"There are at least two layouts in the August issue with typefaces whose legibility is beyond the capacity of anyone who doesn't grow their own mushrooms."
-Mark Feeny, The Boston Globe
The magazine bursts with
vitality as its fluorescent dayglo ink screams out "Look at me!" This radical
design was a planned part of Wired's strategy. According to Louis,
"When we decided on the design strategy, we said that we wanted to make
Wired
as visually exciting as the revolution it's describing." For example, when the
readers opened the cover of the first issue, they were confronted with a dizzy
combination of typography, graphics, bold ink and printing techniques. This
welter of information slowed the readers down, forcing the eye to decode the
meaning of the text. The style and message was grokked instantly by Wired's post-industrial,
post-mass media audience.
The driving force behind Wired's innovative layout and design is the
married
design duo of Plunkett + Kuhr. John Pluckett and Barbara
Kuhr, founding
members of the Wired team, are its Creative Directors. Barbara designed
the
first Wired prototype that Louis and Jane used while searching for
funding in the early 1990s.
While Louis and Jane had magazine experience and John and Barbara had design experience, neither of them had any experience with publishing and designing a national magazine. In fact, the printer that John had chosen had never printed a national publication either. Actually, according to John, this lack of experience was liberating,
"One of the great advantages was that none of us had ever done a national magazine. We thought, `Well, good, none of us know the rules that can't be broken.'"
Such an attitude triggered a stream of innovations at Wired, from art and design to a digital prepress process (which allows direct download from Wired to Danbury Litho & Printing in Connecticut). Louis explains,
"Art at Wired had never been about finding pretty pictures or moving shapes around on a page. It's about telling a story. John is one of the best storytellers around. Wired looks the way it does not because we use fluorescent ink. It also has to do with the fact that John is an expert on printing and prepress. He was instrumental in selecting Danbury, which had a reputation as a printer of annual reports. He negotiated a great deal with them too, worked with them to achieve superior prepress, and convinced them to violate all their best instincts and put down the amount of ink we needed."
The result is a high-quality publication that people keep around, like encyclopedia volumes. John's rule-breaking design gives Wired's readers a sense that not only are they reading about the effects of technolgy, but are visually experiencing those effects.
"If this magazine was supposed to be bringing news from the future, it had to look like it had just arrived from the future," John says. "I think we've done a good job of differentiating Wired from the competition. We are one out of two hundred titles on the newsstand. We approached the magazine the way we would any other design problem, which is we first look at the context. In this case, it is the context of what else is out there on the newsstand. There's a status quo consensus. There are unspoken rules or mass notions of how magazines are supposed to look that got pretty well codified in the `60s and haven't changed since then. So that became our list of what not to do."
"Wired magazine looks like a slam-bang assault on the visual cortex, but it aims for the cerebellum."
-William Rodarmor, California Monthly
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