Letraset, 1979.

Baseline is an English-language magazine about type, typography and graphic design. Its own history says it began in 1979, published by the graphic arts products company Letraset, and that it was originally meant mainly as a vehicle for promoting new typeface designs that Letraset licensed to makers of typesetting systems. English Wikipedia gives a slightly different early chain, saying that the first four issues came from Typographic Systems International and that Letraset published issues 5 to 18.

The magazine’s account says Baseline appeared “when available material allowed”, on average about once a year during its first ten years. Even with the obligatory typeface promotion, it says, its editorial content found readers in the typographic community, and an international team of consultants, later replaced by an editorial advisory board, gave it a wider outlook.

Issue 1 was designed and edited by Mike Daines, according to the magazine, and later early numbers were produced by a mix of Letraset’s internal studio and commissioned designers. It names Darrell Ireland, Ed Cleary, Mo Leibowitz and Milton Glaser among the people who contributed to Baseline’s early development. The German designer Erik Spiekermann edited and designed issues 6 and 7, which the magazine says included early analysis of type design for the laser and dot-matrix printers then arriving.

The look of the magazine changed from issue to issue in those years. Baseline says the London design firm Banks and Miles was commissioned to design issue 8 in 1986, which moved to full colour while keeping the A4 format, and that Daines stayed on as a consultant to Letraset to give the content continuity. Wikipedia adds that issue 10 enlarged the page size and that the magazine took on its later dimensions with issue 14. Features included Desert Island Type, in which guests such as Terence Conran, Paul Smith, Tibor Kalman and Ralph Steadman chose their favourite typographic ephemera, and the magazine says layouts became more lavish and experimental when the consultancy Newell and Sorrell worked on it.

The editors become the publishers.

The current shape of Baseline dates from the 1990s. The magazine says Hans Dieter Reichert was appointed by Letraset International in 1993 to work as art director alongside Daines as editor, and that for issue 17 the two took what it calls a holistic approach, giving the magazine a more rigorous and coherent appearance.

Letraset had by then lost interest in publishing it, the magazine says. In 1995, by its account, Reichert and Daines bought Baseline from Letraset and became its publishers and joint editors, undertaking to keep its editorial, design and production values and to honour its obligations to subscribers. Wikipedia dates the purchase to 1994 and names Jenny Daines and Veronika Reichert as fellow founders of the new company, Bradbourne Publishing. Issue 19, the new company’s opening number, appeared in the summer of 1995.

The publishers proclaimed no new manifesto, the magazine says. Instead they wrote that typographic personalities, opinions and ideas would stay at the heart of the subject matter, as they had in earlier issues. An advisory board that included Alan Fletcher, Colin Brignall and David Ellis helped steer the content through the change, and the magazine credits Fletcher with starting one of its research stories, the rediscovery of designs by E. McKnight Kauffer. Writers it lists from the Bradbourne years include Beryl McAlhone, Ken Garland, Steven Heller, Robin Kinross and Rick Poynor, and it says publication settled at three to four issues a year.

Baseline also moved early onto the web. The magazine says baselinemagazine.com went online in 1995. On 12 February 2008, Jeremy Leslie of magCulture reported that Baseline had launched a new website designed by its editor and designer, Reichert, with a searchable archive of the magazine. At round-table talks on design magazines held with the Enformato exhibition in Segovia, Spain, the Eye editor John L. Walters reported on 27 June 2011 that Baseline’s Jonathan Hunt spoke about how the magazine was using social media to promote itself.

Mastheads, grids and paper.

Photo agencies and design magazines are brands whose product is other people’s work, and that shapes how their identities are built. The name usually arrives first as a wordmark or masthead: a short set of letters that has to sit above a changing cover image, on a spine, on a website header and in a social-media avatar without competing with the picture or the typography it frames. Many mastheads are redrawn when a new art director arrives, so the same title can carry several versions of its name over its life.

For agencies, the credit line is a quieter but constant brand surface. A photographer’s name followed by the agency’s name appears beside images in newspapers, books and exhibitions, so the agency name has to work in a few plain words of caption type as well as in a logo. Agencies organised as cooperatives or collectives often choose short, neutral names that can represent a group of members rather than a single founder.

For magazines, each cover is a new test of the identity, and the website and archive pages have become a second front cover. Consistent spacing, a stable masthead position and a restrained colour system let the content change while the brand stays recognisable.

A redesign from issue 52.

Daines left after a long run. The magazine says that after twelve years with Bradbourne Publishing he decided to step down as co-editor, having worked on Baseline up to issue 50, and that the change in management prompted a new look. With issue 52, it says, the design team of HDR Visual Communication, Reichert’s studio, redesigned the magazine, reconsidering the logo and masthead, the editorial typefaces and the grid. The magazine also describes the paper as part of the concept, with coated, uncoated and special surfaces used together.

Its stated philosophy explains why the design matters so much to its identity. Baseline describes its approach as holistic, rooted in the belief that design and layout should spring from, and stay in balance with, the contents, and says its format and flexible grid allow both large displays of graphic material and detailed text-led pages. Its team page names Reichert as editor and art director, with Ken Garland, Steve Heller, Ian McLaren, Helmut Schmid and Arnold Schwartzman as contributing editors and David John Lewis and Schmid among the designers.

Baseline has also worked beyond the page. The Eye blog, in a report by Katherine Gillieson dated 6 July 2012, said an exhibition on Otl Aicher’s design for the 1972 Munich Olympics had been organised by the University for the Creative Arts and Baseline at the Herbert Read Gallery in Canterbury, with a symposium on 29 June 2012. Reichert was a co-organiser and spoke about Aicher as a designer and maker of books. In February 2013, Inspiration Grid featured a handmade Baseline special edition on the designer Ivan Chermayeff; Baseline said its pages were overprinted sheets taken from the magazine’s own print production.

The magazine’s website, as archived in December 2024, still described issue 63 as the current issue, carried an update date of May 2018 and said the next issue was in planning.

For a design guide, Baseline shows how a magazine about type can make its masthead, grid and paper part of its identity, and how its editors carried that identity from a supplier’s bulletin to an independent title. Compare Eye, a London graphic design quarterly, IDEA and Print. For this guide we use proof orange, burnt sienna and press black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Baseline’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.