SPD 50: October 2014 Archives

Above: The Runner, Special Issue: New York City Marathon, January 1979

Just in time for this weekend's New York City Marathon! The Runner was launched in 1978 as an insert in the biweekly newsmagazine New Times. Art directed by Steve Phillips, it was the brainchild of New Times publisher George Hirsch, who was also the original publisher of New York. The Runner soon became a stand-alone magazine. In 1987 it was acquired by Rodale and merged with Runner's World. Hirsch later became the worldwide publisher of Runner's World and the first publishing director of Men's Health.

Obsessed with running, Hirsch helped start the five-borough NYC Marathon in 1976, founded the New Year's Eve Midnight Run in Central Park in 1979, and became the chairman of the New York Road Runners in 2005. At 80, Hirsch remains an avid runner and was recently profiled in an article in Runner's World.

After the jump, we've got a selection of interior pages and comments from art director Steve Phillips about the creation of The Runner logo and this special issue.

John Kascht, who was featured on the SPD site earlier this week pictured at the 1990 SPD26 gala, took home the gold that evening in the Design/Cover category. His work at the Washington Times newspaper in the late 1980-early 90s exhibited both his considerable talents as a illustrator as well as a masterful page designer and art director. Like David Cowles, Andrew Skwish, and other art directors who started at newspapers, John worked in a very old school style at the Times, both illustrating and art directing his pages (and he won many awards for both)!

These pages were groundbreaking in their time, both for the boldness of the design and the sheer scale of the illustration size (The Washington Times design director was Joseph Scopin). Very few publications of any kind, and certainly few newspapers, were running pages and artwork at this kind of scale. You can see Kascht experimenting with his illustration style, and his design and typography has an impressive fluidity and diversity, especially considering the very limited, pre-desktop production environment in which they were created. Kascht's art direction and illustration at the Washington Times were highly influential on the explosion of publication design and imagery that took place starting in the early 1990s.

Since leaving the Washington Times in the early 90s, John's illustrations and caricatures have appeared in the pages and on the covers of countless magazines and newspapers. A selection of his work has been collected by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. And you can see a lot more of his work on the Above & Beyond: John Kascht iPad app, created by Joe Zeff and available (free!) from the iTunes Store.

We've gathered a gallery of John's work at the Washington Times, from 1988-91, along with some of his behind-the-scenes comments.