Eye Magazine
Eye Magazine, commonly known as Eye, is a London-published quarterly magazine of graphic design and visual culture, founded in 1990. Subtitled the international review of graphic design, it is read internationally by professional designers for its criticism, history and showcase of contemporary practice. Where most design publications favoured showcasing new work, Eye examined the history, theory and cultural context of graphic design with a rigour rarely found in the trade press, and it established itself as the critical voice of international graphic design across more than three decades of publication.
Founding in 1990
Eye was first published in London in 1990, founded by Rick Poynor, a writer on graphic design and visual communication. Poynor had begun as a general visual arts journalist, became an arts journalist in 1986 with a passion for architecture, graphic design, photography and the visual arts, and by the end of the 1980s was deputy editor of Blueprint, an adventurous monthly architecture and design magazine. In 1990 the publishing house behind Blueprint launched Eye, a quarterly international review of graphic design, which Poynor edited for seven years. He has recalled that Eye was an international success, that it caught the mood of the moment in graphic communication and connected with a broad and progressive audience, and that he continues to write for it.
The timing was significant. In 1990 graphic design was being transformed by desktop publishing and digital typography, and the profession's older certainties were dissolving. A magazine founded at that moment, by a critic rather than a practitioner-showcase editor, was well placed to argue about what the changes meant. Poynor's book Typography Now: The Next Wave, the first international survey of new digital typography, appeared in 1991, and Eye became the periodical home for that debate.
Editors and Art Directors
Poynor edited the first twenty-four issues, from 1990 to 1997. Max Bruinsma was the second editor, editing issues 25 to 32 from 1997 to 1999, before John L. Walters took over in 1999 and became the magazine's long-serving editor. Poynor continued as writer-at-large and has written the Critique column for Eye since 1999, so the founder's critical voice remained in the magazine long after his editorship ended.
The magazine's own design has been in a small number of hands. Stephen Coates was art director for issues 1 to 26, Nick Bell was art director, and creative director, from issues 27 to 57, and Simon Esterson has been art director since issue 58. For a magazine about graphic design, the design of the magazine itself is a statement of values, and the long tenures of its art directors gave Eye a visual continuity that readers and design historians have treated as part of its identity.
Publishers and Independence
The magazine has had five publishers: Wordsearch, Emap, Quantum Publishing, Haymarket Brand Media and Eye Magazine Ltd, formed in April 2008 after a management buyout. That last change matters most. A management buyout returned the magazine to independent ownership under the team making it, a model that suits a specialist quarterly with a loyal international readership. Under Eye Magazine Ltd the magazine continued as a quarterly print title supported by its website, events and a readership of working designers, educators and students.
Content: Criticism, History and Practice
Eye is an international quarterly journal of graphic design offering criticism, history and practice. Its articles range across typography, branding, illustration, photography, information design, design education and the politics of visual communication. Special issues on typography have been a recurring feature of the run. The magazine's approach is discursive: long essays, interviews, book and exhibition reviews and portfolios of work reproduced to a high standard, with the emphasis on argument and context rather than on novelty alone.
Frequent contributors have included Phil Baines, Steven Heller, Richard Hollis, Robin Kinross, Jan Middendorp, J. Abbott Miller, Rick Poynor, Alice Twemlow, Adrian Shaughnessy and Kerry William Purcell, among many others. Other contributors have included Gavin Bryars, Anne Burdick, Malcolm Garrett, Jonathan Jones, Emily King, Ellen Lupton, Russell Mills, Quentin Newark, Tom Phillips, Stefan Sagmeister, Erik Spiekermann, Teal Triggs, Val Williams and Judith Williamson. That contributor list, mixing British and international writers, practitioners, historians and critics, explains the magazine's authority: it is written by the people who write the books and teach the subject.
Rick Poynor and Design Writing
The founder's wider career illuminates the magazine's mission. Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography and visual culture, author of books including More Dark Than Shark, a study of Brian Eno's early songs, Typographica, a study of Herbert Spencer's influential design journal, No More Rules, a critical guide to graphic design and postmodernism, and the essay collections Design Without Boundaries, Obey the Giant and Designing Pornotopia. He co-founded the Design Observer website in 2003, curated the exhibition Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2004, was a visiting professor and research fellow at the Royal College of Art, and from October 2016 to December 2023 was Professor of Design and Visual Culture at the University of Reading. Eye grew from that critical project: the belief that graphic design deserves the same serious, sustained writing as any other cultural form.
Place in Design Publishing
Design historians treat Eye as one of the most authoritative graphic design journals ever published. The full run, archived by design collections, provides a record of design criticism and visual culture from the 1990s to the present, covering postmodernism and 1990s graphic design history from inside the debates as they happened. Academic programmes in typography and graphic communication use and cite the magazine, and its publisher-editor continuity since 1999 gives it a coherence unusual in magazine publishing, where titles commonly change direction with each editor.
Eye also stands in a British lineage. Its founder wrote the modern study of Typographica, Herbert Spencer's journal; its contributors include the historians and typographers who defined British design writing; and its home in London places it in the city that has been a centre of commercial graphic design, design education and design criticism throughout the magazine's life.
The Magazine as Designed Object
A quarterly print magazine on graphic design is judged by its readers as an object as well as a text. Eye's large, well-produced issues, changing art direction across three long-serving art directors, and commitment to print at a time when trade publishing moved online, make the physical magazine a demonstration of the craft it discusses. The decision to remain a print quarterly, owned independently since 2008, is part of its editorial position: that considered, long-form design criticism belongs in a durable form.
Readership
Eye is read internationally by professional designers, and also by design students, educators, historians and others interested in visual culture. Its readership expects criticism rather than promotion, history alongside new work, and writing that treats a poster, a typeface or a brand identity as cultural evidence. Libraries and design schools hold it as a reference, which extends its influence beyond its print circulation into teaching.
Digital Presence
Alongside the quarterly print magazine, Eye maintains a website carrying articles, the Critique column and material extending the print issues, through which the magazine reaches readers who first encounter it online. The combination of a searchable digital presence with a collectable print object is the standard settlement for specialist magazines of its generation, and Eye reached it under its own ownership after the 2008 buyout.
Profile Summary
Eye Magazine is a London quarterly, the international review of graphic design, founded in 1990 by Rick Poynor, who edited issues 1 to 24. Max Bruinsma edited issues 25 to 32, and John L. Walters has edited it since 1999, with art direction by Stephen Coates, Nick Bell and, since issue 58, Simon Esterson. After four earlier publishers, a management buyout in April 2008 created Eye Magazine Ltd. With contributors drawn from the leading design writers internationally, Eye remains a principal home of graphic design criticism, history and debate.
