Artillery magazine
In a tough economic environment, and a publishing world beset by new media, somehow we’ve managed to thrive on what some might consider a dying segment of design. For that we're grateful, and also hopeful that we can be of service to more and more publications as we grow.
__ Thank you for reading this brief history. Please look around at our samples, services and philosophy, and don’t hesitate to contact me. We can give an honest assessment of your project and a competitive quote.
—Bill
__ Around that time I was contacted by publisher Kashy Khaledi who was looking to resurrect his late-’90s magazine, Mean. For the relaunch I took the new Mean away from its zine-y, subculture roots and tried to give it more of an adult appeal to cater to the film industry subjects as well as national advertisers. The result was an 80-plus page glossy that has enjoyed a four-year run across the U.S. and abroad, with a steadily increasing circulation.
Mean was the first vigorous test of designSimple’s business model. We art direct, design and produce the entire magazine from satellite offices (often our home offices) using digital files for proofing and press delivery. At various times the process entails editing in New York, studio shoots in Los Angeles, layouts in Pennsylvania, proofreading in Pasadena and, finally, printing in Montreal and Winnipeg.
We have applied this low-overhead virtual-community approach to to numerous projects including books for Feral House and Process Media (both in Oregon), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Brooklyn Review (New York), and Americhip Books (Southern California). The presses and personell we’ve worked with are in Boston, Michigan, Canada, China, San Francisco and Hollywood, to name a few.
__ Recently, Brain World and Artillery magazines have employed designSimple. Artillery is an art publication distributed on both coasts. I first gave Artillery a new look and we’ve been designing the features and covers ever since. Brain World is a new national glossy covering the science of the mind. I created the first issue which was used to test the waters and secure national distribution. For the expanded distribution, I redesigned the publication to have a broader appeal outside the scientific community but hopefully still retain a sense of seriousness true to the subject matter.
Bill Smith is my name and designSimple is my enterprise. I’ve worked in publishing for most of my career, getting my feet wet by art directing a college-town daily in Pennsylvania then continuing in Los Angeles where I eventually art directed LA Weekly. There I managed a talented group of designers and freelancers, and together we laid out one of the largest and most successful alternative weeklies in the country. During my time with LA Weekly we produced an estimated 40,000 editorial pages. That’s a lot of ink and coffee. Through that period, I helped create numerous offshoot publications and prototypes for the Weekly as well as for corporate parent, The Village Voice, including Reverb, Loud, Play magazine, Westside and OC Weekly.
__ In early 2003 I left the paper to start a design business out of my home. I enjoyed working with a diverse group of clients from small independents such as MajorSongs and Wheat Recording Company, to larger organizations including Toyota/Lexus, Taschen Books and Lollapalooza.
__ I kept a working relationship with my friends at the papers as an editor-at-large occasionally producing special issues, but I figured that I would have to leave print publishing design behind. I was quickly proven wrong when Southland Publishing contacted me to develop a prototype and templates for their new paper, LA CityBeat. This lead to the opportunity to redesign another Southland paper, San Diego CityBeat.