A narrative design studio

TYPE is getting popular, or maybe too popular? This was the subtext of a discussion at Cooper Union, January 12, among this year’s TDC type design judges. (The annual Type Directors Club competition has three parts: typography, fonts and animated titles. Results will be exhibited this summer and published in the 32nd annual later in the year.) I was the least competent judge, at least in terms of the knowledge and practice of type design. I mean, my one attempt at designing a font myself, on Fontographer 1.0, was such as disaster that I have never tried it again.

I was happy to make way for the others on the jury, such as Matthew Carter, who I’ll embarrass by describing as the greatest type designer of our time (but he is). Or Paul Shaw, a living national treasure who designs types, writes books and blogs (http://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/) and leads wonderful walking tours of cities all over the world, looking at street signs and building inscriptions.

And then there was Erik Spiekermann, the founder of FontShop and FontFont who has a gazillion followers on Twitter and without whom the nation of Germany would probably never get anything designed. The jury was lead by the extraordinary Maxim Zhukov, the Russian-born typographer and teacher, for many years the go-to guy for fonts at the United Nations, who speaks more languages than you can count on two hands, and has a singular, comprehensive global view of type.

Carter suggested the topic at “Judges’ Night” (which I gather is an annual event) in an e-mail message:

There has recently been an increased interest in type design as part of popular culture and as something to be considered critically on a par with other forms of industrial design. Perhaps this began with the success of the Helvetica movie.  Other manifestations have been the acquisition and exhibition of fonts by MoMA, Simon Garfield’s ‘Just my type’ and its reviews, and awards to type designers in arenas other than type-design contests.

Attention to type design by non-specialists who would once have considered it too arcane to tackle brings some risk of errors in the treatment. Do we accept these errors as a price to pay for a welcome and wider appreciation, or do we castigate them and insist on a better-informed coverage of our work and its history? Discuss.

Then Zhukov responded in an interesting way.

It is my observation that “fonts” are quickly becoming the butt of many jokes, a common conversation item—not only among type people.

The examples attached come from the books by Michael Moore (Stupid White Men . . . and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! New York: HarperCollins, 2001) and David Remnick (Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker. New York: Random House Digital, Inc., 2002).

Profanation is the price of popularity. The French don’t call popularisation vulgarisation [cq] for nothing.

The Michael Moore book cited by Maxim has a parody of the Alfred Knopf colophon style, “A Note on the Type.” It begins, “The typeface used in this book is Bermuda Demi-Bold. It is a serf style face with a touch of postmodern, postfeminist graphic movement. The Bermuda family of type was invented by Walt Higgins, who is also the creator of the Bermuda shorts . . . .”

The e-mail exchange between the judges went on to retell a number of jokes, along the lines of “I shot the serif.” When we got to Cooper Union for the “Judges Evening” the mood was more serious. My one joke, in reply to Erik’s line that, “you always remember your first kiss,” was cut out of the videotape. I said, “You always remember your first Kis.” (Okay, it was worth cutting.)

TDC Salon: The Judges Night 2012 from Type Directors Club on Vimeo.

Zhukov, opening the conversation, came off more Tory than in our e-mail exchange. He described the tension between high and low in type, between “the learned profession” and “personal communication—think blogging, SMS-ing, and tweeting,” saying this was not necessarily good.

I took exception. All my life I’ve been hearing about the distinction between high brow and low: the critics’ ignorance of rock and roll, magazines’ dismissal of TV as an art form, and the news media’s blindness to popular culture. The old guard never gets it. Going back to the videotape, Maxim was much more thoughtful than I was, and I’m not sure I made my point that the high-low barrier has been pulled down like the Berlin Wall. While others saw a gulf between regular users of fonts and the paid professionals, I think it is more of a continuum. The software and the operating systems have improved screen typography measurably over the years. Just compare the fonts on your iPhone to the bitmapped Chicago on an early Mac. I mean, even Microscoft Word has exception kerning, and custom fonts, like Cambria.

At the tip top we can find typography that is as good as it has ever been, but the low is not nearly as low, as, say, the typesetting on a third-world customs form in the 1960s. Erik decried the disappearance of handwriting as a commonly mastered skill. But my grandmother would have said that disappeared by 1918. The typewriter killed it. And today I am grateful to read a little e-mail Arial in place of some of my friends’ handwriting.

Zhukov quoted an Emil Ruder decree, “The good designer must reject the mixing of writing and printing.” Which is like saying that laymen should not mix with the clergy. Ironically, there is another historical pole in the history of typography which would give precedence to handwriting. A hundred years ago Edward Johnston and D. B. Updike placed Renaissance calligraphic letterforms (the Carolingian minuscule) at the summit of typographical culture. They dismissed or ignored the contemporary sign-painting-inspired commercial typefaces, those vigorous moderns, slabs and grots.

Now, we’ve entered the era of what Aaron Burns called, “typographic communications.” In the 1980s he predicted that everyone would soon be setting their own type, and began an effort, with Hermann Zapf, to give them the tools to do it well. (They called their software, “Pages.”) Of course Zapf was horrified to see Palatino printed on a Laserwriter in 1987, but that didn’t stop Palatino from becoming one of the most popular fonts in the Western world. And I wonder what he would think of the Palatino on the iPad. 

Indeed, when the TDC judges went over to a Pratt Institute building that weekend to look at the type design submissions, we saw a variety of designs, representing a wide range of styles from informal cursives to fresh takes on classic Romans. Nothing knocked us dead. But there were no howlers, either.  We agreed that the bottom has been raised a great deal. There is better type design education (at Reading, RISD and now Cooper), and better training of junior designers at dozens of foundries (following the example of David Berlow and the Font Bureau). This is encouraging, but we were left wistful and unsatisfied.

There are two issues for type design and typography going forward. The first, while there are higher Lows, we do have to watch out for the unwashed hordes who are taking up smartphones and whatever is at hand to do their own “typographic communication.” We need programs like Burns envisioned—that do more than just set lines of type, but actually help people with composition and layout. MS Word, for example, still starts with a default page that has a half-inch margin on both sides and type that is too small. We see the same thing on the web—columns so wide, they’re illegible.

Second, we’ve got to strive for higher Highs. As we’ve seen in magazine and web site design, if the bottom is be raised, the best design has to be more than accurate, clean and professional. It has to hit it out of the park.

Maybe next year we’ll see a new typeface design that is roots-radically inspired, breaks new ground, rising above the bourgeois clutter, causing the judges to gasp with delight, and the reading public (the users) to say something more than, “Awesome.”

 

LEGACY publishers may not get it, but it’s increasingly obvious that the best way to produce content apps for Apple’s App Store is to build them in adaptive HTML, and then wrap them in native app shells.

Last week Forrester released a report that recommends this approach as the most productive approach for magazine and news publishers. You can buy the whole report for $499 here.

Forrester defined four possible content platforms:

• Native
• Hybrid apps (native code with HTML and JavaScript)
• Mobile middleware platforms
• A web approach (HTML5 and JavaScript)

Of course, I’m going to end up arguing for plain web—and save Apple’s 30 percent cut—but if you want to distribute via the app stores, then go for hybrid—specifically, Treesaver in a native slipper. Let’s look at the alternatives.

Native: For now this means building on four separate platforms: iOS, Android (including Amazon’s version in the Fire), WP7 and RIM. Plus, you are probably doing a web site in any case. Then, you have to figure out how to feed any or all of the apps with content. A static monthly might be happy with an XML export from the print edition, at least until readers start asking for live updates, video, and comments. So that means a dedicated CMS, and staff. (How many CMSs do you have so far?)

Hybrid apps: You can save some of this pain, and a lot of the operating cost, by making an HTML site that fits into native shells. PhoneGap, acquired last year by Adobe, provides shells for all of the platforms.

Mobile middleware: A solution more for developers than publishers. If, like The New York Times, you have a staff of 120 programmers working on your site and apps, then by all means let them figure this out, unless of course you wanted to have a common workflow and code bad for all of your products, and a cost structure that will cheer the shareholders.

Web apps: If I were king, than we would forget about native apps for publications, and go with the web approach. We could develop entirely with HTML, CSS and Javascript. It would help if browser makers and the W3C would enhance the presentation. They’ve figured out web fonts, and Safari finally added full-screen view. How about allowing full-screen trigger via Javascript. On mobile platforms, the browsers need better swiping and other touch animations. And it would be nice if users could make desktop bookmarks more easily than they can in, say, iOS Safari.

We already make adaptive or responsive sites that work beautifully on phones, tablets and PCs, from the same HTML. I point, proudly, to Treesaver’s web edition of The Sporting News iPad app, powered by the same HTML feed. And there are more conventional layouts, like the BostonGlobe.com.

Of course, HTML can’t yet match the typographical niceties you get can achieve in print, which is the only excuse to go with a PDF solution, like Zinio, other than laziness. But we how have the fonts, and Mozilla has offered type refinements that might become W3C standards eventually. (And I don’t think it’s going to take as long as it did to get a standard for web fonts.)

But the real rub is distribution. To get into Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market and Amazon’s Appstore, you gotta have an app. Forrester recommends, “Start with a web approach; move to a hybrid approach as needed.” This makes the sense, for now.

Dan Rowinski, the prolific Read Write Web blogger (@Dan_Rowinski), summarized the Forrester report. “It is more likely that development studios will find talented coders that are well-versed in Web technology” he writes, than coders who know “the variety of languages it takes to create an app for the four major platforms.” And few individuals are good in all of them—Objective C, C++. Java, plus other code for the visual layers.

It’s not just the development cost that argues against all-native apps. It’s the constant support for the frequent OS revs. Raise your hand if you had to do some sudden fixes when Apple moved, with little warning, to iOS 5. (The only people who didn’t raise their hand were those who didn’t have any iPad or iPhone apps.)

