I decided to give it a shot, so I emailed Janet and came in and had an interview with her and she brought me in for three weeks. I wanted to work with people and a few people were telling me that they thought Janet Froelich would really respond to my work.
#LEGENDARY TIMES MAGAZINE HOMEPAGE FULL#
I had a whole portfolio full of books I’d designed but I had no magazine experience and having run my own business out of my home in Minneapolis I realised that wasn’t what I wanted to do. The story goes you cold-called the magazine to get a job? He got it and we moved here and I started to look around for what I wanted to pursue. I had always wanted to move to New York and there was an opportunity for my husband here so I pretty much insisted that he put his name in for the job. I was working for myself and feeling kind of isolated – working out of my house making these books. I had moved to Minneapolis with my husband and I was having a really hard time with the weather there because it’s freezing cold. How did you first come to move to New York? So she thought ultimately I would end up there. I would come in in a cloud of charcoal dust and I seemed really involved in that fine art aspect of things. Is it true that your professor on the graphic design course told you she never thought you’d complete the programme?īecause I was still so involved in fine art. The interaction that happens with design is something that I find really inspiring. I had to come up with the project and keep pushing myself and I was the only one who would make something happen. For a while after starting work as a designer, on the weekends I would go into a printmaking studio and I was always alone – all the impetus for it had to be internal.
I also like the storytelling aspect of it and the way things unfold over time, mostly in publications.
It was an interesting realisation for me, because I am kind of a messy person and often typography is about paying attention to the minutiae of spacing and sizing, but there’s something about setting type that is calming. When you switched from doing fine art at college, what was it about graphic design that captured your imagination? Ten years later, she’s replaced her one-time mentor, working closely with editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein to deliver a magazine that defines the weekend reading habits of millions of Americans… After college she worked as a book designer for several years before moving to New York where she emailed her portfolio to a bunch of prospective employers, including legendary Times Magazine creative director Janet Froelich. She went to college in Michigan to study fine art, before switching to graphic design. Growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a small city in the American mid-west, Gail knew really early on that she wanted to do something involving art. As design director of The New York Times Magazine – which distributes 2.5 million copies with the Sunday edition of the newspaper – Gail Bichler knows a thing or two about those pressures. Less attention is paid to the industry’s real big hitters and the pressures of producing high quality products for hundreds of thousands of readers. Everyone loves an underdog, which is why the conversation about a new golden age of magazines often centres on small-run indie titles plucky print upstarts with nimble publishing models and niche themes.