The Design of Image 1 comments

In 1989, when the pilot issue of Image was in production, founder and editor Greg Wolfe asked Kathleen Lay Burrows to be the journal’s art director. She accepted the invitation, and created the cover and page design that twenty years later still give Image its distinctive look. We emailed Kathleen, who is now retired, and asked her to reflect back on the work she did twenty years ago.

Image: How did you come to be the art director of Image at its inception?

Kathleen Lay Burrows: As I remember it, I was contacted by Gregory Wolfe, I believe because of my friendship and professional work with Luci Shaw. She and her now deceased husband Harold had a small publishing house in the Chicago area, Shaw Books, which later became an imprint of Doubleday. My main work had always been as the art director of InterVarsity Press, designing all of their book covers, and most all of the marketing, until they set up an in-house marketing department. It was likely because of this exposure that I was asked.

Image: The Image logo you designed in 1989 has represented the journal for twenty years—it’s almost impossible to imagine it looking any different. Were there other logo ideas you tried out? Are they in a file somewhere? And why did you settle on this particular logo design?

KLB: I always do a considerable amount of research before I decide on a final logo, but I have no recollection of other designs I did for this project. One thing I do remember: I played around a lot with the letterspacing and condensing of the typeface. The width of the magazine and the power of the name itself helped create a rather elegant solution. It had been usual enough to use letterspacing and condensing, but to put a word into a tight space was a bit unusual at the time.

Image: The journal is printed in the font Galliard. How would you describe the look and personality of that typeface? What appeals to you about it, and why did you decide it was a fit for what Image was trying to do?

KLB: ITC Galliard is an unbelievably lovely typeface. I selected it because it is so beautifully classic, in the best sense of the word. It is a serif typeface (as opposed to sanserif) and a derivative of Garamond. Its origins are with Robert Granjon, a French type designer born in the 1500s, who worked in Antwerp. Four hundred years later, the punches and matrices he developed would be used by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker to design Galliard “a serviceable, contemporary, photo-composition typeface based on a strong historical design” that was a reinterpretation of Granjon’s typeface from the 1560s (according to Fonts.com). The typeface was released in 1978 and was an instant success. I found it in the U&LC booklet (Upper & Lower Case), which released all of ITC’s new typefaces.

Image: Do you often get interested in the histories of particular fonts, or do you prefer just to deal with them as shapes on the page?

KLB: Although I do love the history of typefaces, to me they must reflect the design project itself. And Image represented to me both classical as well as contemporary art.

Image: What do you like about ragged right? It’s somewhat rare for periodicals, I think.

KLB: I used ragged right for Image because it was different from most periodicals. When you are launching a new magazine, particularly one in the arts with a very audacious agenda, as Greg Wolfe had, you had better be noticed.

Image: Looking back at Image’s design now, is there anything you would have done differently?

KLB: Design always needs to be nuanced, so yes, I would change a few things. But to the cover, I’d make no change at all. On the inside front cover, I would make the editorial staff and advisory board smaller by a couple of points, and then I would lead them out (leading means space between lines). On the contents page, I would try to keep more space after the date and number line. Other than that, I’d keep it the same. The article titles I would perhaps make a size smaller, but no more. You might want to look at the subtitles. They should not have too much leading between the lines. That separates them from the titles. The scale of the author’s name, in relation to the title, as well as the drop-cap, still seems okay to me. The running heads, letterspaced as they are, still seem very nice, as does the contributors page in the back.

Image: What are you working on these days?

KLB: A few years ago, I retired from InterVarsity Press and moved on to photography and now do painting full time. I’m an abstract expressionist, coming out of the Institute of Design, which was started by Moholy-Nagy in Germany and then moved to Chicago after Hitler all but closed them down. The earliest teachers there became giants in their field: George Kepes, for instance, whose book Language of Vision became our textbook. There is no doubt that it informed my design experience.