Nevertheless, you need the shell or the wrapper around your HMTL, and increasingly it makes sense to go for a third party developer who can keep up with the revs and help you revise the HTML and CSS when needed. The big guys aside, which magazine or news publisher wants to keep a lot of native developers on the payroll, waiting to smooth over bugs that weren’t bugs before the latest update?

No, in a perfect world, we do not want the native apps. But the world is imperfect. People have come to believe, “there’s an app for that.” We have little choice but to give ’em apps. The first iOS apps were not for the content crowd; they were games and things that used OS power and features like geolocation like Google Maps—real applications, that had nothing to do with reading stories in text form. Since the user interface was fit to the small screen (with big buttons and swipe), users liked apps. Apple introduced the App Store in 2008, which—at least in the beginning, before there were half a million apps—made it easy to find and buy one. The first bestselling content apps were Net News Reader and . . . The New York Times. (Business Insider has a fun list.)

It’s the combination of the small-screen UI and the App Store that led publishers to build apps instead of mobile web sites. Remember when iPhone arrived five long years ago, the mobile web was still pretty primitive. The browsers were poor, and there were many dumbed-down WAP sites since there was no way to adapt a standard site to a small screen with CSS.

There are still only three ways to buy digital publications: App Store, Android Market and Amazon. By the time Google made the Chrome WebStore, it was too late. I remember putting free samples of Nomad editions in there in late 2010, but few picked them up. Users were going to the Android Market. Although it’s like an open Turkish market compared to Apple’s indoor mall, but hey, it’s Android, it’s just about about even with Apple now, according to Dan Rowinski.

To make the web approach enticing enough to move publishers out of the native apps, we gotta do three things:

• Continue to work on adaptive design until we do anything any app can do, but on all screen sizes.

• Build a web pub marketplace. (I mean, surely we can do better than Apple’s Newsstand, which is about as user-friendly as a magazine rack at a gas station convenience store on I-s95.)

• Get the browser makers and W3C to sweeten the user experience, and otherwise do for HTML anything the native platforms can do.

* * *

Recommended strategy for publishers: “Hybrid Plus”

For now, we have to make hybrid apps—as well as web apps. (Check out The Sporting News in the App Store, running from the same HTML as the web edition.) One advantage of doing Hybrid Plus is that shared links can actually be followed to the web site, without having to download the app.

We’re building our own native shells at Treesaver and Ready-Media, and experimenting with PhoneGap. (Wouldn’t it be funny if it was Adobe who enabled this interim hybrid era?)

Not all publishers still believe that the native approach is the way to Valhalla. The most famous drop-out is the Financial Times which quit the Apple App Store (although they still have iOS devs on the payroll to support their legacy subscribers). Instead, FT promoted a web app—but only for iPhone and iPad. (If you are reading this on one, check out http://app.ft.com.

But it’s not complicated. The FT web app doesn’t work on Android. (You get a non-supported notice on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and are redirected to a mobile site on an Android phone.) Late last year they announced a nicer UI in a free Android app distributed through the Market—but not through Amazon. It works fine on Android phones and tablets.

What happened? Did they lose their nerve, or was it just about Apple’s bite? Subscriptions are offered in the app—and fulfilled by Financial Times, not Google. Something tells me that with a publication called Financial Times, it may just be the money.

In a saner move, two of Treesaver’s newest clients are going to launch on the web, and wait to see if they need hybrid apps. For startups, let’s build the solution that we ultimately want.

Sites and apps are like chutes and ladders. If you build an adaptive site that can fit into a native shell, then updating content is a downhill slide. With all-native, it’s like climbing stairs, forever.

NEWSPAPER publishers, navigating through fields of icebergs, have ordered up vinyl siding to re-clad their hulls. Why do they think this will help? They are fussing with surface details when they need a new course and a whole new vessel.

The obvious example is the Wall Street Journal, which took Joe Dizney and Mario Garcia’s superb design and covered it with cheap polyester upholstery. (Whatever you think of Rupert Murdoch, you don’t associate him with good taste.)

This image came to mind on a recent trip from Singapore. Transferring at Narita, I got on a United (legacy Continental) plane to Houston, and was offered a copy of the Houston Chronicle. My stomach turned when I saw that they had thrown out the typography I’d helped develop less than 10 years ago. The centerpiece of that effort was Houston, a strong revival of the Jenson type used in American newspapers in the early 20th century.  (These Jensons were based on Morris’s Golden Type, which was based in turn, he thought, on the first Roman typeface cut by Nicholas Jenson in 1470.)

The work was done by Christian Schwartz, originally commissioned to do a headline font for the Chronicle. He volunteered to do a body type in the same style, which I doubted would work.  The text face has some reference to British Monotype’s version of Jenson, Italian Old Style—not to be confused with the Goudy (Lanston Monotype) font by the same name. I expect this type was used by newspapers for small display, but not for body type.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before, but we always test newspaper text fonts by running a press test, showing columns of alternate typefaces, with variations of leading, tracking and size. I had expected that Ionic, which I had gotten the Font Bureau to revive for the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, would be the best on press, and the best for the design. But, by golly, Christian’s Jenson won, and we were able to convince the paper to add his text styles.

The Chronicle, as it looked in the first major redesign in 20 years. The font Bureau site has a little gallery of typography, including Houston and Benton Gothic.

Now, it’s gone. The Houston Chronicle has subbed Farnham, another Christian Schwartz type, for its custom font, and made some other changes in the design, in effect masking the masonry walls with some nice masonite paneling. I am reminded of visiting J.J. Black’s Mascho house, one of his best-detailed buildings in Midland. A previous owner had painted over not only mahogany ceiling in the dining room, but ledge stone walls around the fireplace, I guess to make it brighter. Well, the Chronicle doesn’t look any brighter, and maybe not that much different for most readers. (Indeed, no one blogged on the change, and I can’t find any reference with a quick Google search.)  But they’ve lost the quality and the reasoning behind the design I directed, which tied it to both the newspaper’s past and the big newspapers of the past, some of them Hearst newspapers, which bought the Chronicle in 1987.

The revised design, as seen on today’s front page. (Via Newseum.)

Ironically, I’d been suggesting to Jeff Cohen, the editor, that it was time to make some changes, since the paper had remained the same for too long.

Eduardo Danilo, my business partner at Danilo Black, was traveling with me, and suggested that this change may have something to do with the editorial hub that Hearst has set up in Houston. Perhaps they purposefully sprayed over the paper with a generic coating, so that pages could be used in San Antonio and elsewhere.

Well there are ways of doing this without throwing away the design equity of the paper. Danilo showed how it could be done, 15 years ago at El Norte, Reforma and El Mural, which are part of the Junco newspaper group in Mexico. The dailies shared pages, but switched the fonts so each would have a local style. This was accomplished by getting the Font Bureau to match the widths on their text fonts so that line endings, and layouts, would be the same in each paper.

I won’t go into the other wrong choices the Chronicle has made with this move. (I’ve written about the value of design equity before.) Or the previous trashing of the web design, which does not seemed to have helped the revenue side. Many great designs have been thoughtlessly discarded, and with it some of the connection to readers and advertisers. Some publishers don’t get the importance of refining and restating a brand rather than changing it.

Some do. The New York Times, Rolling Stone, to name two I’ve worked on, have extended their vocabulary over the years, but they still use the same language.

Not always the case. Joe Hutchinson’s and my design for the Los Angeles Times has survived the intervening years with most its design equity intact, despite the depredations of Sam Zell. That wannabe mogul tried to destroy the design of all the Tribune papers, and succeeded in Chicago, Baltimore and Ft. Lauderdale, where editors ordered up the cheap vinyl siding, or just went at it with sledge hammers. In L.A., the designers stood up to Zell, who has now been placed on an iceberg in Lake Michigan. (Or should have been.)

There are other ways to approach the decline of the U.S. newspaper business, other than panic. I saw an example last week in Singapore, which of course is a different market entirely, but still worth learning from. I had gone to Singapore to help Danilo on an exciting design project for Today, the free paper there. We worked with a smart, energetic—and small—team, lead by editor Walter Fernandez. In the ten years since it was started by the TV group, MediaCorp, this daily has taken a big bite out of the market from the establishment paper, The Straits Times, which Danilo Black designed in the 90s, but which since has also applied two layers of vinyl siding.

Today is a lively paper, with a mid-day update edition that office workers queue for. There’s a complete web site, and of course an iPad app. Yet, the newsroom headcount is under 100. And they’re already thinking, “digital first.” They’re breaking the stories on the web, and then adding texture and reporting during the day. The print edition features analysis and opinion, the theory being that everyone already has the news. What readers are looking for in print, is the analysis, the background, the critique, the forecast—the narrative. With the energy of this project—no giant conference room meetings, more work than talk—I am believe that we can put the kind of design momentum that will build equity, and a style that moves with the constant change in Singapore.

A new, small, fast, multi-platform boat can get up on plane and cruise around the gathering icebergs, while the giant, liners, despite their cosmetic resuracing, slowly get out their lifeboats. Wave as we pass, since we may not see them again.

* * *

And, hey, if you want a strong and elegant news text face that no big paper is using, I can recommend one.

* * *

Update: Great City Forced to Drink Swill

Alert reader Terry DeWitt has nailed it. The Chronicle is “hubbing” (as Charles Apple puts it) with the other Hearst Chronicle, the one in San Francisco. Here’s today’s front, also via Newseum.

San Antonio has yet to switch over to this style, but it may yet. Both the Express-News and the San Francisco Chronicle have wandered away from the work done by Jeff Heinke and Nanette Bisher, who both tried to build on the DNA of their papers. The SF paper had a wonderful version of the typeface Electra to work with—drawn in house (!) by Jim Parkinson. In the last few years the papers lost their editors, their art directors, and their way. There is none of the great old San Francisco Chronicle in this generic design, the days of Scott Newhall and Herb Caen. (Never mind the actual Hearst flagship, the Examiner, which was sold down the river—and twice since).

