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David Hillman interview

David Hillman is a British editorial design icon. At the end of the sixties he art directed Nova magazine through it’s most successful period, and in the early eighties, having become a partner at Pentagram, he executed the re-design of the Guardian that established that newspaper’s position at the forefront of UK publishing design.

He has recently left Pentagram, but just before he did so I had the opportunity to talk with him over lunch about his career in publishing design. An edited transcription of that conversation follows.

Since our lunch, Simon Esterson hosted a conversation with Hillman at Publishing Expo. I couldn’t make it along, but a friend who did get there described Hilman’s presentation as inspirational and sent the following brief description:

“The room was packed for previous speaker Tyler Brulé, and then everyone cleared out for David and I thought ‘why are you all leaving? This man will have so much more to say’. It was ‘In conversation’ with Simon Esterson but it wasn’t really a conversation, David had obviously prepared really well and gave a great presentation. He did a good thing though which was to take a picture of the newstand in a supermarket and see which mags really stand out. Weirdly it was Instyle which has to be the most horrible cover but is very visible.

He talked about how he wished there was a magazine for grown up men, which is intelligent, with no women, a few cars, and some great writing. I thought ah, maybe that could be Monocle. Also I felt that when he briefly talked about the Guardian and said that they had thrown away their brand, it is very true.”

Here’s my interview, from 18 January:

Lets start at the beginning; why magazines?
When I left school I decided to go to design school, art school, after talking to a guy I vaguely knew. I thought he was a printer – there was a print works near where I lived as a child. But it turned out he was the in-house commercial artist. And he said if you want to go to design school the only place worth going was the London School of Printing (now London College of Communication). Shortly after I started, an American guy introduced me to American magazines. He brought some in to school, Macolls, Esquire. This was 1959. It was such an amazing experience looking at these fantastic layouts with their photography and design by the likes of Marvin Israel and Henry Wolf. Then I saw Town magazine, a British magazine designed by Tom Wolsley. And then Twen from Germany and that did it for me. Magazines became my passion.

So when I left LSP I applied for work at magazines. And fortunately the month I left the Sunday Times launched its colour magazine and I got employed by Mark Boxer as a junior.

What changes have you seen in the industry?
Magazines then were all about the spirit of what the magazine was trying to convey. Today, nobody would publish Nova. Though it was launched as a woman’s magazine, everybody who ever worked on it saw it as a male/female magazine. We didn’t sit down and think about ideas for women, we produced a magazine we thought would be of interest to everybody. It was successful for the readers but a total disaster when it came to the advertising industry. The ad agencies like to pigeonhole you. They want Vogue because they know that’s where they can place their make up, shoes and frocks. You got to Nova magazine, you had fashion, which was conceptual, not just about selling clothes; cooking, which was off the wall; then articles on VD, homosexuality, breast implants… issues.

The publisher would come and say lets do this, we can go to a client and say we’re going to do this feature. But we weren’t going to do that. That’s what made Nova the magazine it was. And I just know now, having redesigned so many magazines over the years, that the advertising director is always in the background writing the brief. The first question ad agencies want to know is ‘what is your profile’.

And that didn’t used to be the case?
When I went to Sunday Times as an assistant to art director Michael Rand, he did the flat plan. The ad dept gave us a list of ads and we placed them. We used the ads as a means to produce a rhythm, so you could flick it from front to back. Now you can’t do that. The bloody ad list comes down and the first 48 pages are right hand ads. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ads, I’m just saying there should be a much happier marriage between the ad dept and editorial depts.

Nova had been around for a while before you joined
It started in 65, four years before I joined. In those four years it had ten Art Directors. I don’t think they could ever deal with the editor Dennis Hackett.

I joined in 1969 and stayed til it closed in 1975. I don’t believe Nova could have lasted longer… well it would have had we cow-towed to the pressures of IPC. Working at IPC was very different to the Times. Back then the Times was published by the Thompson organisation, run by Roy Thompson. He was one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. A real gentleman, and he never interfered. When the colour magazine was going through a bad time he financed it out of his own pocket. He shared the passion.

But then I went to IPC which had the editorial director/publisher system. Both were responsible for a stable of magazines. Our editorial director was also in charge of Woman and Woman’s Own. They were full of knitting patterns, never upset anybody. Each magazine had editorial meetings every Wednesday, so he’d leave the Woman meeting where he’d be discussing which royal family story they were going to run, come upstairs to Nova, to find this months cover story was sexually transmitted diseases in woman’s prisons.

