Raymond Bobar is a graphic designer, specializing in the fields of publication design, typography and lettering. He studied photography and multimedia. At the same time, he was involved in the redesign of Republik magazine and the design of the first issue of Omagiu magazine. Familiar with the contemporary art stage he contributed with art chronicles to Idea – art + society magazine. Moreover, he has been an advisor and has designed many posters, logos and small publications for the Transilvania International Film Festival, Libra Film, Next Film Festival, Este’n’est foundation. Starting with 2007, he was the Art Director of the Romanian Esquire magazine succeeding in launching the publication at an outstanding visual level. His goal consists in designing cutting edge typography and top layout with a creative approach on photography, ingredients that make publications attractive adding value to published texts. Since November 2008, he has been the Art Director of the Romanian edition of Men's Health magazine.

On 23 April, Saint George’s holiday, Raymond Bobar has started zeppelin 12bis, a recover and completion of zeppelin 13 that was broken down. Since Ray is not only a valuable portfolio designer but also an enthusiastic speaker about everything that this field means, he came back with a definite wish to make a distinction between a designer and a mouse keeper and to explain to us the rules of the duel in the publication design.



Making comedy is a serious job, actors use to say. Similarly, editorial design is a serious job or better said, a rigorous one

Sometime in the past, by end of 19th century, book designers started drawing magazines thus shifting to a new field, which is the editorial design. It is a field that creators love since it offers greater freedom and a direct contact with the audience. However, it should be understand that a magazine design requires knowledge of a number of rules and mainly meeting those rules. In many circumstances, Romanian photographers say that they prefer working for magazines since they have had enough with being briefed. This is an illusion-based trend. Normally, publishing work is not less controlled and it should not be, in any case less rigorous.

“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics.” Paul Rand

Raymond led us through recent magazine history and put a stress on publishing in the USA, the only place thought as a genuine melting pot of creation in the current editorial design. M. F. Agha, Alexei Brodovitch, Willy Fleckhaus, Neville Brody, Herb Lubalin, David Carson, Lee Swillingham and others he mentioned are names who turned publication design into a dense independent field, while designers became key-characters for magazine developments, not just accomplishers of editors’ ideas.

What means being a good graphic designer in the publishing field? Turn a good text into an even better article

Many of the shown covers or spreads pointed out the strategic relationship between the editor and the graphic designer. The latter must not be just a boy good at computers and software. He should be a professional capable to make connections between the components of an article, understand the idea of a text and be able to highlight it visually. This refers to a subtle semiotic process in which comprehension of text and global message is essential.
One of the classical examples is 1966 Esquire cover that was completely black and bore just a simple text on it: „Oh my God - we hit a little girl”. Designer George Lois’s hand was essential in making that cover of an amazing simplicity. Today, we can say that any other designer could have made it. It was enough that the editor came and said, “Put a white sheriff font with this text and send it to print”. However, the story is just the opposite since George Lois was the one to persuade the editor to accept his idea further to enormous explanatory work (fortunately, the editor was an open-minded person). The Vietnam War was hypermediatized, Nixon was the US President and the quotation had been selected from an article published in that current issue of the magazine. George Lois has had the vision on the impact of that outcry and the courage to use it on the cover. A reason why the magazine got quickly out of print and the edition was reprinted.
John Korpics, another graphic designer also talks about texts and their comprehension. He is the one who obtained the National Magazine Award for Esquire in 2000 and then resigned, after having stated “It’s hard to find inspiration when having to illustrate uninspired texts.”




An eminent punk fan. Not Eminem

In the eighties, Neville Brody made his way into the public eye and revolutionized our way of perceiving magazines today. He studied graphic design at London College of Printing. During that period, Brody swung between the school he attended where everybody was fascinated and influenced by the Swiss lawful and orderly system associated with printing, and the punk stage. This mixture gave birth to Face Magazine, the final and total icon of what they call „fashion victims”. The magazine has survived until 2004 and represents an all-point revolution including a fractured content, some thorough-going journalism combined with articles about gadgets that were presented in a most common way, articles about pop culture down to most frivolous topics and, at the same time, reviews from readers, some extraordinary mixture having survived for 25 years. He appears in a culture of magazines including a rather classical layout. Two justified columns, a centered image, full bleed images; the character looked to the inside, a severe period. Neville Brody is the first to say he does not wish to use classical Sheriff or Helvetica fonts. Lacking resources, he starts designing families of letters specially customized for a dedicated magazine. He also designs letters only for a heading, a process called lettering. Then, he turned many of them into font families and sold them via Fontshop whose founder he is.





