New Haven, 1940 to 1953.

Print began as a printer’s project. Wikipedia says the journal was founded by William Edwin Rudge to demonstrate “the far reaching importance of the graphic arts”, a field it took to include art prints, commercial printing and wallpaper, and that its opening issue appeared in June 1940 under the title Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts. The design site TypeRoom, writing on 15 December 2019, quoted J. J. Sedelmaier saying that Rudge was the third generation of a family of printers who all carried the same name, and that he ran the publication from his office in New Haven, Connecticut.

The early issues were objects as much as magazines. Wikipedia says they included original prints: the frontispiece of Volume 1, Number 1 was a two-colour woodcut by Hans Alexander Mueller, and Volume 1, Number 3, dated December 1940, carried a black-and-white wood engraving by Paul Landacre. Sedelmaier, as quoted by TypeRoom, described a limited-edition periodical with tipped-in features, published in a journal format of about 7¼ by 10 inches up to Volume VII, Number 6, in March 1953.

The contents were broad. Wikipedia lists typography, book making, book printing and fine prints alongside trade subjects as plain as the printing of candy bar wrappers. Print’s own website, in an essay titled “PRINT’s Next Chapter”, says the opening issue carried a treatise by William Addison Dwiggins, a feature on illustrated books of the 1860s and a history of wallpaper that came with actual wallpaper samples.

The cover of that issue set an unusual tone. TypeRoom credited it to Howard Trafton. Print’s own site says it showed a small inset figure with a flower for a head, set against a large set of fingerprints belonging to the typographer Bruce Rogers, and that the cover carried no words at all, not even the title.

Wikipedia says that by Volume 8, in 1953, the periodical’s focus had shifted to that of a trade journal. Sedelmaier, as quoted by TypeRoom, traced the moves behind it: the publishing office went to Burlington, Vermont, with editorial offices in Hartsdale, New York, and by the spring of 1953 Rudge was president and editor, with both offices in Manhattan.

A masthead that kept changing.

Print’s name has changed several times, usually when it absorbed another title. Wikipedia sets out the sequence. In the summer of 1942 the journal combined with The Printing Art, an illustrated monthly on printing and the allied arts, but kept the title Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts. In August 1951 it combined with The Print Collector’s Quarterly, and Volume 7, Number 1 carried both titles. From January 1952 it was Print, The Magazine of the Graphic Arts; from late 1954 plain Print; from early 1958 Print, The Magazine of Visual Communication; and from July 1958 Print, America’s Graphic Design Magazine, a subtitle Wikipedia records as still in use in 2005.

The editorial voice changed in the 1960s. Print’s own site says a playwright named Martin Fox arrived at the magazine in 1962 and led it for four decades, and that the modern magazine began to take shape under him. Fox, the site says, told Debbie Millman in 2015, on the occasion of the brand’s 75th anniversary, that he knew nothing about graphic art when he came to Print. When he retired, it says, he handed the magazine to editors who carried his approach in their own directions.

Wikipedia describes the printed Print of later decades as a general-interest magazine written by cultural reporters and critics who looked at design in its social and historical contexts. Its subjects ranged from newspapers and book covers to motion graphics made for the web, and from corporate branding to posters for indie-rock bands. Print’s site says Steven Heller wrote a column for the magazine called “Evolution”, tracing the history of many corners of design.

The print edition ended in 2017. Wikipedia says Print continued as a physical magazine through the end of that year and then stopped, with a promise to focus the brand on “a robust and thriving online community”. Its publisher at the time was F+W Media, which Wikipedia says declared bankruptcy in 2019; Print then sat with Peak Media Properties, the company that arose out of F+W. Print’s own site describes that moment plainly: after its owner’s bankruptcy, it says, the magazine disappeared.

A printer’s journal that became a website.

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.

New owners in 2019, a new site in 2020.

The current chapter began with a sale. TypeRoom reported on 15 December 2019 that the Print brand and its website, Printmag.com, had been acquired by Print Holdings LLC, formed by Debbie Millman, host of the Design Matters podcast; Steven Heller, author of the Daily Heller column; Andrew Gibbs and Jessica Deseo of the packaging site Dieline; and Deb Aldrich and Laura Des Enfants. The announcement it reproduced was dated 10 December 2019, New York. Print’s own site says Millman had served as the magazine’s editorial director and that Aldrich and Des Enfants had been its advertising directors.

The plan was a web magazine, not a return of the printed one. TypeRoom said the legacy site, including new Daily Heller columns, would keep publishing until 2020, when a new format would launch under the new owners. It quoted the team saying that, rather than the how-to of design, Print’s content would cover the why: why the designed world looks the way it does, how it has evolved and why that matters. Millman, quoted in the same piece, said the owners wanted to reinvent Printmag.com as a reflection of what designers are interested in reading today.

Print’s own relaunch essay, “PRINT’s Next Chapter”, played on the name. It opened with the words “PRINT is dead” and ended by saying the brand was also more alive than ever. The essay said Print, once focused on design in the United States, now looked at design around the world, and that the site had left behind what it called comically bad corporate web design. It named Bill McCool as managing editor and said the aim was to work out what design means today while tipping a hat to the past.

The same essay noted that Print had never been purely about print design, in the way Wallpaper* had never been purely about wallpaper, and pointed to the wallpaper samples bound into the 1940 opening issue.

For a design guide, Print shows how a single-word title can carry a publication from tipped-in woodcuts in 1940 to a website in 2020 without changing that word. Compare Eye and Creative Review, two other design magazines, and Communication Arts, the California journal founded in 1959. For this guide we use proof red, woodcut brown and press black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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