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Trade magazine art directors talk about Ready-Media

Trade magazine art directors talk about Ready-Media

Ready-Media   08.09.10   posted by Robert Newman

The recent launch of Roger Black and friends' new project, Ready-Media, created a storm of controversy within the publication design community. The post about the project that ran on the SPD site garnered almost 80 comments, from some of the top publication designers in the field. Many of the comments were highly critical of the project's concept to create out-of-the-box newspaper and magazine templates that require the users to "just add content." 

A good amount of the comments, both pro and con, centered on Ready-Media's potential impact on trade and business-to-business (B2B) magazines. We asked four art directors with extensive experience in the trade and B2B area to share their opinions on this controversy. Here are comments from art directors Francesca Messina, Don Morris, Mitch Shostak, and Florian Bachleda.

Trade magazines above: HQ (Francesca Messina), Snap (Mitch Shostak), Government Executive (Don Morris), What Matters (Florian Bachleda).


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In Defense of Roger Black and Ready-Media

In Defense of Roger Black and Ready-Media

Ready-Media   07.30.10   posted by Robert Newman

Arthur Hochstein was the art director of Time magazine from 1994 to the end of 2009. In addition to creating over 1000 covers of the magazine (and putting together Time's annual Top 10 magazine cover list), he has done a number of very smart redesigns and projects for other magazines. We asked him for his thoughts on the new Roger Black Ready-Media project and the controversy that has surrounded it on the SPD site..

Arthur Hochstein: I'm hearing an echo of the Luddite movement here (although I understand that this discussion isn't about resistance to new technology). Like my friend Luke Hayman, I don't quite see what all the fuss is about, and I admire Roger for having the impulse to do this and not be cowed by the criticism of his peers. As others have pointed out, he's always put the business of design on equal footing with designing itself (as if there is something inherently unsavory about that).
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