Why Hearst thinks that Chronicle readers are the same in Houston and San Francisco, is beyond me. You go there, and immediately you see that the cities are profoundly different, geographically, demographically and psycho-graphically. The true owners of a newspaper are the readers. They pay for it every day, and/or look at the ads. And Houstonians are immensely proud of their city, and understand its identity. More so in San Francisco, if only because it’s older.

The only way you could appeal to citizens of both Houston and San Francisco with the same typography is by doing something has has nothing of the soul of either place. This is what they got.

MY friend Eduardo Arriagada, the Chilean media teacher and blogger, asked me on Twitter, “Please, at least a clue for 2012—@earriagada.”

Well, why not? My own blog is small enough that I don’t have to worry about a storm of scoffing objections if present a short list of predictions. And, next December, if some items haven’t happened, well, hey, I’ve been wrong before. Maybe one of these will wind up as one of those old-style fillers in the New Yorker, titled “The clouded crystal ball.”

So here goes: What happens in the media world, and beyond, in the next year.

• We stop calling it HTML5, and just call it HTML.

• Algorithmic design becomes more sophisticated and challenges hand-built layout for tablet publications with more regular formatting (like Vanity Fair, as opposed to Wired).

• Open source rules: Android, MySQL, Drupal . . . Treesaver. 

• Treesaver gets a rival, after two years as the unchallenged HTML platform for digital publications that dynamically lay out narrative content to fit all screen sizes. Meanwhile, the open-source community pushes Treesaver in interesting directions, including wider CMS integration and personalized publications. Treesaver is the standard component in major distribution hubs (aka, portals), mostly outside the U.S.

• Web fonts are widely adapted on big web sites, as well as small. Corporations buy worldwide licenses for the fonts used in their visual brand.

• The first multi-platform ad networks emerge, where advertisers can place ads on web sites, mobile sites, and apps, with one buy, and still get full analytic feedback.

• We continue to be annoyed by intrusive alerts when we’re using mobile browsers that say something like, “Hey, would you like to drop everything and download the app? (Yes) (Ask me later) (Go shoot myself).”

• Publishers are still unable to resolve the app vs. site dilemma, and increasingly have to do both. The smart ones are able to feed an app with the same HTML as the web site.

• New versions of the browsers, like IE10, with better integration with the OS platform, enable to developers to make sites that are so much like “native” apps, the difference doesn’t matter.

• But people still want apps.

• Nobody makes a tablet better than the iPad.

• Amazon recovers from the lackluster launch of the Kindle Fire, with an update and launches in Europe, and sales soar to a total of 40 million for 2012.

• Xoom and Playbook disappear.

• HTC ships a webOS tablet.

• Windows Phone 8 makes a strong entry into the mobile market, with the help of Nokia. Doesn’t impact iOS-dominated markets like the Bay Area, Canada and Singapore, but Android growth level off.

• Adobe seems to turn away from Flash and toward HTML, but no one is sure.

• There is a surprising arrival in print: A beautifully produced A4-size lifestyle magazine with superb photographic narratives, and an eclectic design combining retro-modernist typography and punk-expressionist illustrations. The surprise is that enough people are willing to pay the $100/year subscription (for 10 issues) that the magazine breaks even within the year.

And, in other news.

• The economy starts making two steps forward for every step backwards. The unemployment level is down to 7.8 on October 1, largely because there are fewer seeking employment rather than more jobs.

• A cool summer and calm weather confounds the doomsday predictors, but only temporarily.

• The TSA again fails to actually catch a single terrorist.

• The United-Continental merger results in a near-disaster in net revenue: 1 + 1 = 1.8. Meanwhile, American idiotically buys US Airways, and Spirit goes bankrupt.

• After a scary spike during the summer, oil prices settle at $90/barrel.

• Occupy Wall Street matures into an enduring and influential political movement, still without offering an agenda that plays according to old rules. The result: An onslaught of Constitutional and legislative reforms to separate corporations from politics.

• After a degrading campaign, and a big voter turnout, only 12 incumbents in the House and Senate are re-elected. Obama wins by a thin margin.

READING all the year-end media round-ups and forecasts, I’m thinking it’s probably more fun to write them. It’s been a seething year in the media, with more churn than change. The sudden news that Janet Robinson is out at The New York Times, is a symptom. The fact that she will be gone in two weeks, but no replacement CEO in sight, is another.

Publishers know that they need to do something about their business, they just don’t know what. The big companies are struggling just to get the right CEO. Time Warner, after a nearly year of pondering, last month installed an advertising executive at the helm of Time Inc., Laura Lang from Digitas. A good idea, particularly if publishing is just an adjunct of the ad business, as it often seems.

Time’s previous CEO, Jack Griffin, lasted only six months. His initiatives in the digital arena, like hiring Randall Rothenberg, were abandoned. Rothenberg went back to the IAB. (Another loss on the digital side in this rudderless period was Josh Quittner, a respected, tech-savvy Time editor who left for Flipboard in the summer.) You can expect that the absence of a CEO at the Times will result in more people-who-get-it, getting out.

The newspaper business seems more threatened than the magazine business. Jeffrey I. Cole, a professor at the USC Annenberg J-school and director of the Center for the Digital Future, released a peek a big report he’s been working on, predicting that that this digital future does not include a lot of newspapers. In fact, he says, only four big ones will survive, at least in print: The Times, the WSJ, USA Today and the Washington Post. I’m glad that two of my almus matris made the cut, but sad to see the L.A. Times and the Houston Chronicle go.

In around 1990 David Berlow, speaking at the Poynter Institute, predicted the end of print newspapers in 25 years—2015. It’s wonder he wasn’t lynched. That prediction seems real now. However loud and clear, predictions about industries never seem to be fulfilled in as clear and concrete a way as they are made. Things are too complicated. Newspapers have been working for 16 years trying to adapt to the web, and have been more adventurous than magazines. First stumbling with the 27/7 frequency of the web, the dailies were in a better position than the monthlies.As the web developed into a quick-in-and-out transitional space, and as social media began to seriously disrupt the reporting and distribution of news, they’ve struggled to stay afloat in a cultural stream that’s gathering speed. (It hasn’t help that their old business model deteriorated at the same time.)

It’s human nature to see danger and imagine the worst, that this fast current will at some point go over the falls. “We believe that America is at a major digital turning point,” Cole says. His study also predicts PCs will soon be replaced by tablets. Well, they will, at least for some consumption of news and other content. Remember, though, that Apple so far has sold “only” about 40 million iPads. Not a small number, but even if they were all in the United States, 85 percent of the population would still be iPad-less. When tablets get cheaper and lighter, more people (maybe everyone) will buy them and find how nice they are for consuming media. And we’ll still have PCs for work. (Hint: They have keyboards.) And much media consumption will still be done at work, at least if the boss is not looking.

The Annenberg prediction, like Berlow’s, is based on the assumption that the current momentum will continue unabated, and there is plenty of evidence to support that. Nevertheless, the newspaper business has been trying to change. There have been big efforts to create digital products, including a zillion iPad apps. And the classic management response to a downturn has been applied: massive cost reductions. Starting in 2010, the big newspaper groups began to breathe easier. Magazine groups, like the big ad agencies, also responded with big cuts and consolidation. Titles were shed, and big acquisitions were made. Time Inc. sold its special-interest magazine division, Time4 Media. Hearst bought Hachette. And so on.

This is a digital turning-point, but that doesn’t mean that print will go away. As in Detroit, home delivery may become a weekend play for newspapers. And some magazines are finding that an increase in production values makes readers happy. We’re seeing better paper, bigger trim sizes, and longer feature wells.

Until digital publications can offer the same ease-of-use, the sense of immersion and the compelling digital flow that print publications provide, some readers will still opt for print, if they can get it. And until digital publications can match that connection with readers, advertisers won’t pay as much for online media as for print. In the long tail of print, there are beautiful new magazines that are printed in limited editions, like the typographical journal, Codex, or McSweeney’s, an artisanal quarterly which two years ago published its own prototype of a future newspaper, “The San Francisco Panorama,” with rich narratives, upgraded stock and all-color printing.

Nevertheless, this is not a cyclical downturn, a spring flood. It’s a sea change, and it’s quickened by disruptions in the old print business model, in books as well as magazines and newspapers. The publishers can buy some time, and find ways to save some of the print business, but it won’t be the same print business. The idea that it may not all come crashing down at once (five years hence or whenever) is not very reassuring.

As discussed here previously, the business model for online publishing is yet to be figured out. Annenberg should ask the question: “When will digital revenues pay for the newsroom?” I haven’t heard that one answered. Ten years ago it looked like web site income would exceed costs by, say, 2004. That didn’t happen for the long tail, or even for most big content sites, because unlimited ad space inventory suppressed the rates. Could The New York Times digital products pay for its massive news operation? Not next year, even if they find a CEO. The problem is that the current formula just doesn’t cover the costs for most publishers. Some startups, like Huffington Post, have found a way to make it work, but of course they don’t pay many of their bloggers, and in any case much of its content is aggregated from the old-line print-based publications (which irritated Bill Keller all to hell, another Times executive who retired sooner than expected).

The next big question is: If publishers come up with a new model, like the Times pay wall, will they be able to implement it? The answer to that one may justify the predictions of doom. They don’t have a strategy; they have many strategies.

At a recent meeting at one of the big groups in New York, I saw, again, that the smart techies are bogged down for the lack of a coherent direction. Digital initiatives are moving in different directions, with different apps and sites—and different ad avails, marketing goals and editorial objectives. The platforms aren’t aligned, with the result that at this group there are five different content management systems. This is R&D, not a publishing strategy. It is hard to manage—and, worse, harder to monetize.

