Smith+Fritzy: Your Blog for City & Regional Publications

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:02:28 +0000

What better time to kick off my new blog about city and regional magazines than when template controversy has taken over most publication design blogs. It all started when a new venture, Ready-Media, backed by Roger Black, was introduced on the SPD blog. Lots of well-known designers have joined the discussion about Ready-Media’s template service for magazines and newspapers. Some people have said “Good for Black” while many more people have criticized the business decision for devaluing designers and setting sail a boat on the same path as photography. Black responded to those comments through an interview on SPD where he attempted to explain his position.

I’m summarizing a bit here… Black basically says that the templates will relieve art directors to concentrate on important stuff like covers and photo location. It will also allow smaller publications who can’t afford “good design” to get that chance. This is where us smaller publications get shafted by, not only Black, but by other SPD members and the like. I’m not saying there’s not ugly smaller publications, but I’m not saying there’s not ugly big ones either. There’s a lot of designers working at smaller publications that are doing some of the best work out there right now.

I’m setting out to disprove some of these notions that local and regional publications are “stepping stones” in the publishing industry. Perhaps we’ll see that they’re our hope of keeping print alive in these changing times.