Artwork in the magazine

Visual content in the magazine

Since the relaunch of SftP, editorial collectives have focused primarily on article illustrations, layout design & branding, and cover art, which are foundational to the success of any publication. While cover art strongly influences potential readers’ first impressions of the magazine, layout design facilitates an enjoyable reader experience and branding conveys consistent editorial standards across issues. Article illustrations serve a variety of functions: not only can they bring stories to life and demonstrate challenging concepts, but they also contribute to reader experience by providing space to pause between text. In recent issues, most written features and essays have received a half-page or full-page main illustration preceding the article and spot illustrations as needed. Some of the illustrations are highly content-specific and/or stylized (e.g., commissioned specifically for the article), while others are more general (e.g., photographs drawn from the public domain), serving as layout elements more than as creative accompaniments to the written piece. (Note from Andres: Matteo Farinella and Pamela Parker have done an outstanding job crafting the magazine design & identity, producing dozens of illustrations, leading on cover art, and soliciting contributions from other illustration artists for all issues to date.)

Separately from the work described above, visual stories and art features have surfaced occasionally and are currently considered by the same open call process as written content or developed by ad-hoc member initiatives like the Mapping Collective. Visual stories can be an exciting way of engaging readers online and in print. In general, visual stories are narrative like the core written content accepted by SftP; the category mainly differs in terms of medium and implementation needs (e.g., photography might place a central role; in some cases, interactive components require programming expertise to implement). SftP’s open call process should be relatively effective at facilitating the submission of visual stories, although there is room for SftP to expand its technical support that would help realize visual stories – particularly on the web and using interactive media.

Art features may differ quite fundamentally from SftP’s core written content and visual stories in that they may not be strictly editorial. The inclusion of art features can profoundly broaden the range of voices represented, as well as offering practical/formal benefits like breaking up long sections of text and increasing the “coffee table” value of printed magazines. Unlike the producers of visual stories and illustrations, most artists (excluding illustrators) work separately from the journalism and academic writing spheres that are most closely tied to SftP. Although art features are accepted through SftP’s open call process, it is probably not the best strategy for acquiring visual features – at least untill SftP is better known within arts communities and has a more specific outreach strategy, as well as criteria for how open call art submissions should be considered.