I attended a lecture earlier this week, sponsored by the Society of Publication Designers (SPD) – wow, those magazine people can party! Just kidding. But there was a lot of schmoozing. Anyway, Arem Duplessis, art director of the New York Times Sunday Magazine gave a good talk and showed tons of work, going back to his early days at SPIN magazine, on through some of the most recent covers at the Sunday mag. I was running kinda late, okay, really late, so I hadn’t even really thought about what I was going to be seeing or hearing. So, without firm expectations in place, it was great to sit back in the semi-dark and just take it all in.

Awesome work, especially considering the pace at which a weekly magazine works. And it wasn’t just the design and the conceptual take on the subject matter; it was the photography (no stock!!) and the illustrations. One artist’s work in particular struck me: Sam Winston. He does a lot of work with words, and letters.

These pages from the NYT magazine were especially intriguing (scroll down past the cover on his site). I haven’t been so amused by looking at words in a while. Granted, it’s unlikely that this sort of solution will work for anything I’m currently assigned to, but it was refreshing to think about using text in this crazy sort of way. However, it’s possible that an element, a piece of it, could work it’s way in somewhere…

We get into our routines, and sadly, can easily get into a rut. It’s just good to be reminded that there’s always another way of looking at things.

Tags: art, design, typography