There is no consensus at these legacy groups, even where they have a CEO, and they don’t have much time to gel a consensus and make a plan. As one executive said at the meeting, “We can’t keep supporting all these different sites and apps.” He knew the answer is HTML5, and a push to the browser, but he can’t get agreement from his colleagues, or the funds.

At the root of the problem is the truth that the publishers and their editors are stuck in print. It’s still their main revenue, which confirms their reluctance to change. They may fear the predicted waterfall, and promote slogans like, “Digital first,” and “Mobile first,” but they still talk about converting their publications into digital products.

This is also human nature, the feeling that the way things were when we got here are they way they are supposed to be. Of course, the only constant is change. Those of us on the typographical end of the business will attest to that. From metal, to photo, to digital, to web fonts, change hasn’t stopped long enough for us to get used to each new phase.

Letterforms are still letterforms, but they perform differently on screens than printed pages, and they are created and distributed in new ways. News executives recognized early on that a newspaper on the web is a different product. (We need a new word, recognizing there is no paper in news web sites.) The screen size was so much smaller than broadsheet newspapers, that they understood immediately that at least the layout was going to have be different. By 2000 the Times and the other big web sites had become 24/7 offerings, with rapid-fire delivery of news items. But the delivery of the longer stories has never that usable, and has gotten worse over the last 10 years. Clean reader pages like the old International Herald Tribune site disappeared. You have to go to their apps to approximate the immersive experience of reading a newspaper, but it is not the same. In fact I now I find and read different stories on the apps.

With magazines, we have a good, adaptable word. (“Magazine” means storehouse. In French it means department store. In the military it means arsenal. It doesn’t just describe a printed publication.) Maybe because the iPad screen size was close to that of a single magazine page, the publishers thought, hah!, we can put magazines on these things. The result was Zinio, and worse. There are exceptions. For example, at Hearst, Scrollmotion’s innovative Esquire app, now a year old. One wonders what its circulation is. 20,000?

David Carey at Hearst is confident that his group, with 20 magazines, will reach one million digital subscriptions by the end of 2012. This sounded great until I remembered when I was working Hearst in the 90s, they wouldn’t think of launching or buying a single title if it could quickly reach a million circulation.

As good as some digital magazines are, most are artifacts of print magazines. The print is produced first and a team takes the material and extrudes it into a web site or an app. At Time Inc. and Condé Nast those teams have gotten big, trying to produce the apps with the print-based tools like Adobe InDesign. And the cost is still paid by the print edition. Some justify the digital losses, saying the apps help retain subscribers.

When thinking about this stuff, I am always reminded of the famous Harvard Business Review article in 1960, “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt. It explains the similar predicament faced by executives of the passenger railroads 50 years ago. Levitt asked the question, “What business are you in?”  The wrong answer was “the railroad business.” The right answer was “passenger transport.” And it’s the same now with the print media. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

Newspaper web sites may no longer be repurposed newspapers, but there is still a lot of ink in the veins of the editors. And magazine iPad apps are purposefully made to be just like the magazines, produced with the same workflow, with maybe a few videos bolted on. The ads for the Kindle Fire show a few magazines, and they might as well be screen shots from their InDesign layouts.

The question is, can these big groups figure out their core business (telling stories) before they reach the waterfall? Can they reconcile their internal conflicts, and make a series of new products, with consistent branding and friendly user interfaces? Can they set up a new workflow with a central CMS and overlapping teams that create the right content for the right platform? Can they rally around a CEO, if they have one, who knows where the world is going?

The evidence points toward: “Maybe.” But let’s keep in mind, there’s a reason there is no New York Central Airlines.

THE great Lou Silverstein died December 1. He was the designer who changed The New York Times into a readable, handsome, modern newspaper that was still very much the Times.

Lou was a wonderful guy, with the manners of the old New York about him. Short, slightly rounded, bald, always with a cigar, he looked like the son of the Brooklyn grocer that he was. If I’ve ever seen an eye that twinkled, it was Lou’s.

Searching Twitter the day the obit ran in Lou’s newspaper, I found a great number of respectful tweets from contemporaries, boomers and even many gen-exers. One was titled, “A sad day.” Lou retired nearly 30 years ago, so you can excuse the millennials if they’re not clear on who exactly Lou Silverstein was, but no excuse for one moron who, referring to the obit, wondered how a newspaper of all things could be made “modern.” (I immediately blocked him.) Ignorance of events before your time is one thing, but this remark is solipsistic; it indicates a belief I’ve been hearing since about 1995 that the history of human culture prior to one’s birth no longer applies.

Whether or not you read a printed newspaper, the principles that Lou brought to bear on the Times will apply to the news media for a long time. I was lucky enough to learn them directly from him. Since I got a (probably) premature start as a chief art director at age 23, he was one of only three designers I’ve ever reported to. But you could not ask for a better employer. And I have to say he is the only boss who pushed me hard enough to change my own willful direction. Lou had a big impact on my life.

When I worked for him, he led a staff of 60 from a smoky suite of offices on the ninth floor of the Times building on 43rd Street, guarded by Loretta, a friendly terrier of a private secretary. The idea of a whole floor of art directors was something the newsroom never quite comprehended, when they thought about it all. Lou was waging a long war to bring visual content into the paper as part of its regular offering. It’s hard to believe that now, with the Times providing great graphics and photojournalism as a matter of course. The attitude of the newsroom then, he thought, was uncivilized. His goal was to bring civilization to The New York Times.

For the editors, if they ever left the third-floor newsroom (where each reporter shared a desk with the night guy) to visit him, his department, 60-strong, was a clue Lou enjoyed the confidence of Punch Sulzberger, the publisher. There was an office with a big desk, windows looking north, and a comfortable seating area, where he conducted one-on-one meetings. It connected to a book-lined work room with a long counter piled with newspapers and a drafting board, always with a new layout pinned to it. Next door was a private conference room for art department meetings. Al three rooms had doors leading to bullpen for assistants, run by the loyal, stubborn and tireless Bob Peletier.

The place was smoky from his cigars. Of course, he never smoked one before lunch, but he made up for it in the afternoon. (This picture of Lou always with a cigar, shows how long ago it was.) When I moved into his office in 1984, the company replaced all the brown-stained ceiling tiles and cleaned the light fixtures with solvent. Within a few months, I was smoking cigars, too.

On the other side of floor was the art department proper, centered around the retouching artists and mapmakers, all members of the Newspaper Guild. Along the 43rd Steet side was a row of art director’s offices, each with a window. He treated them like he liked be treated, giving them the space to think, draw, and get the paper out. It was not a collegial atmosphere, but he didn’t lean over their shoulders much, either. When I later suggested that they put their current layouts on their doors, they bridled. Each art director had his or her own section (or sometimes two) to design, and the freedom to deal directly with the section editors without interference until they blew it, and then Lou would have something to say, personally.

Lou’s first effort at civilization was to surround map artists and retouchers with designers. As the old-timers reached retirement age, he replaced them with the likes of J.C. Suares and Ruth Ansel.

His power base was Punch, who had promoted him to Corporate Art Director from the promotion department where he had come up with the iconic “I got my job through The New York Times” campaign for the classifieds. You tend to forget that in the 60s, when this campaign started, the Times was not the only good newspaper in town. There was the World-Telegram, the Journal-American, the News, the Post. And the Herald Tribune still had a big classified section, particularly for executive jobs.



A subway poster designed by Lou in 1967 (found here). Note the crisp News Gothic in the headline—presumably set at Photolettering or another phototype shop that was already into the tight (but-not-touching) style that became the rage. The subject, RitaSue Siegel, became the most successful headhunter in the graphic arts profession. She helped me get my job at Rolling Stone eight years later

Slowly and carefully Silverstein built a graphic and typographic identity for the Times. Starting with the logo and then the editorial page and the new Op Ed page, Punch began to get him involved in the newspaper.The first areas Lou designed were not controlled by the newsroom, but by the publisher.


The Times editorial page before and after Lou. It’s hard to believe the before example (1958) is not much more than 50 years old. It looks like the 19th century. Yet, the the after (1978) could have been printed yesterday. (From Newspaper Design for the Times, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990. It’s out of print, but used copies can be found at Amazon. Ignore the spurious thumbnail of the cover.)

Lou was developing the external visual brand for the Times, as well. The sharp Ed Benguiat redrawing of the logo (which has become the default blackletter style for traditional newspapers worldwide) was too horizontal some for other applications. Lou stacked it, aligning the glyphs—not making it flush left or right—and, then, surprisingly, tilted it for the news racks and the trucks.



The logo placed on delivery trucks by Lou. Photo by Trevor Little.

The corporate work was successful, and the Times began to shed its staid Gray Lady image. This made Punch happy. With the competition fading, Sulzberger wanted to reach New Yorkers who lived in the suburbs, and he decided to launch a regional section zoned for Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New Jersey. He suggested to Abe Rosenthal, managing editor, that he bring in Lou to do the design. Abe teamed him with his trusted sidekick Arthur Gelb. (As far as I know, only Abe called him “Artie.”)

At first the editors were leery of this alien intruder, sent by the owner, but the team bonded quickly. All were , all fundamental New Yorkers—Lou was a Pratt alumnus, the other two from City College. This threesome, with, Punch, transformed a great institution, the most important newspaper (now I guess you say news publication) in the English-speaking world. Abe became executive editor in 1977, and with Punch pushing and funding the efforts from the top, the great lady’s course was changed. In the 70s and 80s, new section after new section was introduced. The Sunday paper (under Gelb) came alive. Advertising revenue soared. This was the heyday of the Times.

“Put a caption under every picture.”

