OPENER / ANDREW TUCK
Issues at hand
First office copies of the next issue of Monocle arrived at Midori House on Wednesday (you’ll get yours soon, I promise). It’s the October issue and it’s had a bit of a design and content makeover. Nothing weird, just a wise update – more in the vein of buying a nicely fitting new jacket rather than discovering a sudden penchant for kaftans and cha-cha heels. But, even so, the outfit switch came with some challenges, swift changes of plans and hair-pulling – I may have also let out a strange wailing noise at one point that made me sound more like a constipated moose than an at-ease editor.
Putting together a magazine is an amazing thing that, even after all these years, feels like a privilege to do but for everything to come together nicely you need some finely tuned choreography. Take something as simple as choosing a photograph. Matt, our photography director, will first do a “select” from the bigger shoots, perhaps picking 20 or 30 shots from several hundred. Then Rich, Sam or Maria will design the feature and, in doing so, make their select too – sometimes deciding to use just one image. Then it’s my turn, and perhaps I will lobby for a small or wholesale change if an image doesn’t quite tell the story I think we need to get across. Also chipping in will be the page editor, perhaps the writer and the photographer, and without doubt a certain fellow in Zürich. And, finally, our production director Jackie may dive in as we prepare to go to press to warn that an image would not print well. Choose again.
After years of people working together, this all usually happens effortlessly but not always and not always on a redesign issue when changes are being made late at night and people are heavily invested in a story. Nor should it. Making a page, even just choosing a picture, needs belief, passion and a careful understanding of when to fight your corner and when to back off and let Rich and Matt do their jobs. (Rich, our creative director, is very generous to me, even allowing me to occasionally suggest how a story could be laid out. He knows things are bad when I start sketching on a Post-it note.)
But back to Wednesday. The magazine was there in front of me on my desk but, at first, I tried to ignore it – I would have been far more relaxed seeing that upset moose standing by my perch. After a few calls and attending to some urgent emails (“Do you have the kaftan in cerise by any chance?”), I gingerly opened it. Turns out there were no empty pages, nothing upside down, after all.
On Thursday we convened a conference call with editors on the road, Tyler, the commercial team and the crew in London, to go through every layout, every ad positioning. And, finally, pages began to look like pages, not patchworks of tricky decisions or myriad alternative routes. Some magic had happened.
Perhaps you’re surprised how collaborative making a magazine needs to be – no matter how high you inch up the masthead. There’s a balance of confidence and humility, passion and patience, needed from everyone in the room if you want to make something worthwhile and still remain friends at the end of it. But, of course, it’s tough and in those moments there is at least your inner moose to channel.
And now, after all this, comes another test: when you get to turn the pages and, hopefully, don’t wonder, “Why the hell did they choose that picture?”