Hosted by the St. Louis chapter of AIGA, Communication Arts owner and editor, Patrick Coyne spoke Wednesday April 8th before an audience comprised of both budding and experienced designers.  The Washington University and St. Louis design communities came out to Steinberg Auditorium on Washington University’s campus to hear Coyne speak about the foundation and development of the visual arts magazine.

Coyne began his lecture by laying out the origins of Communication Arts.  Established in 1959 by Coyne’s father and friend, CA celebrates its 50th anniversary August of this year.  Their original goal was to establish a magazine that showcased quality visual art from around the country and fifty years later Coyne still agrees.  He also pointed out that even from the beginning the magazine was viewed as an ongoing design project as compared to a formulaic publication.  However, the concept behind CA was not enough to create instant success. Coyne talked about the monetary struggles that the magazine had to overcome during the poor state of the economy in the 1960s.  With advertisers not willing to invest in a new magazine, CA had to rely on the quality content of the magazine in order to stay in production.  However by the early 70’s, CA emerged successful, out of debt and publishing as the first American magazine to use offset lithography.

After Coyne’s formal introduction of Communication Arts, he moved on to talk about technological advances made in the last fifty years and the profound effect they have had on the production of the magazine.  As mentioned, the original production of CA began with offset lithography.  Although revolutionary at the time, it was shortly upstaged by the piece of technology that would forever transform the creation and production of magazines; the computer.  Coyne told of the CA’s original ownership of three Macintosh computers that used Ready, Set, Go, one of the first desktop publishing programs to create pages and layouts.  CA has since progressed to operating the newest design layout and printing programs on multiple Macintosh computers.  An interesting note made by Coyne was that 95% of the work put into CA is in the area of production as compared to only 5% put into designing the pages.

Despite the relatively low portion of time spent on design, one important part of the designing process that Coyne mentioned is the layout.  He identified three important rules that CA’s designers must follow when creating each issue.  First, all material that is being reproduced must already be printed work.  Second, the work can only be altered by scale not cropped.  Third, the problems associated with printing on a wet press must be taken in consideration so that ghosting doesn’t occur.  All of these tasks involved with design and production are carried out by the nineteen people on staff at CA.

Coyne then mentioned the influence of another technological advance; the internet.  Communication Arts embraced the popularity and success of the internet in 1995 and created a website for the magazine.  In 2001, CA enhanced the website with a creative hotlist which posted job openings from within the visual arts community.  The popularity of this grew so much that the creative hotlist was soon broken off and made into its own website.  CA is now in the process of creating another supplement to the existing website and creative hotlist.  A search engine of all the projects found in the magazine is currently in production and will be available online for public access soon.  The database of images will be updated with the publication of each issue and will indefinitely extend the life of featured work in the magazine.

Throughout Coyne’s lecture the role that technology played in the development of Communication Arts was evident.  However, Coyne was cautious not to put too much importance on its ability.  He noted that although computers make work easier and faster to produce, the craft involved with an aspect such as printing should not be sacrificed or disregarded.  To conclude his lecture, Coyne talked about the future of CA and the magazine world in general.  In terms of how to prepare for the future, he offered the advice of asking the question “What do you want your design career to be?” as well as becoming your own client.  Listening to Coyne made a career in design seem attainable with ambition, and as an aspiring designer I cannot wait.

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