It lasted a long time for something that was on the ‘outside’
The thing that killed it was the launch of the British edition of Cosmopolitan, not because Cosmo was a threat to us but because when we heard it was launching we knew we had to do a really good issue against it. Edward Heath was Prime Minister at the time, and the big thing about him that concerned everybody was that he was unmarried and possibly gay. He was a keen sailor and was regarded as very camp.

Our features editor David Jenkins had this brilliant idea that we should find Heath a wife. So we put Heath’s details onto the Dateline dating service computer and three women turned up. One of them was perfect, and we told her what the story was and she was very keen to do it. She thought it was very funny. So she described how she would change his life, there’d be no more sailing, how she would feminise Downing St. She was quite left wing and devised a dinner party guest list featuring all these union leaders, the Irish campaigner Bernadette Devlin, and Phyllis Diller, Liz Taylor. She worked out the seating plan and I got Jean-Paul Goude to do these amazing photo-like paintings of the party, and the cover was designed as a newspaper front page with an image of the newly weds and the headline ‘Ted Weds – No more boats says wife’.

But just as the proofs came in, the ‘wife’ rang Jenkins up and said that now it was all over there were a few things he should know. So they met for tea, and it turns out she was already married, she’d only gone on Dateline for a joke, which is one thing. But the thing that really freaked us all was that at the time she, her husband and her daughter were being hunted by the CIA, FBI and Interpol for drug-dealing.

They pleaded their innocence but the editor Gillian Cook felt obliged to tell the publishing director who completely panicked. So they destroyed all the magazines. They came round the office, removed all traces of the story.
So we missed a whole issue, we were three weeks late coming out, while Cosmo launched with an enormous ad campaign. And Nova never recovered from that.

Put Nova in context; what else was happening in British publishing at that time?
There was 19, Honey and Petticoat, the great new success, all published by IPC. Other things like Time Out had begun, Rosie Boycott’s Spare Rib. Private Eye was around. The Observer and Sunday Telegraph launched their Sunday colour magazines, setting up a war with the Sunday Times.

The Sunday Times as a package was incredibly successful. But it wasn’t just the magazine; the front page of the Review section was the best designed page in any newspaper at the time. They did World War II, Kennedy’s assassination, they were very visual. I worked on a lot of them, that was where I first worked on newspapers.There were some really good Dutch magazines around then too, I cant remember their names but visually they were totally different. They tended to be for the music business. France had a really good rock magazine called Salut les Copains, and it had really good photography, was well produced on glossy paper. Rolling Stone had a big effect on me, beautifully designed but on newsprint.Then the launches became more commercial. Penthouse came along. I used to be an avid Playboy reader, not just because of the beautiful women in it but because it had fantastically written interviews. Playboy carried one of the first interviews with Yoko Ono and John Lennon. But when Guccione published Penthouse, with its harder porn, it forced Playboy to compete. Suddenly you couldn’t be seen on the Tube reading it.

This was the beginning of the end for magazines. Picture Post disappeared, and Illustrated London News, and the excuse was people didn’t need them because of TV. Then you had things like the Radio Times with a really serious art dept: David Driver and Robert Priest. Radio Times was the magazine to be reckoned with. It sold a couple of million every week.There was this circuit of photographers working for Radio Times, Nova, the Sunday Times magazine. People like Eve Arnold, David Montgomery, Terence Donovan, Don Mcullan, even Cartier Bresson. It was also one of the very few times when illustration and photography were both in fashion at one time. I can go through Nova magazine and show you that was when photographers ruled supreme, and this was when they were having a bad time and the illustrators were doing well.

