This year, I had the privilege of participating in the judging of magazine design for the American Society of Magazine Editors awards (ASME). It was an eye-opening experience. The majority of my work for the past 15 years has been in publication design. My early mentor was Roger Black, the famed art director and designer of Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Esquire. I headed up his shop for seven years until the internet lured Black, and I decided to start my own studio specializing in editorial consulting and design.

What my group and I witnessed in our three days together as ASME judges was a tremendous amount of sameness.

Editors were as dismayed as art directors. We talked a lot about the need for a fresh point of view—about how 70 percent of the magazines in those rooms represented a tired, tried-and-true formula. Handsome, yes, but numbing at this point. I am referring to the gorgeous design developed by Robert Priest 10 years ago at Esquire—a look that was then pushed exquisitely by John Korpics. The front of book (FOB) pages are heavily ruled, the main display font is a beautiful classic serif. This serif is played with aggressively. It crashes, it burns, it interlocks—it interlocks a lot. These two designers created beautiful, groundbreaking work—but this particular style has been relentlessly copied for years. The homage needs a rest.

My ASME experience had me thinking about really fresh magazine design and influences in the past couple of years. Certainly, two of the biggest influences in American design right now are Luke Hayman’s spectacular New York Magazine and Fred Woodward’s ever emerging, always energetic GQ.

But Hayman and Woodward get recognition. Both of their magazines were finalists in design at ASME. New York won. What designer doesn’t know Woodward? And anyone who has not noted Hayman’s career in the past few years has simply not been paying attention.

One designer who’s been floating under the radar, but whose influence I feel right now, is Paul Ritter and his work on the now defunct Vitals magazine. Vitals was one of those landmark launches that people either loved or hated. Its influence is prevalent —certainly on two of the most talked-about launches of the year: Martha Stewart’s Blueprintand Fairchild’s Cookie. It was sad when Vitals went silently into the night. Like Suede, the sophisticated black woman’s magazine before it, Vitals had a real graphic point of view and has left the publishing community lots of delicious cud to chew on and integrate into their own brands. So why doesn’t Ritter get more buzz and more credit?

VITALS’ ORIGINS
Vitals Man emerged in September 2004, to an audience of very moneyed, sophisticated shoppers. Later (Spring 2005), Vitals Woman was launched and the idea of “twin” magazines was born. I adored the women’s magazine. Editor in chief Joe Zee was the fashion director at W for over nine years, and is one of the most respected stylists on the planet. His entire vision was strictly high end, full-on service, with very direct prices everywhere. The key, however, was his “how-to guide” to everything that anybody with a lot of money and style would need to know. Zee was able to bring a level of insider information from his own experience that nobody else could have. And that was what made it so delicious—access to Zee. Where W was aspirational, Vitals was attainable (within that tax bracket anyway). The rest of us enjoyed the fantasy—and what a lush fantasy it was!

“Joe is a genius,” says Ritter. “Definitely one of the smartest people I’ve met. I think the job he did as a first time editor in chief was extraordinary. He would drive me insane with the service demands, which I called ‘sidebars within sidebars.’ My thing is much more direct and clean, and he would load pages with mountains of information … but that’s what made it great.”

Those secondary components were just the thing that made Vitals impossible to put down. One of Ritter’s first jobs was working with Tibor Kalman as art director at Colors. He was also creative director at Virgin Records in Paris, creative director of Life, then he pursued film and video direction for a time. This “outsider” experience freed him to react to magazine design in very fresh ways.

“I’m obsessed with pushing the limits of what a magazine can be,” says Ritter. “That’s why I started adding lots of design elements like the timeline/page finder, which I saw as a mini table of contents, because I know that nobody reads a magazine front to back (quite the contrary), and all the section guides with the FYI boxes, the outside fifth column for additional FYIs, etc. It was a nightmare for edit, but I think all of those details really brought a personality to the magazine.”

Vitals’ uniqueness came from an almost neurotic obsession with details—gorgeously presented. It was a mix of real information with a level of sophistication and chic that really didn’t exist in America outside of the very specific Martha world.

TOP: Launched in 2004, VITALS MAN eventually spawned a twin: VITALS WOMAN.