Like my colleagues, I am taking a few minutes at the end of the year to look at some of my favorite Prospect projects from the last 12 months. But as I am the magazine’s designer and all-around “visual guy,” my list will be a bit different from my workmates’, who will be rounding up some of their own articles. While my own rundown features plenty of strong reporting and analysis, I had nothing to do with that part. My job encompasses the look of the magazine—the typography and the visuals used to pull readers into texts and bring story points to life.
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Favorite Cover
Working with illustrators is among the best duties of designing a magazine—it’s a chance to work closely with talented people from around the country (and around the world) and to expand the visual vocabulary of the publication beyond what can be accomplished in-house. Alas, it doesn’t always work that way in practice—I have worked at magazines that workshopped preliminary sketches so heavily (and often detrimentally) that there was very little spunk left in the final. At the Prospect, we usually succeed in taking a more genuinely collaborative approach. A conceptually challenging piece that we happily turned completely over to illustrator Angie Wang was October’s cover featuring David Dayen’s “How Policy Got Done in 2022,” a piece about Biden’s legislative victories. I’m also pleased with the understated but conceptually integrated type treatment.
Favorite Interior Illustration by a Real Illustrator
I’m not going to pick one this year, because there are too many good ones to choose from. Instead, I’m going to let the Society of Illustrators of New York (a bit of a misleading name—they have members, and recognize work from all over the world) choose one for me: “‘Welcome to Hell,’” a 3D rendered illustration by Wesley Bedrosian (he also did “Anatomy of an Anti-Union Meeting” for us) was recognized as one of the best illustrations of the year.
Favorite Interior Illustration by In-House Staff (Me)
Few who have seen one of my drawings would guess that they were the product of someone with an MFA in painting. Never all that good at the drawing part of drawing, my skills have atrophied further as I have focused instead on publication design over the last few decades. Nevertheless, I was pleased with the old-skool line art spot I did for Paul Starr’s piece on the Supreme Court after the midterms. It could almost have appeared in a ’50s pulp magazine, as could my web-only illustration for “San Quentin Is Still Punishing People for Being Sick,” a piece on the ongoing COVID crisis in a California prison.
Best Photograph
This is a new category this year! At my last publication, I worked with a great staff photographer, and as a result the publication, though it always looked good, had little remaining in the art budget for illustration—I could only commission a cover once or twice a year, usually for one of our advertising-driven special issues. At the Prospect, my situation is a bit reversed; I have an adequate budget for good illustration in every issue, but most photographs we use come from the Associated Press, and their offerings are a bit of a mixed bag in terms of visual quality. But we did commission a couple of outstanding photographs this year, and a favorite was of whistleblower Cyrus Coron by Pablo Robles for David Dayen’s story on neglect and fraud at the largest packaged gas distributor in the United States. Additionally, our writers sometimes step up with pix when reporting. Our recent travel issue had a number of compelling staff-taken photos; a favorite was of a seaside village taken by Ryan Cooper for his story on the Faroe Islands tax code.
Best Editorial Layout
When you’re a magazine designer, a visual siren call comes from what I’ve come to call the 50/50 opening spread. One half of a two-page opener is devoted to an image and the other kicks off the article with a headline, subhead (or dek, in the biz), and possibly the start of the article. What’s not to like?—it’s neat, organized, and there’s a visual focal point on each side of the spread. But they can get boring if you overuse them, and the spreads I tend to remember don’t fit into this category. “The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas,” by Olivia Paschal about the regional domination of Walmart and Tyson Foods, almost turns the opener into a two-page illustration (in fact, we used it that way on the website). As a bonus, it was cheap to produce: The packaged chicken and background map came from a stock site, and I whipped up a plausible Walmart smiley face in Adobe Illustrator.
