Editorial design

Like most graphic design, newspaper and magazine design is an exercise in combining technical detail with artistic flair. The core components of editorial design are text and pictures, so a keen understanding of typography, layouts, grids and composition is essential. In fact, magazines perhaps more than any other format show how the many elements of graphic design can come together in one place: images, illustration, photography, logos and mastheads, information design, paper stock and so on.


What is perhaps a little different from other areas of graphic design is that editorial design demands constant reinvention, as Jeremy Leslie of magculture.com explains: ‘Editorial design uses and fuses two key elements of graphic design. It uses templates and sets up rules to follow, which is the technical side, in terms of understanding structure and limiting your choices to make certain statements. But it’s also about taking the rules that you have set up and making something creative from them. Unlike most areas of graphic design, editorial design is an ongoing project. It’s not a one-off, like a piece of packaging or a poster, where you get it all set up and then hit the print button; it needs to develop. So you’re looking for graphic designers to come up with a strong functional basis and rules, but you’re also looking to bend those rules on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. There has to be a balance between the familiar, so people recognise the magazine they bought last time, and surprise, to let them know it’s a new issue.




Esquire covers under art director David Curcurito are very type-led

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