Palo Alto, 1959.

Communication Arts, known as CA, was founded in 1959 by Richard Coyne and Robert Blanchard. AIGA San Francisco, in a tribute posted in May 2022, said the magazine was established in Palo Alto, California. Wikipedia says its opening issue appeared in August 1959 under another name, the Journal of Commercial Art.

The magazine began as a sideline to a design business. In a 2012 interview for AIGA San Francisco, conducted by Sam McMillan, Coyne’s son Patrick Coyne said his father and his business partner set it up in the 1950s so they could work with the new technology of the time. They wanted their own litho film preparation facility, he said, but could not justify buying a large copy camera and darkroom for their design and advertising business alone, so they came up with a commercial art magazine to justify the expense. After a few issues, he said, his father decided that publishing a magazine was more interesting than running a commercial art studio.

Wikipedia says that after Blanchard left to go into business on his own, Coyne carried on with his wife, Jean Coyne, and a small staff, writing, designing and producing the magazine themselves. The AIGA San Francisco tribute traced Jean Coyne’s roles: editorial assistant from 1959 to 1968; associate editor from 1968 to 1978, when she wrote feature articles and managed the juried competitions; and executive editor from 1978. It said she met Richard Coyne when both studied art and design at the Cornish School in Seattle.

The company name keeps both founders. The magazine’s own website says Communication Arts, commarts.com and the careers site Creative Hotlist are owned and operated by Coyne & Blanchard, Inc., and describes a three-generation, family-run business. Patrick Coyne told AIGA San Francisco in 2012 that it was still a family-owned business.

The family’s work also reaches beyond the magazine. AIGA San Francisco said Richard and Jean Coyne set up the Richard and Jean Coyne Family Foundation in 1990 to fund programmes that help economically disadvantaged high-school students develop portfolios for admission to art school, and to provide college scholarships for study in visual communications.

The Annuals and a second generation.

The competitions arrived early. Patrick Coyne told AIGA San Francisco in 2012 that it all started in 1960 with one Annual covering design, advertising, illustration and photography, and that the decision was about survival: with few subscribers and little advertising revenue, his father needed something to make the magazine viable. Wikipedia says the competition grew and was eventually divided into separate competitions for graphic design, advertising, photography and illustration. Coyne described the order of the splits in the same interview: illustration and photography separated from design and advertising, then design and advertising split, and then illustration and photography went their own ways.

New media brought new categories. Coyne said the Interactive Annual was added in 1995 because those entries needed to be judged differently; interactive work entered in the 1994 Design Annual had taken the jury a long time to review alongside the print entries. Wikipedia dates the addition of a typography competition to early 2011, and says the competitions are juried by creative professionals.

The second generation arrived in 1986. Patrick Coyne told AIGA San Francisco that his father decided to retire that year and said he would sell the magazine unless his son wanted to get involved. Coyne, trained as a designer, said he realised that otherwise someone else would be running his family’s magazine. In an interview published by the Epica design and advertising site on 22 September 2023, he said he had studied design in college, worked for several designers in San Francisco and become a partner in a design firm before deciding to continue the family magazine.

The production tools changed under him. Coyne told AIGA San Francisco that his father had been an early investor in a desktop publishing system called Lightspeed that predated the Macintosh, and that the magazine bought Macs and began doing its own desktop publishing in 1989.

Wikipedia says the magazine went online in 1995, with a site that showed creative work and carried job listings. The jobs section grew and was relaunched in 2001 as a standalone site, Creative Hotlist. By 2012, Coyne said, Annuals and feature articles were being archived behind a paywall as online premium content that came free with a print subscription, searchable by firm or by person rather than issue by issue.

A darkroom sideline that became a family journal.

A design publication is read as much as it is looked at, and its identity has to work across every surface it touches. The masthead is the anchor: a wordmark that sits at the top of a cover, a website header and a social avatar, and has to stay legible at the width of a phone screen as well as on a newsstand. Around it, covers and grids carry the voice from issue to issue. A cover system might fix the masthead position and leave the image to change, or treat each cover as a commission and let only the type stay constant. Inside, the grid, the body face and the caption style set the pace of reading.

Online, the same identity is stretched across websites and newsletters, where it has to survive templates, thumbnails and inbox previews. Many titles also run events, talks and annuals, and each of these becomes a brand surface in its own right, with its own posters, stage graphics and printed books. Read together, these pieces show how a publication keeps one recognisable voice while its formats keep changing.

Text, layout, paper and a family voice.

Communication Arts presents itself through the magazine as a made object. Patrick Coyne told Epica in 2023 that the team spends a great deal of time crafting the text and layout and spends heavily on printing and paper. He said the magazine covers the whole spectrum of visual communication, and that its juried competitions draw work and judges from around the world.

The house voice has a family source too. Coyne told Epica that his mother, Jean Coyne, had advised him never to use a big word when a small word will do. He named his father, Richard Coyne, trained as an art director, as a role model, and said his father had become a journalist reluctantly because there was no money to hire more staff. He also credited the magazine’s competition judges, whose views on the entries and on where the field is heading he described as a source of inspiration.

Jean Coyne’s editorship ran until 2022. AIGA San Francisco reported that she held the post of executive editor from 1978 until her death in April 2022, and that she had also managed the competitions in the 1970s.

The title has moved from commercial art to communication. The issue of August 1959 appeared as the Journal of Commercial Art, Wikipedia says, and the magazine is now known as Communication Arts, or simply CA. Its fields are graphic design, advertising, photography, illustration, typography and interactive media, Wikipedia says, the same disciplines that give the competitions their names. The company’s website describes commarts.com as the online complement to the printed magazine, updated daily.

For a design guide, Communication Arts shows how a magazine started to justify a darkroom can make its own juried Annuals the backbone of its pages, under one family company. Compare Eye and Creative Review, two other design magazines, and Print, the American journal founded in 1940. For this guide we use litho cyan, process magenta and darkroom black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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