ABSTRACT
I n the beginning was the word, or so the Bible says, and many journalists think ofwords as the starting point of magazines too. But they’re wrong. In the beginningis not the word but the blank page. All magazines start as a series of blank pages waiting to be filled. Think of almost any magazine and you’ll think not just of words filling those pages, you’ll also think of images and how these relate to the words, how these elements work together within a context: that visual context is the magazine’s design, the subject of this chapter. (A detailed discussion of the actual images is to be found in Chapter 14.)
The idea of ‘design’ has, in recent years, been almost overburdened with significance both positive and negative. (The word ‘designer’, for example, is now widely used as an adjective to mean unjustifiably expensive.) Yet for the commercial world design has always been a matter of legitimate concern. In the UK the Great Exhibition of 1851 was intended to gather together the best examples of British industrial design for the edification of the general public and of those manufacturers who were thought to be lagging behind in their awareness of the importance of design. An enormous success with the public, the Exhibition generated enough money to fund the beginnings of ‘Albertopolis’, that corner of London’s Kensington dedicated to the great national museums and the Albert Hall. It is still one of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s roles to collect and display examples of the finest design in the crafts and manufacture.