In 1983, after a year as art director of the Magazine, I became Senior Art Director at the Times, basically Lou’s assistant. One day he called me to come down to Abe’s office to help with something, and when I opened the door, I found Abe, Arthur and Lou all on the floor, sitting in a sea of Lou’s layouts, playing like kids. Others in the newsroom were terrified of them, and perhpas news executives in those days could get away with arbitrary, capricious and unpredictable behavior that today would be called abusive. But I loved them. (Well, maybe not Arthur who had a way of siting you down his nose.) And I’ve never worked with a smarter, funnier, wiser, more productive group.

If you can get a copy of Newspaper Design for the Times, you can see some of the results of this effort. There is a full history of key projects, like the Op Ed page, and new sections like Travel. (I still don’t understand why they abandoned his brilliant front page concept after 15 years.)  Sketches and hard-comp dummies are shown. Remarkably, the sketches, done on tracing paper printed with blue grid lines so they would drop out in the stat camera, are very tight. He could draw 96-point Bookman free-hand and get the character count right. Bob Peletier would just measure the size of the type indicated and set it up on a Harris terminal in the bullpen, carefully marking it with a box at the top, ART DEPARTMENT/FOR LAYOUT ONLY, or we couldn’t touch the proofs when they came out of the processor in the fourth-floor composing room

One day Bob was out, and I set the type for Lou and gave it to a freelancer who had come in to help. When she pasted up the page, I saw something was wrong and remonstrated with her. It wasn’t following the layout. I put Lou’s sketch on top of her paste-up and you could see where the spacing was off.

“What?!” she said. “These sketches are supposed to be taken literally?”

Yes. Lou was literal, and precise, and his fast sketch of Ludlow Bookman not only fit, it looked enough like Bookman that he didn’t have to spec the type. These iterative sketches and dummies incorporated the editors reactions and his own thinking. They all get better and better, more refined and more elegant. Watching him do it was a great education.

One of the best in the book is the Metro section (now gone). Here is an interim dummy:



A hard comp for the Metropolitan section in the New York edition, 1986. It’s a redesign of one of the original sections in the four-section daily. The headlines are real, but the text is dummy type.

The designs had enormous strength. And they’re all black-and-white. The layout is crisp and modular—no doglegs. But he did use bastard measures, like the three-over-four grid of the “Brooklyn Activist” story.The free-standing photo piece at the bottom, follows the shape of the pictures, not the columns. So it’s not on a strict grid. It’s not mid-century, but it’s the modern newspaper in its first, and most influential form. Because once you get The New York Times to do something, it’s like getting the U.S. Army to do something. It’s hard, slow work, but it has a lot of impact.

Lou’s typography started with a marvelous combination he selected from the fonts in the composing room: Ludlow Bookman, Cheltenham Bold Italic, and the archly thin Latin Elongated. The text was and is set in Intertype Imperial, which he specified at Punch’s behest, back in the 60s. To these he added Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and Lightline Gothic, the grand American serifs designed by Morris Fuller Benton at ATF. They had been the staple of his identity work. And at some point he decided he had to bring in Helvetica as an alternate to the Trade Gothic, and you can see it in the slogan on the truck.

Lou cropped photos down to the quick. All extraneous parts of an image were eliminated. Once, passing by my desk in his bullpen as I worked on a layout, he said, “I see you don’t know how to crop a photo.” Well, I thought that I did, and asked how I was supposed to do it.

“With our crappy printing, you have to crop ’em as tight as you can,” he said, holding his fingers over an 8 x 10 photo. “And then, crop another half inch off each side!”

“Ask yourself, ‘Where is the news on this page,’ before taking it down to the newsroom.”

The obituaries all mentioned the Op Ed page, and the use of allegorical illustrations rather than political cartoons, which the Times has never run. Those are wonderful designs, and widely imitated around the world, but the contribution I admire the most was in the area of information graphics. In the 1980, Time magazine adapted the London Sunday Times style of illustrated graphics by Nigel Holmes, and brought Nigel to the United States. USA Today, launched in 1982 copied the style, notably the front-page “Snapshot.”

Lou didn’t have the time to get massive drawings done on deadline, so he developed a collage style that he called, “Sides of beef.” They were a combination of photos, charts, and diagrams, explaining a big news story. He was always pushing for the narrative, for the story-telling that couldn’t be done in plain text.

The day Indira Ghandi was assassinated, I heard him asking, “What is it like in India nowadays? Most of us have conception of the country that is probably out-of-date.” So he ordered up a side of beef—not just to the art department, but to the pressroom. Lou had his own page budget, so that he could get visual content into the paper without it coming out the “news hole” which was always jealously protected by the desk editors who thought the highest form of journalism could be expressed in 120-inch “take-out.”

We rushed around getting the components together. Lou did one of his tight sketches. And by the first edition, the paper had a one-page visual backgrounder on India. It really helped add visual interest to a big breaking-news story.



Lou’s graphic specials look great in the awards books, but they were all part of larger reports, with regular news page layouts.

* * *

Lou hired me in 1982 to art direct The New York Times Magazine. While that section has had reached visual heights since then, in the 80s the editorial part was still largely a monochrome affair, and the gravure printing was so coarse that there were no hairlines, including in the type. The previous art director, Ruth Ansell, had made great strides, but they were mostly confined to a 20-page feature well, and the fashion section, which was edited within in an inch of its life by the legendary Carrie Donovan. Nevertheless the magazine was fat with ads in those days, many for high fashion and luxury goods, and the impression was that of a lush color complement to the black-and-white newspaper.



One of the covers I did while working on the Magazine.

The next year he asked me to come up to the art department to work as his assistant. I was happy to do that, since I enjoyed designing the layout logic of publications more than art directing in the trenches. And at the magazine I was trapped in a war between the editor and Abe, and I was ready to get out. Plus, getting a tour of duty in the newsroom sounded like an exciting challenge.

I thought it would be fun to work with Lou, and it was. And he had assembled a great group on the ninth floor, among them Tom Bodkin, Gary Cosimini, Bob Eisner, Steve Heller, Jerelle Kraus, Diana Laguardia, Margaret O’Connor and Richard Weigand.

It was a loyal group, like a family in a 1940s movie. The Times was an extended family in those days, at least for some of us, with some real personal connections despite all the stress and competition. This in part was because the Times was a family-owned company, and still is. (When I first got there, I mentioned on a personnel form that mother had worked at the paper in the 20s. Soon after my arrival one of the Ochs ladies, a cousin of Punch, came to see me with a copy of a staff photo of the business department in around 1923. My mother was in the picture, at the age 18. That kind of thing makes you like your employer.)

And it can be stronger than that. When Lou’s son was seriously hurt in a car accident, the Times was generally supportive. That makes a bond with an employe. And Lou passed his sense of loyalty on to his staff. When I got in trouble with alcohol and drugs, Lou could have fired me, but the Times got me to a rehab. That was 29 years ago, and I am grateful every day.

[This section amended after comments from Helen Silverstein.]

I didn’t understand when he moved me to the ninth floor that he was grooming me as a replacement. He had so much energy, the fact that he was 64 had no significance to me. But the Times had a mandatory retirement age, and very quickly I found myself installed as his replacement.

Lou had trained me well, and I had a good relationship with Abe, which was essential. Of course, I didn’t have the title. I wasn’t on the masthead, and I wasn’t the corporate art director. I didn’t have the friends in the newsroom or the friends at the top that Lou had. I had to earn all of that.  But pretty soon, I realized I wouldn’t have Abe Rosenthal either. He was hurrying toward his own mandatory retirement, and I began to realize that his replacement would be Max Frankel, a buddy of Punch’s, a longtime correspondent, and a powerful Washington a bureau chief, but not an editor and certainly not a visual editor. It would be long time before the Times art director had the camaraderie with the executive editor that Lou and Abe had, and I knew I woud have to start at the beginning again. And it took Lou 25 years.

Before then, I got an offer from Newsweek, and decided to take it. I was at the Times for nearly four years, three of them with Lou. And they were three of the best years of my life. I regret that I abandoned his trust in me to continue what he had started, but I was just not the right guy for the long haul. Tom Bodkin ultimately stepped in to do that, and the legacy was saved. And it’s been another 25 years.

Lou Silverstein was the greatest news designer in history. By moving the direction of The New York Times, he changed the role of design in the news. I was privileged to be there for some of it, and watch him do it.

THOUGHTFUL content folks—writers, photographers, designers, editors and publishers—are engaged in an Arthurian quest for a business model that will support digital publications. The problem is that advertising is just not paying the bill, and readers aren’t ready to pay for content (as discussed in Part 1).

To recap, there is a Gresham’s Law of the Web: Unlimited inventory, combined with an anachronistic understanding of advertising as “space,” causes cheap ads to drive out the good.

This has damaged the design of content web sites, and is poised to destroy the content apps on the iPad. There are two obvious prescriptions for this malady. First, greatly reduce the number of ad positions. Then, charge more for ads.

The way to do this is to create sponsor relationships with special packages, not the hideous network advertising that repels readers. To drive engagement, a package needs to be truly interactive. It has to attract readers, and then get them more involved in the sponsor’s product. A good example in current experience is the Camry campaign Toyota is running in The Sporting News, the Treesaver publication that began as an iPad app. (You can see them in the web edition beta, or go to the App Store.) Jeff Price, the energetic, perceptive publisher of Sporting News, made it possible for a single buy across platforms—the iPad app and for browsers on the desktop, laptop, and smartphone. (Hell, it works pretty well on the Kindle Fire—without advance testing.)

Toyota’s ad adapts to an Android phone, and in an iPad app.

Cue the Prelude to Parsifal. Saatchi, Toyota’s agency, didn’t just run an iPad campaign. They linked the ads to current web pages where you can get prices and “build your own” Camry.

