Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design
Eye is a quarterly magazine about graphic design and visual culture, published in London since 1990. Subtitled 'the international review of graphic design', it is read by typographers, designers, art directors, academics and students around the world, and it occupies a distinctive place in design publishing: a beautifully produced print journal devoted not to showcasing fashionable work but to critical, informed writing about what graphic design is, where it came from and what it does in the world. Its publisher describes it as the world's most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal.
Eye was founded by the design writer Rick Poynor, edited by him for its first twenty-four issues, and since 1999 has been edited by John L. Walters. In 2008, after a succession of corporate publishers, the magazine became independent through a management buyout that created Eye Magazine Ltd, owned by the people who make it. More than three decades and a hundred issues after its launch, it remains a print-first quarterly in an age of feeds — deliberately so.
Overview
Eye is a quarterly printed magazine about graphic design and visual culture. Its content is a mixture of interviews, overviews, profiles, history and polemic, and its own summary of that mixture explains its appeal: the combination makes it an essential source of information, inspiration and analysis for its international readership of typographers, designers, art directors, academics, students, teachers and professionals in visual communication.
The magazine is available from design bookshops and by subscription and single-issue purchase through its own shop at eyemagazine.com, where its website extends the print journal with a blog, features, a critique section, education material, events and a newsletter. But the printed object is the point. Writing in 2017 about the magazine's ninety-third issue, long-time contributor Steven Heller praised the team's unapologetic love of print and the judicious, purposeful choice of typefaces in every issue — a journal about graphic design that is itself an argument for the craft.
History and Founding
Eye was first published in London in 1990, founded by Rick Poynor, a writer on graphic design and visual communication who had begun as a visual-arts journalist on Blueprint magazine. Poynor edited the first twenty-four issues, from 1990 to 1997, establishing the magazine's identity: long-form, historically aware, argumentative writing about design, produced to the highest standards of the discipline it covered. Stephen Coates was art director for issues 1 to 26, giving the young journal its early visual character.
Max Bruinsma became the second editor, editing issues 25 to 32 from 1997 to 1999, during which Nick Bell took over as art director from issue 27, a role he held until issue 57. In 1999 John L. Walters became editor — the position he still holds — beginning one of the longest editorships in design publishing. Simon Esterson became art director from issue 58, and the Walters-Esterson partnership has defined the magazine's modern era.
Publisher and Ownership
Eye has had five publishers: Wordsearch, Emap, Quantum Publishing, Haymarket Brand Media and Eye Magazine Ltd. The last of those changes was the decisive one. In April 2008, following discussions with Haymarket, ownership of the magazine passed to its editor, John L. Walters, in a management buyout. Haymarket's view, as reported at the time, was that the magazine's niche readership would be better served by a smaller, design-oriented company.
Eye Magazine Ltd was established by Walters with Simon Esterson, the magazine's art director, and Hannah Tyson, business director at Esterson Associates. The buyout made Eye an independent, owner-edited journal — owned by its editor, its art director and its business director — and it has remained so. That structure explains much about the magazine's character since 2008: its loyalty to print, its collectable production values and its freedom to publish special issues, such as typography specials, that a corporate publisher might not have indulged.
Editorial Content and Sections
Eye's editorial territory is the whole of graphic communication: typography, book design, branding, illustration, photography, information design, design history and the politics of visual culture. Its features range from scholarly examinations of design history to interviews with practitioners and polemical essays on the state of the profession. A celebrated early example is Michael Rock's essay 'What is this thing called graphic design criticism?', first published in Eye no. 16 in 1995, which asked whether design could sustain real criticism at all — a question the magazine itself was founded to answer.
Recurring elements include the magazine's blog strands on topics such as book design, design education and design history; reading lists for students, in which writers such as Steve Rigley reconsidered the canon from Meggs, Spencer and Hollis to Berger and Sontag; and special issues, with typography specials a long-standing tradition in the issue list. The website organises material under features, critique, education and events, but the quarterly print issue — sequenced, typeset and printed with deliberate care — remains the primary editorial statement.
