Design of the Times: Design director of The New York Times Magazine, Gail Bichler, tells us her story

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. 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. 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. 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. She went to college in Michigan to study fine art, before switching to graphic design. 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. 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… When you switched from doing fine art at college, what was it about graphic design that captured your imagination? I loved the craft of typography. 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. I also like the storytelling aspect of it and the way things unfold over time, mostly in publications. 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 had to come up with the project and keep pushing myself and I was the only one who would make something happen. The interaction that happens with design is something that I find really inspiring. Is it true that your professor on the graphic design course told you she never thought you’d complete the programme? (Laughs) Yeah she did! Why? Because I was still so involved in fine art. I would come in in a cloud of charcoal dust and I seemed really involved in that fine art aspect of things. So she thought ultimately I would end up there. How did you first come to move to New York? 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. I was working for myself and feeling kind of isolated – working out of my house making these books. I didn’t have a real community. 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. He got it and we moved here and I started to look around for what I wanted to pursue. The story goes you cold-called the magazine to get a job? 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. I wanted to work with people and a few people were telling me that they thought Janet Froelich would really respond to my work. 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. That turned into the ten years I have now been here. And was it somewhere that immediately felt right for you? No. I was really apprehensive about it. I had been designing these books where I got to pick everything new for each project – what the paper would be, what the format would be. I wasn’t sure how I would do with magazines and it was a real learning curve for me. One thing that’s entirely different is the pacing; I had been working on very long-term projects and suddenly there was this very quick turnaround and I wasn’t really sure it was the right thing for me. But a three week commitment isn’t much of gamble and I have always loved The Times Magazine. I was also really interested in having just arrived in New York, working for such an iconic New York institution. The New York Times has a really significant heritage and a certain place in the US media. Does that filter into the magazine as well? I think it definitely does have a huge effect on the magazine. It’s very different tonally from the paper but we adhere to the same kind of standards. One area where that affects us quite a bit is our photography because we are under very strict rules about what we can and cannot retouch. Other magazines are able to go in and alter images quite a bit but we really cannot do that because we’re part of a journalistic organisation and people have to know the photographs we are publishing are not altered. We also have standards for how we interact with the subjects of our articles and the way things are fact-checked – those kinds of things. I’ve