The ad links to adaptive pages on Toyota’s site

If you are working with Treesaver or a building a more conventional web site that uses responsive or adaptive style sheets, like BostonGlobe.com, you are creating one HTML publication that works on every size screen, on every device that has a current browser. The code is not trivial. New platforms emerge frequently (now the Amazon Fire’s Silk, next year a new one for Windows tablets), and there is an ongoing production effort needed to ready images and video for different sizes and OS/browser combinations.

Once you’ve figure all that out, you have a publication that goes everywhere, everywhere readers might be—onto their phones, their tablets, their laptops, and their desktop computers. As the Financial Times has discovered (although so far only for iOS browsers), this is a much better solution than building separate apps for each device, and keeping them updated. (Of course, web publications have support issues, too. There are always new versions of browsers, most recently Firefox, that change the way the HTML is rendered. And, worse, users expect any old browser should work, like their IE 7 sitting on XP. Geesh.)

The missing link is advertising. So far as I know, there is no ad network that serves desktop, mobile and tablet web ads at the same time, with the same insertion order. Doubleclick, owned by Google, handles iPad ads, as well as conventional web ads. Admob, also Google, sends ads to all the mobile browsers and different apps. But there is no single way to buy and insert adaptive ads across the platforms. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which has worked over the years to promote standard sizes for ads for the desktop web, doesn’t even list mobile ad sizes with its web ad units, offering only a PDF with “prevailing” sizes.

You see this confusion on all the sites and apps of big publications like The New York Times. Check it out, the ads are all different. That could be on purpose, but I doubt it. On the iPad, there were (when I wrote this) a bunch of LogMeIn ads, in a sponsorship play typical of their app. Okay! But, on the Android app on an HTC Evo, there is a tiny banner for the Cleveland Clinic. On the iPhone app, I didn’t get any ads at all—until a story was interrupted by a full-screen ad for American Airlines. Yay! But it was a pop-up with a deliberate “close” button, not a magazine style ad that you could just swipe past if you weren’t interested. 

The Times’ web site does not adapt to different sizes, so you get all the ads on every browser web. (To my relief, The Times doesn’t suggest you go to their mobile app when you are coming in on a phone, but maybe they set a cookie and know I have them.) You have to pinch and zoom, and the big leaderboards are nearly illegible unless you do. One wonders, however, if they still get get the full analytics from the web browsers—page views and all the requisite clicks that have made web design so ugly.

Toyota’s agency, Saatchi, is using adaptive web design to get the same ads to work at different sizes on The Sporting News. They link gracefully to adaptive pages on their web site. In addition to full-page or full-screen ads they’re running 300 x 250 pixel ads, a standard IAB “interactive marketing unit,” in this campaign. These also link to details on the site. (Note, those ads work fine on mobile, until you turn the phone sideways.) I suppose you could fall-back to the next sized down, 180 x 150. It’s proportional, but it’s 60 percent of the larger rectangle, and thus like IAB units in general, not on any grid. So, float it!

* * *

So what’s holding us up from making truly adaptive or responsive advertising across the platforms?

Quick aside: And what do we mean by adaptive and responsive anyway? In my lexicon, adaptive means a design that adjusts the layout while staying on a grid, and responsive means design that adjusts to any screen size. Scott Kellum, the design director at Treesaver, has made a demo for a truly responsive ad. The grid works from the biggest to the smallest screens, portrait and landscape. If you adjust your browser window size, the code smoothly refits the ad while you are changing the size.

It is too much to expect that the different advertising factions—clients, publishers, agencies, brokers and networks—will agree anytime soon on a multi-platform strategy, never mind develop truly responsive assets. What I am hoping for is that they will settle on the same basic column widths, preferably 300px so it fits on a phone. The need for standard cross-platform sizes suggests that the term here is adaptive sites, not fully responsive.

Mark Boulton, a British web designer, summed up the issues involved in a useful and comprehensive post on his site.

• Web advertising is a whole other industry.
• Ad units are fixed, standardised sizes.
• They are commissioned, sold and created on the basis of their size and position on the page
• Many ads are rich (including takeovers, video, pop-overs, flyouts and interactions)

The first point is that the ad side of the web is unfortunately separated from the publishing and tech sides, and we need more communication. On the web, advertising has followed the print CPM model, whereby audience and “impressions” trump good design and reader engagement. While advertising went its own way, the business model flew out the window.

The last point, rich advertising, is another artifact of the web ad glut. With sites filled with with crappy ads, advertisers pushed for attention-grabbing animated “take-overs” just as web sites started moving away from the balky browser-crashing Flash animations and toward simple, direct design that creates a connection with customers. We’ll see the crap fade away as soon as more adaptive formats are proven, the bankrupt web model is discarded, design starts favoring the users.

Boulton’s second and third points are the key to the ad world’s resistance to adaptive. Units are in fixed, standard sizes. This is a legacy of single-size page design, and the idea that a web page is “space” and we carve it up like an old newspaper. The client buys a web leaderboard (728 x 90) and a mobile leaderboard (320 x 50) as completely different orders. They are not even the same proportion. Without the sponsorship arrangement at The Sporting News, Toyota would have had to make at least two insertion orders for the same ads. Where is Google now that we need them?

Finally, there is the point about ads that are “sold and created on the basis of their size and position on the page.” This is tricky for adaptive ads, particularly in Treesaver, where there is no exact position and no exact page number. It’s all relative. A home page can have a bunch of ads on a desktop monitor, but obviously they won’t all fit on an iPhone. But if you sell sponsorships rather than spots, the exact position is not the point. The point is the connection with the reader.

And this is the holy grail. There are a few first steps:

• Greatly reduce the number of ad positions
• Charge more for ads
• Sell cross-platform ads (web, tablet, mobile) with a single insertion order.

We’re talking about a whole new business structure, and these are just the pilings. Publishers will have to emphasize sponsorships and stop ruining their sites with network trash. Exclusive positions and cross-platform distribution and analytics justify higher pricers.

Still, we’ll have to work on the social layers for both promotion and feedback, and build great heuristics to make easier for readers to find what they are interested in. We’ll still need to watch the SEO, pay for external promotion including events—and offer subscriptions with real value. In other words, we have to keep improving the environment for readers, and advertisers. And, we’ll have to create wholly new advertising avails, like the digital equivalent of magazine outserts.

For it to work, we have to offer great stories. That’s what it comes back to: Wonderfully written, photographed and designed narratives about stuff that’s interesting. This is not a matter of “converting” magazines and newspapers to HTML5. It’s rethinking what we’ve done well in print, for the screen, on multiple platfroms. There must be new kind of design, as well as new technologies.

If we can make this change, then we’ll have an environment that encourages narrative, interactive advertising as well. And that, ultimately, can pay for it all.

WE know the print publishing model is broken, and increasingly we’re aware that the digital content business is, too. The idea was to set cheap ad rates and make it up in volume. The CPM (cost-per-thousand) model worked in broadcasting where there was a finite amount of time, and a mythically homogenous market. Print publishers, at least in the U.S., followed suit.

On the web a low barrier-to-entry created a lot of content web sites and an unlimited inventory of positions. The market is atomized. The prices for ads have been driven down to the point where the Long Tail can’t make a go of it. Publishers are caught between thinning ad revenue and the audience’s reluctance to pay for content.

Radio ushered in the idea that content could be free 80 years ago. TV confirmed it. The internet circulated the idea that it should be free. This is neither logical nor fair to writers and editors (and art directors)—it’s just the market. If people are accustomed to free content, if their mental price-point is zero, then publishers can’t charge much for a publication, if at all. I know for myself that $5.99 seems like a lot to pay for a digital issue of any magazine, value be damned. But I find myself signing up for 99-cent deals, often with recurring charges to my iTunes account. That amount is negligible. I even paid for a couple of months of The Daily before realizing what was happening, and rushed to the App Store to cancel cancelled. [Note to self: Post question on Quora asking how the hell the Apple Newsstand works, and why I have some magazine and newspaper icons in it that I can’t move elsewhere and others that I can’t find in it?]

So publishers are stuck with little (or no) subscription revenue. That’s the number-one problem with the old model. Problem two is the look and feel of advertising. Web publishers have fallen into the Gresham’s Law of the Web: Crappy advertising drives out the well-designed.

What we have now is the ugliest advertising in the history of the media. I used to say that web sites looked like the walls of a third-world futbol stadium, but that was unfair to the stadiums. Most content sites look so bad they actually repel readers rather than attract them.

The old Times of London with a front page filled with ads looks like an Aldine octavo next to a typical news web site.


The Times of London front page in 1788. From Wikipedia

As the estimable Frédéric Filloux showed a few weeks ago in a Monday Notes blog, the cheapness of web space and the publishers’ resulting hunger for revenue have drowned out the content on the home pages of even the most important news sites in the Europe and the U.S. Filloux presents a series of screen grabs, with the ads indicated by red rectangles. It’s shocking how little content is getting on the home pages.

Worse, he points out, are the story pages.

These pages are being ruined by the “display” ads, not the hideous network ads with their frightening images of teeth whiteners and the bogus news stories: “Woman in ______ [your hometown here] Finds Free Secret to Losing Weight!”

Individually the big ads might be okay, but together they are a discordant mess that swamps the content and the branding of a site. First they cover a page, and then use animation to distract your eye. Increasingly we’re seeing animation on mobile screens. (Remember the blink tag?) We’re wired for motion, so an animated ad always trumps reading, and thus becomes a push-back to the readers.

What happened to the understanding we reached in the 90s, that an animation just ran once and then settled down so people could read?

So, what can be done now? The answer, of course, is design. (If you’re a hammer all problems look like nails.) To solve both the inventory glut and the visual cacophony, the content web community needs, in concert and with no further delay, to:

• Greatly reduce the number of ad positions
• Charge more for ads

This means, of course, sponsorship, where an advertiser pays to be the only advertiser on a screen. A content site could sell unique partial avails (a banner or box), or a “full page” before section fronts and within stories. I prefer ads that fall naturally between page turns, like in print. Products that appear in interstitial full-screen ads (that you have to specifically close by hitting a button) should be boycotted.

