RIP ID Magazine – Is this a sign of a troubled discipline?

Posted: December 28th, 2009 | Author: rf | Filed under: Design | 1 Comment »

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A lot has been said lately about the current state of the union in all things Industrial Design and some of them with a less positive outlook into the future, particularly in a consultancy environment as the one I’m exposed to and live in on a daily basis.  One school of thought says our practice has been loosing focus while the other says that it’s a much-needed reinterpretation of our role that makes us more relevant in facing the way challenges and opportunities present themselves to the world today.

My position in this matter is that of someone who’s agnostic on its way to become an atheist. Design Thinking being the world view supported by atheism and author design being whatever religion you pick. I’ve always seen myself somewhere in the middle and had been trying to counter balance the gravity pull that is definitively sitting on the Design Thinking theories these days. As of late I decided to stop resisting, embrace it and leverage its momentum.

This is a big identity crisis for many Industrial Designers today since embracing process and broadening the scope of action (often times with no physical product as the outcome of a project) detaches us from the physicality of things that is so dear to us. We grow apart from the idea of the craftsman that I believe most Industrial Designers aspire to be.

That being said, I want to anchor the focus of this post to the publishing world taking the ID magazine as a starting point.

Having a fuzzy picture reflected every time we look at ourselves in the mirror, any sign will quickly be elevated to evidence in order to support either worldviews on this subject. “Is this a sign of a troubled discipline or just another indication of how the publishing business is in crisis?” Not surprisingly, this was the question in a lot of industrial designers minds these days.

I agree with the latter.

ID magazine wasn’t as focused on ID as 10 years ago and the categories for the Annual Design Review reflect just that: products, graphics, environments, interaction etc… This seems to be a classic example of heavy weight publications not being able to make a transition to online in a way that explores the unique advantages of the web. ID’s website today offers a web 1.0 experience.

If we look at Core77, Designboom and to a lesser extent Dezeen, it’s fair to say that although broad in their scope the core content is still Industrial Design. These websites managed to capture the mindshare of the design community and became a threat to printed content and eventually, as we now see, deemed it unsustainable.

I don’t believe printed magazines will cease to exist and there are some interesting signs that point to a plot twist in this story. In the future we might see some of these online portals create a printed publication that goes together with their online content. This has started to happen with Design Observer and Dezeen where a few selected posts get translated into a book. This happen maybe once a year today, but if you start increasing seasonality soon enough you’ll have a magazine.

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Monocle is an interesting example of a new paradigm of publishing since it was designed from its inception to be represented at the highest quality in both mediums.  Anyone who holds a Monocle issue in his hands will tell you the magazine was created with a clear set of priorities, design and attention to detail being on top of that list. And this translates perfectly to the online format and a great part of the creative process is described here.

Although there are a lot of things I admire about this magazine, content and positioning is not one of them. I was a subscriber for a year and decided not to renew my subscription. It’s hard to describe the visceral feeling I have for this magazine but I think it could be put as something to do with being too elitist and exclusive for my taste.  I don’t feel, or wish, to be part of the royalty club that descends to peasantown on a private jet with overpriced Monocle branded luggage for a fashion photoshoot in Beirut. I would subscribe to this detailed review of the magazine.

We know the publishing landscape is changing. How does all of this affect the way we try to publish our work?

I think a lot of the power to make our message sticky will come from the medium and format in which we try to distribute it. If we create assets that are aligned with what makes online publications awesome, we’ll be infusing the message with strength of its own.

Think of something like 3 minute videos or microwebsites that tell a story about the project, the product, the people who made it and the people who designed it. I believe there’s an increasing interest in viewing behind the scenes stuff and being transparent about the whole process. Online publications and viewers are eager for this type of material and the traditional three pictures with white background and three pictures in context are still aligned with the decaying paradigm of publishing.

As production for creating these assets becomes cheaper and faster we will be seeing more of it and it’s a matter of how fast designers can develop those capabilities and integrate them into the workflow. Broad bandwidth is prevalent today and the cost of DSLR with HD video capabilities keeps coming down. The convergence of these two elements is setting the stage for new storytelling opportunities.

I recently read an interesting article about the future of photojournalism that points exactly in that direction. You can find it here.

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