The San Francisco technology chronicle debuts its package about "design under constraint" on February 24, the March 2009 issue. Creative director Scott Dadich explains the thesis in his introductory essay.
You're looking at a box...a 16- by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images "variations on a rectangle." That is, in any given issue of a magazine--this one, for example--subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you're still dealing with the same ol' blank white box.
At WIRED, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can't animate the info-graphics (yet). We can't embed video or voice-over (yet). We can't add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can't do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand "Just do whatever you want." That's because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
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