Editorial Design
Designing an Editorial Experience
The term editorial design holds different meanings, depending on where one is coming from. When the term first cropped up, it was initially just another way of looking at design—the way one would design pure editorial content. It was a subset of graphic design: clever compositions, editorial layout and creative typography.
With an increasing number of newspaper and magazine designers coming from journalism backgrounds, the term editorial design took on a new import: content could no more be rewritten or hacked only to meet a design requirement. Design could no longer be about looking good; it had to have editorial significance.
In their book Designing the Editorial Experience: A Primer for Print, Web, and Mobile, Sue Apfelbaum and Juliette Cezzar lay down the definition: "Editorial design is a discipline of communication design that specialises in publications of a serial, periodical nature, which are unified by a distinct editorial or creative vision, are produced at a predetermined frequency, and are made available by subscription and/or strategic distribution."
In 2011, shortly after leaving the New York Times as the director of digital design, Khoi Vinh wrote about "designers who know how to enhance and even maximise an audience’s understanding of published content. They’re comfortable working with writers and editors to help shape what we read, and they create unique value out of the combination of the written word and graphic language. Even given recent difficulties in the publishing industry, there are still lots of these people out there."
This is where the editorial design thinking of INSCRIPTIONS takes off. The editorial experience is at the core of our design process. We understand readers and their expectations and you understand writers/authors and their expectations. We "reconcile these wildly divergent worldviews into a single, coherent whole that looks and feels effortless."
The Reader in Mind
We don't look at the editorial world through a simplistic UX (user experience) lens. Thinking of a reader as just a user demeans the editorial experience. We want to see the written word through the eyes of the reader. And, that is why we extend the editorial experience from the domain of newspapers/magazines and books to other formats: books, newsletters, annual reports, and more.
Reading as Experience
Editorial design is as old as the written word. Writing, when it began, was "a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language." The cuneiform script created in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC was the first. It is the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin. Ancient Egyptians used sharpened reeds or feathers to write on papyrus, a reed paper made from the cyperus papyrus plant.