On a news site, a typical story could start with one big partial-page on the lede, and follow with occasional full pages, and perhaps more partials—as they fit. I sketched this out five years ago, fresh from work on The New York Times Reader, after seeing great story in the print Houston Chronicle (which I helped design) look really bad on the web site. Every page would be sized to fit the screen. (We didn’t have Treesaver yet, and we didn’t have web fonts, but I was ready!) The desktop version would like like this:



A study for a possible Houston Chronicle Reader, 2006

The Chronicle reader, pixel-for-pixel, showing the paper’s custom fonts.

I can hear the publishers already objecting that exclusivity would cut out a lot of revenue from their network ads. But don’t throw them out the other ads, blend them in. You can put non-display ads on a page with a display ad, without hurting the advertiser or the reader.  We could take a the cue from the original text ads, which were “pub-set” (that is set in type by the publisher, not the ad agency) in a regular text font—classifieds. The design of classifieds became generic and mean. Only Craigslist is uglier.

The modern example would be Facebook, which simply does not allow display advertising. Everything is pub-set. And they’re going to bringing $3.8 billion of it, estimates Bloomberg.

The key to all of this is to charge more. But if you look at most content web sites, there is not that many different advertisers at any one moment. What’s happening is that the publishers seem to be putting all of their ads on every pages. It’s as though they were afraid no one would read more than one page. But this way, they guarantee it. Look at the Houston Chronicle web page of that same story:

Story page from Chron.com, 2006

If you think that’s bad, look how Gresham’s law has eroded the design in the last five years. Here’s a typical recent news story.



Story page from Chron.com, 2011

Now, tell me you want to read this.

The chances of web publishers and bloggers all rising up together to create scarcity and great design seems unlikely, but all it will take is one great success. I am reminded of a redesign project I worked on in Singapore in the 90s, The Straits Times. They had three ads on the front page, and were reluctant to simplify the page because there was so much money involved. I said, “Charge the same total for just one. Better, don’t just triple the price for a single ad, quadruple it!” And the publisher finally agreed. Well, the page looked better, readers liked it more, the visual brand was improved, and revenue increased. The advertisers bumped off the page took larger ads inside with their same budgets, and the waiting list for Page One was a year long.

* * *

The next change for web publishers:

• Sell cross-platform ads (web, tablet, mobile) with the same order.

We’ve been hearing about responsive web sites. But what about the ads? Web, tablet and mobiles are sold and served separately, and there are not analytics services that can yet follow a multi-platform campaign. Right now the only way to get responsive advertising is a custom sell, and custom creative.

I’ll tackle this in the next post, but if you are interested, take time to read a thorough review of the issue by Mark Boulton, a fine web designer in Britain.

The time has come to do for advertising what the Boston Globe has done for news sites (with the help of Upstatement and Ethan Marcotte (and a assist from Webtype!). The Globe makes the same content, with the same HTML/CSS feed, look great on any device, OS and screen size that a reader chooses.

OCCUPY Wall Street, like a lot of media celebrities, is smaller in person than you had imagined. Zucotti Park is a pocket park, a public benefit given in exchange for a height-limit restriction or something. Last Saturday morning, when Foster Barnes and I went to check it out, there were maybe 300 Occupants, and a similar number of sympathetic onlookers, police and tourists.

Foster and I were staying at the Andaz Hotel Wall Street, a Hyatt boutique hotel chain with a touch of Ian Schrager. (I would recommend it.) The irony of staying in a place with free cappuccino in the lobby and receptionists wielding iPads with the band of protestors slept on the concrete, was not not lost on us. I remembered in 1969 encountering a bunch of well-dressed liberal swells in the lobby of the Hay-Adams after fleeing pepper-gas at a Moratorium march on the Mall. . . .

“Eat the rich.”

This time it was I who took the role of limousine liberal. But it’s a less judgmental age: You can’t tell who are your friends just because they do or don’t wear a necktie or have long hair. We looked at the people in the park with a mixture of support and distance. There is much to agree with, and only a couple of wackos to ignore. Anyone who asks, “What do these people want?” just isn’t listening. They want to move the corporations out of the government.

That means: Get the lobbyists out of the legislation business, and restore democracy. How hard is this to understand?

Others complain that the Occupants lack a clear set of specific goals, keyed to actual pieces of legislation. They miss the point. The idea is to change the system, not to feed it.

The Occupy movement is spreading emotions more than agenda. The lack of “agenda” confounds Fox News pundits and Republican candidate-debaters. It makes it hard for them to formulate soundbites, as though any difficult political problem could be addressed with a catch phrase alone. But many normal people can identify with the complaints of the people in the park, and the need for change.

While there are some in the park with signs against fracking and sustainable energy, the green movement is more of an ally than a policy plank. This is a enigmatic reform movement, and it’s been quickly cloned. The Occupy Austin group, one of hundreds inspired by Occupy Wall Street, is similar in complexion, diversity and anger. There seems to be a wide realization that if we don’t change the way we do things in Washington (for example, the grotesquely corrupted Volcker Rule, which started as a one-page regulation and became a 300 pages of contradictory, unenforcible gibberish), this country will be trapped in a downward spiral of unemployment and declining lifestyles, while the super-rich get super-richer.

There have been plenty of interviews of the Occupants on NPR and the newspapers, so now we know they are not the slackers in Seattle in 1999 throwing rocks at a Starbucks during the World Trade Organization summit. Nor, despite Fox News’ convictions otherwise, is this a result of labor union machinations. Not that that would be a bad thing, considering how little influence the unions have anymore. No, these are regular people, out-of-work or donating their free time while bloggers post on donated MiFis recharged by cycle generators, and turn out the Occupied Wall Street Journal, which reminds me of the Mayday newspaper in 1971, published for a similar of occupation (they were camped in Potomac Park to protest the war in Vietnam). Occupied so far has gotten out three editions; we did five! But I expect that there will be more.

The Democrats don’t know what to make of the paper or the movement still, which makes you wonder if the party has any chance of getting a clue in time for the election.

The media, however, is beginning to get the connection with the Tea Party movement. The front page of the Washington Post Sunday suggested that they “occupy some common ground.” Certainly they share the anger of regular people who have been marginalized by the system. The Occupants’ enemy is the corporations, and the Partiers say’s it’s the government. How do you tell them apart anymore?

The Tea Party started as a libertarian uprising, but was co-opted by the religious right—and the GOP. A movement to get government out of our lives can’t get that done if it says in the next breath that government should tell women what they can do with their own bodies, or tell men who they can marry.

The Post quoted one Partier, “We agree the government should be made unbribable.” And throwing out the lobbyists is the fundamental reform both want. The writer concluded, “No one expects the Tea Party and Occupy movements to merge.” But why not? It’s not like there are boards of directors to vote. It could just happen. The emotions are the same. And this a movement not a ideology.

The great part about the Occupy manifesto is that there is no manifesto. This why I think of the movement as neo-anarchist. They’re intellectual anarchists, free-thinkers, not the bomb-throwing anarchists of 100 years ago. By refusing a platform with the usual planks, the movement is inclusionary. So some old lefties can join in, but there is no “line” like the leftists of the 60s and 70s argued into the night during their long occupations of the “Ad Building.”

In the 1971 occupation,  the Mayday Tribe, the leadership, spent most of its time sharpening the line—honing the differences between Marxist-Leninism and Maoism, instead of getting the folks trained in civil disobedience. Characteristically, they rejected the support of the Trotskyists, who held their own rally at the Washington Monument—and the Beach Boys played for it. Brian Wilson couldn’t tell a Trotskyist from a syndicalist; he just wanted to protest the war. I don’t remember anymore the ideological details, but they didn’t matter when some 12,000 of the Mayday demonstrators were arrested and thrown into RFK stadium without even a show of non-violent resistance.

There is no Tribe at Occupy, and not much intra-left argument. When the police moved on the marchers at the Brooklyn Bridge, they sat down and locked arms, and while 700 were arrested, they had won the day. Mayor Bloomberg, one imagines, explained to the police that they had to be cool, and they are. (There are several pro-NYPD signs at the park.) To the owners of Zucotti Park, you can hear Bloomberg saying, “Forget about that clean-up. It won’t end well. We don’t want a Cairo on our hands.”

So, it’s working. If the Occupants can keep their agenda inclusive, and about big reform and not planks, and realize that government may not be the problem, but it is not going solve everything, and that corporations are not all bad, they’re made up of people too, and there are rights of property worth preserving and free enterprise is what got the U.S. to where we are—then maybe more Partiers will realize they are fighting for the same thing.

And then if the Partiers can let get fundamentalist about the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of reigion”) and get real about the need for a social safety net in this country, they could build a movement that would upend the worthless two-party system we have now.

Of course sooner or later, they would have to make a manifesto. So, uninvited, here are bullet points for the combined movement, reforms that we can agree on, and which might actually push the country back to upward mobility:

• No more corporate campaign contributions.

• $5,000 limit on personal campaign contributions.

• Non-partisan primaries (and consider the none-of-the-above ballot line).

• Congressional reform: Every bill must be about one thing, and it’s title must explain the purpose of the bill.

• Abolish Electoral College

• Flat federal personal income tax: 20% above $20,000 per year per person. No exemptions.

• Flat federal corporate income tax: 20%. No exemptions.

• Major reduction in foreign wars and military spending.

• Major reduction in the security establishment.

• No federal laws restricting personal rights unless they conflict with others’ rights.

• Transparent adjustment of all entitlements across the board.

• Banking reform. No one is too big to fail.

• Medicare, medicaid for everyone, private and/or public.

• Minimum annual income guarantee for all of $10,000.

