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Cover To Cover

Design was a vital cog in making <i>Outlook</i> stand out. How we cleared the cobwebs.

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Cover To Cover
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The summer of '95 was an uneventful one. The P.V. Narasimha Rao government was sunk in ennui. The economic reforms that had been kickstarted in the early '90s had, after the initial enthusiasm, lost pace and buzz. Scams in public life were so regular that to read about yet another one being unearthed elicited just another big yawn. The print media looked tired and out of ideas after a glorious run in the '70s and '80s. In those somnolent times, news of a new newsmagazine's arrival would normally not merit more than a column centimetre in an obscure inside page of a newspaper. But there was a quiet buzz at the capital's Press Club of India—the only watering hole for news hacks then—about a 'fugitive editor' (as the now-defunct Sunday magazine would call him) launching, for the seventh or maybe the eighth time in his career, a new journal.

Many such ventures in the past decade had faded away with quiet requiems—crushed under the weight of the mighty India Today. The other newsmagazines—Sunday, Frontline and The Week—were feeble challengers to IT's muscle. But Vinod Mehta's new weekly was expected to be different, to bring in some much-needed freshness into the world of magazine journalism, and a sustainable presence at the newsstand.

Outlook started from a single room in a crumbling carcass of an ITDC hotel. I had very little experience of designing a news magazine. The magazine format was new to our editor as well. Some of our team did have valuable magazine experience, and they would hold forth expansively on typography, colour, layout; how Time does it, how Newsweek would do it. It left us all even more confused.

Design is the frame that holds a magazine together, it's the subtle yet vital component that distinguishes one magazine from the other. Without design, a magazine is merely a melange of disparate elements; with it, it is a disciplined entity. The enormity of the task at hand was weighing me down, until the Editor, whose taciturn nature can be unnerving at times, finally broke his silence with an inspirational speech that galvanised all of us. He said, "Let Time, Newsweek, India Today do whatever they like. Here we have a splendid opportunity of creating something of our own. Let's do it without the burden of thinking what others have done."

For starters, we had a few positives that weighed on our side. We had identified India Today as our principal competitor. The benefits of this were two-fold. Firstly, our opponent's enormous circulation figures shook us out of our initial inertia, and spurred us to try and match them. Secondly, IT was a fortnightly, and by the time it appeared on the stands much of its currency was lost. The long gap between two issues robbed it of the surprise element so vital to a news magazine, and gave its contents a boring predictability. Moreover, India Today in '95 looked visually tired, with its cluttered look, inelegant typography, toss-away visuals and lack of attention to detail. It was designed more or less by default, not by professional designers but by layout artists, who rigidly followed an already tight template. A BBC correspondent at the time, leafing through a copy of the magazine, remarked to me that IT's Macintosh seemed to have gone amok!

When we started out, we had the privilege of not being weighed down by the greatness of our back-issues. This allowed us a fair degree of leeway and an openness in dealing with the visual aspect of the magazine. Outlook's visual personality, we decided, will be elegant and minimalist, with authoritative typography, sophisticated visuals and judicious use of colour; and lively pacing that would make the editorial material flow seamlessly from one story to the next. We would try to keep a surprise element for the reader, but not in a way that would make him wonder about the mental health of our Macintosh!

We were well aware that the cover of the magazine would be a critical factor in determining whether the reader would ultimately buy Outlook from the stands. We identified four key areas to address this issue:

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  • Identity: the cover has a vital role to play in establishing a magazine's brand identity. Type, colour, image style and number of cover lines—all conspire to personify the brand.
  • Image: the main image and the masthead are the first things the reader sees when surveying a newsstand. So, week after week, it is essential to get right the overall composition of the cover, and choose the right image that captures the essence of the cover story.
  • Impact: to grab the attention of a potential Outlook reader, we must get them through the front door, and make covers that would make readers curious about what's inside.
  • Information: great cover lines are like poetry, tightly written, and with the ability to move the reader.

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Despite trying to follow these guidelines faithfully, we have got it wrong on a few occasions. In an environment where information travels so incredibly fast, how does one find an arresting visual that the reader has not already seen on TV or the morning newspaper or the internet? Some news events, like 9/11, generate only one news image, which the Outlook reader would have seen a thousand times before we could reach the stands. For an event like that, we displayed the most iconic image of the news on the cover and relied on our reader's faith in us that Outlook will offer something new that he has not already seen or read before.

For a news event that allows us to choose from many images we, almost as a rule, choose the image which is not quite mainstream, even if that particular image is only obliquely linked to the cover story. But the reader, as we found out, can be unforgiving if we err too much on the side of adventurousness. The reader response to the Outlook cover of November 12, 2001 (Clueless in Afghanistan) taught us a valuable lesson about the reader's sensitivity. The lesson we learnt from this error of judgment was: wounded babies make for an oppressive visual and hence are a complete no-no for a cover.

There isn't a single dull moment in the design room of a newsweekly, and I have never regretted my decision to be an editorial designer. When receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Society of News Design, the venerable Louis Silverstein, known as the grandfather of news design, narrated why he chose visual journalism as a career. He said, "Of the many odd jobs I did as a teenager, one of them was as a milk delivery boy. One morning when I knocked at a door to deliver milk, a beautiful young blonde wearing a diaphanous negligee opened the door. On finding me there, her face fell in disappointment. 'I thought it was the newspaper boy,' she said. That was the day I decided to make a career in newspapers." It's true, there's something irresistibly sexy about the business of news !

In keeping with the theme of this anniversary issue, we have selected what we think are the 12 best Outlook covers. Readers are welcome to differ, and to let us know their own personal list of favourites. The Outlook website showcases all the covers we have made in the last 12 years.

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Dec 11, 1996 
An unusual subject for the cover, and we were able to be both provocative and funny. It gave us a chance to add an element of humour to the design.

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Aug 18, 1997 
India’s 50th birthday. A strong image of an unfurling tricolour set against a golden background made the cover look celebratory.

Jan 5, 1998 
We used the ‘naive art’ technique to illustrate the story. A simple portrait got horns, it screamed for attention 
at the newsstand.

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Dec 6, 1999 
The news environment forced us to put Sonia Gandhi many times on the cover that year. To break the monotony, we used typography in a graphic form here.

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Mar 20, 2000 
Even the prez was amused. A life-size image was sent to the White House on his request. It was one of the things Bill packed with him after demitting office! 

Oct 16, 2000 
We used all the Outlook covers 
published till then on our 5th b’day cover. The collage encapsulated our visual philosophy effectively.


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Apr 29, 2002 
Again a situation where we had put Vajpayee too many times on the cover that year. A B&W posterised cover image effectively broke the monotony.
Aug 22, 2005 
Inspired by Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. A first for us, an oil on canvas painting, but unfortunately the image had to be cropped! The full image was used inside.'
Oct 16, 2006 
We used another art technique here, a miniature artist rendered the digits. The result was brilliant and the cover image was a perfect fit for the occasion. 

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Nov 27, 2006 
We normally avoid using illustrations on the cover. But we made an exception for this remarkable portrait of the Chinese president.
May 7, 2007 
We sourced clay toys from Bengal, cotton stuffed toys from Rajasthan and plastic toys from Delhi. The collage illustrated the chaos that is India. 
Oct 1, 2007 
We were unsure how readers in the non-Hindi speaking parts of India would respond to the headline. But, 
surprise, it proved a big draw all over.
   

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