A Bloomberg Perspective on Editorial Design

Eye Magazine interviews Richard Turley, hired by Bloomberg as creative director for the relaunched Bloomberg Businessweek. Eye Magazine likes what it sees:

“Bloomberg Businessweek’s pages explode with the energy of breaking news, editorial intelligence and design experiment, while achieving perfectly detailed typography… Turley’s art direction is a sign that mainstream magazine design is still alive.”

Turley provides many insights on how its done…

• “Editorial and design work together very closely… editors and designers sitting side by side. …That places design in a central role in the editorial process.”

• “Including me, we have six designers, three chart info-designers and a photo team of five. So by UK standards it’s huge. In fact by US standards it is pretty big.”

• “Often I’ve found that infographics are an afterthought… that is a back-to-front way of working.”

• “The graphics team at Bloomberg Businessweek are best described as graphic journalists. They are as much researchers as they are designers and they collaborate daily with our network of reporters.”

• “The resulting charts, maps and visualisations are developed narratives that go through several revisions.”

• We start small and scale our charts up according to their merit. If we find a lot of good data or a new interesting take on the story then we make the chart bigger.”

• “We all try and figure the problems out together. This is probably best illustrated in the way we apply charts to pages: the lead designer of that page / article / section will check the InDesign documents in, after which they are picked up by one of the infographic team who adds the chart, and adjusts and changes the layout as necessary. They will add graphic elements, shift around page architecture, making their work integral to the end page design.”

• I certainly didn’t help myself by choosing Helvetica.  …I just wanted something that didn’t surprise anyone and was just a typeface, rather than a branding exercise. I just chose the most obvious idea for a font.”