Ready or not, here it comes – part one

(Image by the Clippy Image Generator)

The design-related Blogotweetspheroid has been bubbling with bile at new venture Ready-Media, a creation of Satan and his minions well-known designers/typographers Roger Black, Eduado Danilo, Sam Berlow, Robb Rice and David Berlow.

I’ve not commented until now, as I’ve been trying to get my head around the controversy. Here’s how it looks to me, and you might not like it.

Briefly, the company is an offshoot of DaniloBlack, and it offers different, fairly decent pre-baked templates for magazines, newspapers and websites, which can then be used as they are, or adapted for clients’ use by Ready-Media’s team.

The objections, mostly from designers, mostly over on the SPD blog, seem to fall into these broad categories:

And probably the biggest of all,

I should make clear first of all that I’m not a designer, so it’s not my neck potentially on the line. I do however work closely with designers on a regular basis, and hugely value the result of marrying editorial and design to create meaningful, effective communication.

Also, I’m quite possibly not close enough to the design industry to fully understand the implications of Ready-Media. But from where I’m sitting, I don’t see it as the almighty threat that some perceive it to be, quite simply because I believe that it is not, and would never be, an industry-wide solution.

Instead, Ready-Media’s intended clients are in fact those publications who have never sought to utilise an art director to their full effectiveness, and probably never will. When Jeremy says that “as print designers we now have full access to all the elements of page make up on our screen. Yet their solution is one that takes three quarters of the decisions away from us,” he’s right, but he’s also applying the Ready-Media method to the way he works. Not all publications access the page elements as he does, nor would they ever. It’s part of what makes him worth every penny – he does more than most, with every tool available. But however much we may wish it to be so, that is far from an industry-wide truth.

One of the company’s founders said on the SPD blog that “Ready-Media was formed to help smaller local publishers get design that’s too expensive for many of them, help them concentrate on the issue-centered art direction and content gathering, and help them make sound font choices without a lot of fiddling.”

Here in the States, there are thousands and thousands of small-scale, local publications, mostly with very mediocre designs. Some are franchises, others one-, two- or three-person operations – and they already use templates, always have, within which sometimes there is a full-time art director on the team to commission and place images, and sometimes there isn’t. Here’s one example. It’s not beautiful, but it works, and on a very low budget. It’s Slot A into Tab B. They don’t have the resources for anything else, and their audience/ad base is good enough for them to make enough money not to worry about it. The results are for locals, if not for the purists. Headlines are this big and go here, body copy goes here, image goes there. Rinse. Repeat.

Right now, many of this kind of publications’ templates are being created by pretty mediocre local design agencies, simply because they are easy and cheap – and the dirty truth is that many of these companies already probably recycle templates between clients, without admitting it. This is the existing, small-scale, small-budget marketplace that Ready-Media wants a piece of.

Michael has stated that “Creativity will be come subservient to ‘the template’ and fledgling editorial designers will be expected to switch off any overtly creative intent by over jealous publishers who paid for these goddamn things so now were going to use them.”

It’s true, but it isn’t anything new. If publishers wanted to shut off design individuality from their team, then they’ve already been doing that for years (and I know of many who have). To reiterate, small publications are often designed to rigid templates put in place by paid, outside designers. That’s not a Ready-Media invention.

I understand that its template-focused philosophy clashes with that of top, high-minded editorial designers. Good – it should. It’s also true to say that it doesn’t move the debate about quality editorial design forward. But it’s unrealistic to think that all publications have ever shared this idealism. Many, many small and local publishers have always talked about media in commercial-centered terms that make me shudder. Ready-Media simply talks that language. They didn’t invent it, they’re just looking at how their potential clients already think, and have created a solution for them.

Would it be a better world if these small publishers genuinely cared more about effective, tailored design? Maybe, especially for those of us who do. Is it ever going to happen? Probably not. More importantly, have their actions or ideas ever actively threatened the quality of the rest of the design and editorial world? No. In fact, these small publications have often made our work look even stronger in comparison. Which is perhaps ironically where some publications stand to lose most from Ready-Media – by raising the quality of the worst-designed, the best now needs to reach higher, in order to continue to make clear its points of difference.

As someone who mostly works in high-minded, idealistic publications, and dislikes complacency, I’m fine with that as a result.

The big difference between what went before is that Ready-Media has made its template strategy overt, while using the name of someone who has previously been hired by major media companies, to help sell the solution. In the context of DaniloBlack’s strategy as an agency, this offshoot makes sense. They probably wouldn’t have been considered for these kinds of small-scale job in the past, and indeed, to pitch for them might have harmed what their brand stands for. So they needed to come up with a better solution, a way of broadening their customer base, ideally with a gimmick that would make them stand out.

For years, people have accused Mario Garcia and also Roger Black himself of using near-identical templates, even for their top clients. It’s a bold gimmick to state clearly that this is what Ready-Media actually stands for – but it is just a gimmick, albeit one with clear benefits for the client: if I were such a small publisher who wanted to consider this solution, it could be useful to see almost immediately how my current issue would look in a variety of some of these templates. And if I want to spend more money on a bespoke solution, the option is there.

All of which doesn’t address the bigger question: what about the future of design? Do we want people thinking in template-based terms on any scale?

For my answer to that, come and read part two.