Audience and Circulation
Eye's readership is international and professional: typographers, graphic designers, art directors, academics, students, teachers and others working in visual communication. It is sold through design bookshops worldwide and through the Eye shop online, by subscription and as single and back issues, and back issues have become collectable — a reader enquiry to Design Week as early as 2001 about a found first edition already treated volume 1, number 1 as a collectors' item.
The collectability is literal. For issue 94 in 2017, the annual Typography Special, the London studio MuirMcNeil used HP Mosaic software on an HP Indigo digital press to generate 8,000 unique numbered front and back covers from ten master seed designs built from the letters of the word 'eye' set in their TwoPoint and TwoPlus typefaces, progressed through all 76 weights and styles. Every subscriber and buyer received a cover no one else had — a production feat that turned the magazine's audience into collectors of individual artefacts and demonstrated, in print, the digital technology the issue examined.
Print and Digital Editions
Eye is, defiantly, a print magazine that also has a website rather than the other way round. Steven Heller, a contributor for almost twenty years, noted of issue 93 that its coverage was of print, with barely a word on the digital — while the entire production was itself a product of the digital age. The magazine's position is not nostalgia but conviction: that graphic design's themes are best honoured in the medium that made designers want to become visual communicators.
The digital presence at eyemagazine.com supports the print journal with a blog, online features and critique, education resources, event listings, a newsletter and the shop through which subscriptions, single issues and back issues are sold. Digital production technology serves the print object — as the 8,000 unique covers of issue 94 proved — rather than replacing it. In a sector where many design titles have become websites or ceased altogether, Eye's quarterly print rhythm, sustained since 1990, is itself its most distinctive publishing decision.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Three editors have shaped Eye. Founder Rick Poynor (issues 1-24) set its critical agenda and remains connected as writer-at-large and columnist; his books, from Typography Now to No More Rules, grew from the same concerns as the magazine. Max Bruinsma (issues 25-32) bridged the founding and modern eras. John L. Walters, editor since 1999 and owner since the 2008 buyout, has edited the great majority of the magazine's life, working with art directors Nick Bell (issues 27-57) and Simon Esterson (from issue 58).
The contributor list reads as a roll of modern design writing: Phil Baines, Steven Heller, Richard Hollis, Robin Kinross, Jan Middendorp, J. Abbott Miller, Alice Twemlow, Kerry William Purcell, Adrian Shaughnessy and Poynor himself among the frequent names, with others including Gavin Bryars, Anne Burdick, Malcolm Garrett, Jonathan Jones, Emily King, Ellen Lupton, Tom Phillips, Stefan Sagmeister, Erik Spiekermann, Teal Triggs and Judith Williamson. Few magazines in any field have sustained such a concentration of their subject's leading writers in one contributor base.
Awards and Recognition
Eye describes itself as an award-winning review of graphic design, and its standing is best measured by the company it keeps and the uses to which it is put. Its essays are assigned in design education — the magazine publishes reading lists for students and its features are reproduced in academic contexts — and its writers are the historians and critics, such as Poynor, Hollis and Kinross, on whom the scholarly study of graphic design rests.
The magazine's production experiments have also drawn coverage beyond the design press: the 8,000 unique covers of issue 94 were reported by Dezeen, the architecture and design magazine, as a notable use of generative print technology, in the company of global brand campaigns using the same software. Recognition for Eye tends to take this form — respect from practitioners, educators and fellow publishers — rather than consumer-magazine awards, which suits a journal whose prize is the loyalty Heller described: exceptional fealty from readers who keep and collect it.
Recent Developments
Eye continues to publish quarterly from London under Eye Magazine Ltd, with John L. Walters as editor and Simon Esterson as art director, selling current and back issues through its website and design bookshops internationally. Its online programme of blog posts, features, critique and education material continues alongside the print issues, and typography remains a recurring specialism in its publishing calendar.
The magazine's endurance is its story. Founded in 1990, just as digital tools were transforming the craft it covers, Eye has outlived several corporate owners to become an independent, owner-made quarterly that still believes a printed journal — critically written, intelligently art-directed and beautifully typeset — is the best place to think about graphic design. In its fourth decade, that belief continues to find an international audience of designers who agree.