To be good is something different from to be creative

Since the history of good magazine often flaps the word creativity and we are creative, indeed, Raymond wished to offer counterexamples as well thus stopping our enthusiasm of just touching the mouse and putting inspiration at work.

„In the nineties, a new figure appears in the design field. Thanks to him we have both profit and loss. David Carson is a heretic and wishes to be so. He is a surfer and the first graphic designer working directly with the mouse; a refined man full of energy and logos, though “vulgar”. He breaks rules that he does not even know. However, he makes history. Due / thanks to him, in ‘95 all magazines were making experimental design, at least for 15 pages: Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Esquire.
David Carson does not observe rules. Many times, he does not observe, at least as reference, the visual tradition in the middle of which he lives. Nevertheless, he succeeds in appropriating everything that pertains to experimental style. This makes graphic designers of the nineties state that further to Carson’s era experimental design is bad taste already.
Not only in school but also in our every day experience we are impelled to think “creatively”, to make something be “cool”, something interesting, create something that must “sell” and convey a message.
 
„Don’t try to be original, just try to be good”, Paul Rand said since this is essential in what the graphic design approach means. Originality, creativity is the last redoubt prior to sending your page to the printing works. Try to be good up to that place. To be good means first to play by the rules. This provides intrinsic quality to a layout.
Rules are important since they supply a practical benefit. When you do not understand the practical benefit of a rule you have eliminated, then you play on a false ground.
If we do not know the rules, we just succeed in being “original”, “creative” in a false way, attempting to cover professional gaps.
Genuine creativity lies behind the free experiment area within the intelligent concept of illustration, within the resourcefulness with which we insert images and letters into a context, in the references we use and the manner we handle them.





A fatalistic and apocalyptic problem

Since here the design is a comedy, Ray’s digression was apt to clarify a little the questions we, the rustics of publications, rose on our origin and destination. In Romania, we live in a visually ugly or in any case, not quite beautiful world. Yet, prior to the beauty or the ugly, the creative or the non-creative, let’s speak about correct and incorrect.
Therefore, Ray explained how a correct writing in Romanian should appear, even if the Romanian Academy took an incomplete and very late stand, in this respect. In 2003, the letters “ş” and “ţ” are defined as letters bearing a coma under them. No other reference to their size, their ratio as compared to the letter body or their size. A coma, which daily practice demonstrated you can flatten or make it in accordance with your own artistic taste. Any Romanian newspaper or magazine issues face this problem, no matter if relating to wrong logos, article body or headings.
This should not happen, yet it has been coming about for at least 15 years. Good news is that things get improved; they do not stay the same.
However, symptomatically for the matter of facts, our banknotes still show the caron and not the breve, i.e. the little sign placed above the letter “a” to write “ă” comes from a different language.





Printing crimes and their settlement. A bloodless chapter

I have never been the kind of person who asserts that the work speaks by itself and does not need any explanations. Yet, Ray’s examples infringing the common sense principles with such an enthusiasm and originality finally were called printing crimes which everybody in the audience did approve. Since images relating to the use of wrong diacritics or the printing work issues came in a package including the correct formula so that finally it‘s been a happy-end.




Photography, infography

Working with the image in publishing, be it photography or graphics, does not mean only technical knowledge about the difference between rgb and cmyk or the capacity to work with a photographer, a photo-editor, a model, an editor or a stylist, etc. It means having a more complex cultural vision. Actually, it involves some continuous education, some experience that is slowly collected. The result is to create an intelligent product to be proud of it, a palimpsest of sensorial and intellectual experiences that overlap and cross each other as a magazine might be also such a product, not just a way of selling perfume.
A freeze frame shot on Vanity Fair, a photography-based magazine that does not impress in any ways on the printing side: just two columns and nothing else. However, the photography makes Vanity Fair one of the top magazines worldwide. Main pictorials are made by Annie Leibovitz who, in one of Ray’s examples stresses an intelligent connection with arts, a link to Manet’s “Picnic”. Therefore, a cultural connection is an outstanding element which may redeem a layout.
The author of a text shall always provide the designer with an anchor. Thus, it is important to think in a cultural background, not necessarily referring continuously to painting or arts. You should not keep reinterpreting any artists; you need a concept behind so that it could be read from under the first image layer.
To avoid regressing to the status of the boy of the back desk, you need a creative input which springs out from an ability to make a cultural distinction.



Organizers: Zeppelin, Arhitectura magazine, KLUDIstudio
Sponsor: KLUDI
Event supporter: DULUX
Partner: Cărtureşti