What editorial design is for

Editorial design is the design of things published to be read, such as magazines, newspapers, books, annual reports and long articles on the web. It serves reading. That sounds obvious and it rules out most of what people do when handed a spread, because serving reading means deciding what a person meets first, how long they stay, and what makes them turn the page rather than stop. A beautiful page that nobody finishes has failed at the one thing it was for.

The working unit is the spread, because that is what a reader actually sees, as "Editorial spreads" in Composition and layout first set out. Above the spread it is the sequence, because a magazine is an argument with a shape. A designer working page by page produces forty good pages that add up to nothing. On a magazine the editor decides what the issue says and in what order, and the art director decides how a reader meets it, from the grid and the typefaces to the pictures commissioned for each story. Between them they settle the order of an issue on the flatplan before anyone lays out a page, because moving a feature late means reworking everything around it.

Different publications are read in different ways, and the design follows the reading. The German book designers Hans Peter Willberg and Friedrich Forssman built their textbook Lesetypografie, which translates as reading typography, around exactly this idea. A novel is read in a straight line, beginning to end, so its typography has one job, which their book sums up as do not disturb. A newspaper is read by scanning, so it needs strong headings and short units a reader can choose between. A dictionary or a timetable is consulted, and everything depends on finding one item fast. Most magazines ask for all three on different pages, sometimes on the same spread. That makes them hard to design.

The modern magazine was largely shaped by art directors who treated each spread as one picture. Alexey Brodovitch ran the look of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, bringing in photographers such as Richard Avedon and Hiro, and he used white space and bold, unexpected crops so that words and images worked as one composition across two pages. Copywriters despaired at seeing their words cut to make room for his white space. George Lois did something else at Esquire. His 92 covers between 1962 and 1972 made arguments of their own, most famously the April 1968 cover of Muhammad Ali posed as Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows.

Underneath the spectacle, every publication is built from the same few parts. A grid decides where things can go. It is what lets pages made by four different people, on four different days, still look like one publication and not a scrapbook of everybody's taste. A typographic hierarchy of headline, standfirst, body, captions and pull quotes tells a reader what to read first and what can be skipped. Pictures are commissioned or chosen to do a job in the argument. Small repeating furniture, such as page numbers and section names, tells readers where they are, and the flatplan, which is the whole issue drawn as small rectangles in order, is where the rhythm of loud and quiet pages gets decided.

Design carries a publication's point of view as much as the words do. In 2005 The Guardian moved from a broadsheet to the smaller Berliner format, in a redesign led by its creative director, Mark Porter. The page got smaller. A new slab serif, Guardian Egyptian, was drawn for it by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, and the Society for News Design voted the result the best-designed newspaper in the world in 2006. Porter's own account was that however much changed, it still had to look and feel like The Guardian. Every editorial designer works inside that balance, between a voice readers recognise and pages that each do something new.