Designing the Editorial Experience

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114 DESIGNING THE EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE

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Richard Turley

Creative Director,

Bloomberg

BusinessWeek

Richard Turley, who previously art

directed the Guardian’s G2 daily arts

supplement and worked with Mark

Porter on the sweeping redesign of

the Guardian newspaper in 2005,

spoke to us about leading a creative

team of people who “shouldn’t really

be designing a business magazine.”

How did you become interested in

editorial design?

The graphic design that I was

interested in always tended to be in

magazines, like David Carson; he’s

quite important to me. And then

the English magazines such as The

Face, Dazed & Confused, Sleazena-

tion—those were the magazines

I read. They were all design heavy

and design led, and I suppose that’s

the stu I was most interested in

at the time.

While in school in Liverpool, I

kind of engineered an opportunity

to do a university magazine, which

was really bad at the time. My friend

and I just sort of told the university

that we were redesigning it and we

did. I really enjoyed doing it, and then

we won a design competition, and

I got an internship at The Guardian

newspaper and stayed on for almost

ten years.

I started o in the marketing

department and did a lot of adver-

torials, ads, invitations, any sort of

marketing. I then got another job at a

magazine, which closed. When I came

back to the Guardian, I ended up

assisting Mark Porter, who was then

the creative director. It was never

really formally announced that

I was his assistant, but I helped him

on a lot of projects, and he taught me

just about everything I know. When

the main Guardian newspaper got

entirely reconfigured in the early

2000s, I learned just about every-

thing about design and typography.

Were you always artistically

inclined? What made you choose

to be a designer?

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CASE STUDY: BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK  INTERVIEW: RICHARD TURLEY

I was always good at art. I wasn’t

terrible at other subjects. I liked

English, I liked history. But I did a lot

of art. I could draw. I found myself in a

graphic arts course and that’s what I

fell into. I like music, so record covers

were very important. At one point, I

think I would have hoped to design

record covers, but then this magazine

thing took o.

“This magazine thing” is pretty

impressive. Bloomberg Business-

week is quite well regarded,

earning awards from the Society

of Publication Designers (2012

Magazine of the Year) and the

American Society of Magazine

Editors (2012 award for General

Excellence).

I think we’re quite surprised by

the way it’s been picked up on. It’s

not that we weren’t ambitious for

that, but I don’t think we ever really

thought that that was possible.

Were you looking at other business

magazines when you approached

the initial redesign?

The only magazine I really looked

at was New York. There’s a way that

Adam Moss, the editor, has made that

magazine where you can graze it, and

you can take out little bits and bobs,

but then you can also really read the

magazine . . . that was very influential

to me. I didn’t look at any business

publications. One of the reasons I

think we were quite successful is that

we’re a lot of people who shouldn’t

really be designing a business maga-

zine. We’re not people who thought in

a million years that we’d be designing

the magazine that we design. So I

think our expectations and our inter-

ests are a lot dierent from the usual

business publications.

How does the fact that everyone sits

together—design and editorial—

help the design process? For

instance, you sit across from editor

Josh Tyrangiel.

We have about fifteen design

people, including photo editors. We

have probably ten on sta and five

freelancers on contract. There’s a

lot more communication here, and

decisions get made quicker because

of that. People aren’t hiding away

in oices. For people who are used

to oices, it’s a bit freakish, but I’ve

always been used to working in a

newsroom.

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