LAST week I went back to Midland, my home town, for a reunion of the Black Sheep, the 11 grandchildren of W.A. Black, an oilman who went to Texas in the late 20s and drilled the first gusher in Ector County. I’ve been to Midland frequently over the last 10 years since it has the closest commercial airport to my camp in the Big Bend. Everyone hates their hometown in some way, and Midland has the most forbidding geography in the country. Utterly flat, dry and hot. Pinkie Black, when she first came there, said that if you look to the end of any street you can see the curvature of the earth.

The town got its start, like many did, as a railway stop. Oil was discovered in the early 20s, and ever since it has been going through a series of booms and busts. Any rational person, once they struck it rich, would have moved at least as far as other oil towns like Roswell and San Angelo, which have hills and rivers and trees. But more stayed in Midland, where by the 50s the lifestyle was getting less raw, friendship was real,  and the business climate (e.g. toleration for failure) was excellent. As long as you’d didn’t stray far from the nearly Puritanical moral code, you could have a good time in Midland.

One family that liked it was the George H. W. Bushes. Forty-one came in 1948 to learn the oil business. My family was about two families away. My mother was good friends with Mary Pannill, whose husband was a successful petroleum lawyer. The Pannills were friends of the Liedtkes. Hugh Liedtke and his brother Bill became H. W.’s partners, and they did pretty well. In those days in Midland, you never let on how much money you had.

Black Sheep cousins at the “Childhood Home,” October 2011.

George W., Forty-three,  grew up in what today seems a modest house on Ohio Ave., but a comfortable one, eight blocks from my parents’s house on Kansas. They’ve made it into a museum, not to celebrate the lifestyle of the H. W.’s family so much as George W.’s “Childhood Home.” They did a great job restoring it to 1950s style, with a knotty-pine dining room and a Lucille Ball kitchen. Paul St. Hilaire, the director of the museum, showed the cousins around, and there was a collective flashback, at least for those of us who grew up in the town, about what life was like then. One bedroom had a baseball exhibit, since W. played the game at Yale and owned a piece of the Rangers at the time his dad was President.

In another bedroom there is a little history of Midland, told, like the baseball displays, with a series of square panels. You can see the fine old Scharbauer Hotel—with its barber shop, coffee shop and, uh, drug store, foolishly torn down in the 70s to make an ugly Hilton, and other landmarks and personalities. I think someone had mentioned it when the museum opened, but I was delighted to find another panel about my father, architect J. J. Black (1900-1983). On his letterhead, “Architect” was first.

The plaque in the history exhibit.

The caption reads:

Architect J. J. Black designed the Midland Commercial Bank and Trust Building in 1955. Opening his practice in 1934, J. J. Black lived and worked in Midland for thirty years. The building reflects the influence of Bruce Goff, an artistic free spirit who promoted organic architecture. Architectural historian Frank Welch describes Black’s results as “well managed with coherence and unity.” Other J. J. Black projects in Midland include the Warren House (1950), the Woods House (1952), the Oliver House (1955), and the Scharbauer House (1959).

There is picture of his Commercial Bank building, torn down to make room for a larger parking lot for a Walgreen’s. Whatever good things you might say about Midlanders, they have zero sense of architectural preservation.

The Commercial Bank & Trust, c. 1957.

The Commercial Bank was a small bank, the third bank in town after the First National, which went bust in the 80s despite its $1 billion in deposits, and the Midland National, which is now a Wells Fargo branch. It was the first to be located away from downtown, in the new Village Shopping Center next to Grammar Murphy, a department store with a logo imitating Neiman Marcus.

My dad worked from an office at home from 1938 to 1965. At any given time he had one or two designers in the office, and a secretary (the formidable Dorothy Newberry, still living). The designer in 1957, when they built this bank, was Bob Dennis. The design was crisply modern, football-shaped in plan with curved sides, accordion glass panels meeting in a point. There was a Wrightian zig-zag detail, a kind of cornice, on the edge of the roof. And the football shape was echoed inside.

The interior of the bank. Ignore the flowers and plants.

Joe was a fanatic about details. This building was published in architecture magazines and at least one international book. But it’s hard to see in photographs the feeling it gave a customer when he or she walked in. Just like it’s hard to judge a web site by a screen grab. There was a pointed-oval motif throughout. And while the materials were not traditional (I remember a solid yellow linoleum floor), the finish was perfect, and while the facade was impressive, you are left remembering the details.

During the Black Sheep reunion, Mark Wellen, who’d designed Camp Cinco in the Big Bend of Texas (where I’m writing this post), led the cousins in a tour of Joe Black’s houses in Midland. He built more than a hundred of them in 30 years and some were mansions for oilmen. Mark took us to the Scharbauer house. They were among the first settlers in West Texas, and bought a vast territory for cattle ranching, all of which had oil under it. Big ranchers liked to build hotels in the town near them, and Clarence Scharbauer built the largest hotel in West Texas. His son’s house is the largest in town, and he is still living there 50 years later. The house has been well maintained, but it was built to last. All-masonry exterior, a tile roof that looks like shingles, steel frame, concrete foundations sitting on rock that had to be dynamited for the basement. It’s 30,000 square feet, with a separate wing for the four kids, who had a big playroom, a separate entrance and a porte-cochere.

This house is traditional (a gigantic English cottage, actually). Joe studied Beaux Arts styles at Columbia, and won a bronze from l’École des Beaux-Arts for a neo-classical harbor design, called, “The Watergate.” Then Mark took us into another house, 1959, home of another oilman, Jim Mascho, and his extraordinary wife Loyce, who I think of as the Madame Butterfly of Midland. She wanted modern, and Joe might argue with the clients but ultimately he wanted to build the house that was right for the people who would live there. He designed the Mascho house in a modernist style with Arts & Crafts craftsmanship, like those of Frank Lloyd Wright, and built it around Loyce’s Japanese art collection. She even brought in a gate from Kyoto for the entrance to the rock garden.

From the outside, both houses were modest, everything considered. Midlanders in those days did not want to make “a statement.” But inside the materials are astonishingly rich. The Scharbauers have what seems like an acre of Italian terrazzo tiles with big smooth marble stones in the family room, and there’s a trophy room with an African mahogany helical staircase carved to look like stacked airplane propeller models.

The Mascho house has stone masonry work with ledge stone inside and out. A fireplace is the center of one stone wall. Another leads to an outside fountain, separated from the room by a mullion-free glass panel. Few walls go all the way to the ceiling. Few ceilings are flat. Few rooms have a rectangular plan. Amazingly, the kitchen, still with its mid-century appliances looks competely up-to-date. Missing in the house now are the warm colors of the wood and stone. The dining room ceiling was a pattern made of mahogany molding.  (The twin bathrooms in the master suite still have the pink lavatories.)

You look at the angles of the glass corners and the way the rock meets the plaster walls, and wonder if you could get ever get this built today. The original program for these houses has changed. The Scharbauer kids converted the playroom to a living room, and then went off to school and on to adult life. (They never occupied the apartments built for them on the second floor.) Jim Mascho died 10 years after the house was finished, and is remembered mainly for the giant Fuhrman Mascho oil field, still in production after 75 years.

And the Commercial Bank is gone, too. When I started working on publications, my dad couldn’t understand it. “You work a short time on pieces of paper that will be duplicated by the thousands and then thrown away.” he said. “I work a long time on one project that will last forever.” God knows what he would think of web sites.

Sadly, architecture doesn’t always last, either, although 50 years is pretty good run in this country today. And making formats and algorithms (like the rules in the Treesaver edition for Sporting News), can give publication design a little more longevity than just some type specifications.

I know Joe was saddened by the demolition of the Center and the Ziegfeld theaters in New York, where in his 20s he was a designer for, respectively, Raymond Hood and Joseph Urban. But the Brooklyn Telephone building (for Ralph Walker) is still there, now the Bel Tel condos.

In Midland, his radical Unitarian Church was demolished after 10 years to make way for an office park.  The Midland Air Terminal, was first horribly remodeled, then torn down. The house I grew up in (so modern in 1938 it was called the “crazy house”—although Joe toned it down as much he could), was gutted after a fire and all the details—the paneling and the cabinetry, the glass block office wall, and the graceful side entrance—removed.

The details stay in the mind even when the design is obliterated, as Lloyd Ziff said about magazine formats,  like an ancient Saharan city in the sand dunes. I’ll always remember how Joe put the windows low, so you could see out while sitting. (He would hang pictures at seated eye-level, too.) The corners in his buildings always met in a decisive way, sometimes not at right angles. The roofs always had wide overhangs, so that the windows would be shaded from the sun, or windblown rain against which gutters were useless.

Sometimes the details of a publication last a long time. The Jensonian typeface that Jim Parkinson designed for Rolling Stone in mid-70s, is still there, and it still looks like Rolling Stone. Time has the same logo we did in the 90s; Fast Company still has the funny little A and O, although they misplaced them for a while. The LA Times keeps its superb David Berlow Kis. The Houston Chronicle holds onto its typography, with Christian Schwartz’s great text font.

And I was sad when the good designs were discarded. My Reader’s Digest has been replaced (twice) by magazines that don’t look like the Reader’s Digest.  The red stripe I put on Newsweek pages so they would pass “the gutter test”—you’d know a clipping was from Newsweek—is gone, along with the red-stripe logo. Although in both cases there is no satisfaction that the magazines are read by a fraction of the people they once attracted. And the whole Newsweek company, after discarding the red bars, was sold for a dollar.

They’re gone, but the details live on, in readers and users’ memories, and in the culture. Joe, as have I, based his work on the accumulation of human creative work—visual, verbal, and scientific. Sometimes he was too early on the scene, and he never played to the critics or the professional associations, but to the people who used his buildings. Some of his work looks commonplace now, but it wasn’t then. That just shows that he was moving in the direction of history.