that there was professional people who write and make readers infatuated with reading more. I always believed that there was just a script in which graphic designers tend to follow with to structure their grid layout, color palettes and font usage. I personally loved the way they maintained the yellow/grey colortone and it also keeps the reader engaged throughout the entire book. 

3. Circular 19 by Pentagram 

This book design I found was similar to what I've seen in museums before. I took an art course "Art in New York City" at Guttman Community College on Saturdays in which I found myself spending lots of time in the gift shop in many of these museums. I did not like the repetitious designs I constantly saw. I love the MoMa museum but I found lots of similarities between that museum and the Whitney Museum in terms of publication of small notebooks, prints and even clothing that they had. Each museum is unique and I found that I did not like the contemporary version of Art now. I love when an art piece has an individuality, realistic side of it, which only makes the piece even more memorable. This was something in which is semi-contemporary yet tying in art pieces from different art styles as the media content within the book. It gives that small yet punchy feeling to wanting to flip through the pages, sort of like tying both the new and older concepts of art. This design genuinely is minimalistic and I like it in a sense it's straight to the point, but also keeping that hook onto the reader is what I feel makes it more profound than just keeping it minimal for the aesthetic.  

A personal favorite of mine in terms of editorial design would in fact be JDM Car Magazines or the Japanese Domestic Market of Cars in Japan and it's eccentric way of displaying the cars on the covers. I personally don't understand the language and have only read one or two magazines which have been translated to English, and I have an admiration for cars. I may not seem the type, but boy do I love myself a "vintage" modded Nissan, Toyota, Lexus, o Mazda car. I love the 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R, and is probably my dream car. I don't understand fully the car knowledge or what is there to be informed about but I love the car culture, the community and the way Japan would present these beautiful cars in their magazines and I like the way their covers was consistent with the mood or tone the cars would give to the reader. It would match with the way that the car community genuinely is.