How did you come to join Pentagram?
I was invited to join Pentagram while I was working in Paris, helping to launch the newspaper Le Matin de Paris. At the time I thought I’d had enough of magazines. So I joined Pentagram and didn’t do a magazine for two years. Then Building magazine came to me, and they really let me do what I wanted to do. I realised that while consumer magazines had lost their freedom, these B2B magazines were prepared to listen to we designers. These were now the magazines that were willing to experiment.Them and other newspaper magazines; I did the launch of the Daily Express magazine, and the promise of that was it would be a kind of Paris Match thing which was music to my ears but they didn’t have the nerve to do it properly. The trouble is there was a spirit at Match that was unique. They spent their whole lives trying to scoop everyone else and do it better than everyone else. I remember when Churchill died there was a photo call to go and shoot his grave being dug. Our photographer came back saying there was a conversation going on round the grave while they were waiting for the diggers to turn up, saying 10-1 when they lift the first turf up there’ll be a Paris Match photographer underneath, That was the reputation they had.

But even that got fucked up and turned into a gossip magazine, on the same basis I suppose that Picture Post went, that there wasn’t the interest, you see it all on television. But in a way you don’t, you know. I look back at the old Sunday Times Magazines and wonder when was the last time you saw ten spreads like that in a magazine? No ads, no text, just pictures. The pictures were of such a quality, and the captions were written in such a way that you had enough information to understand what the story was about. And if you had an interest you could read the 10-15,000 words that followed.

Over this period, working on Sunday Times and Nova, did it feel like you were involved in something special, revolutionary even?
You felt you were at the forefront of something. I was looking through the back issues of the D&AD Annual the other day. If you look at the first annual, there was hardly any advertising in it whatsoever, but it was full of graphic design and particularly magazines. And if you carry on through the seventies, magazines and design remained dominant. In the seventies a few ads turn up, the Benson & Hedges cigarette series for instance, but nowhere near what the balance is now. Today the annuals are all advertising. How many magazine do you see in the Annual these days?

The sixties were a time of great social change. Was there a feeling that working at Nova and the ST you were the publishing arm of the singing sixties?
People’s reaction to you when you said you designed magazines, they’d ask what magazine and when you said Nova they reacted as if you were some rock and roll star. I don’t know if that still happens now. I don’t know if someone like Robin Derrick at British Vogue is treated the same way.

In the sixties, everybody knew who Michael Rand was. They knew me, they knew Peccinotti, because we spent our lives seeing people. You had to control the number of portfolios you saw in a day. I used to get in to the office at 10 and leave for lunch at 1230 and not come back til about 5, then work til 10/11 at night. That was what people did. The lunch was the big thing. Nova was just off the Strand and I used to go to Le Meridiana in the Brompton Rd, a twenty minute cab ride away. Because everybody was in there. Every photographer and every illustrator was there.

Presumably you are aware how highly Nova is regarded by magazine designers today.
I’m aware of that

Yet there seems to be a paradox that everyone’s admiring Nova yet are unable to achieve that same state of freedom.
Nova died not only because of the story I told earlier, but also because in the end it ran out of things to shock people with. We opened the door for every other fucking magazine in the UK. Nova talked about buggery, transvestites, gay this, gay that. The minute we did it even Woman’s Own in its prim little way was able to approach the same subject. A taboo had been broken, we’d put our neck on the block.

Do you think a magazine like Nova has a limited time span?
Yes, it’s like Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Every great magazine and newspaper has it’s ups and downs.I haven’t bought a Sunday paper for ages. The saddest thing I ever saw was one Sunday in a newsagent watching a family picking through the Sunday papers bending them. ‘Oh this has got one… this has one’ they were saying. They paid for the papers, I was so mesmerised I followed them out of the shop and they were stood outside stuffing the paper in a bin having retrieved the giveaway CDs they were after. The entire paper was thrown away. If I was working for one of those Sundays now I think I’d slit my wrists because if all that people are interested in then why not just give them a plastic bag full of CDs and forget the newspaper?I’m sure IPC didn’t see it this way, but those of that worked for Nova felt that we were doing something, and this sounds pompous, but we felt we doing something important because we wanted people to know about these things. The mere fact IPC sold a few hundred thousand pounds worth of ads each issue was by and by for us. Maybe that’s very un-commercial of me, that’s perhaps one of my failings, but actually I’m not interested in that. What makes me happy is when someone says ‘Your redesign, along with the editorial changes made, have increased the circulation by 40%’. That’s fantastic. What I don’t want to hear is that we’ve also got another million pound worth of ads.

What did you make of the attempted re-launch of Nova in the 90s?
That was commercialism gone mad. It bore no resemblance to any thinking in any part of Nova’s history. They were too fucking lazy to think of a new name, Nova as a name was too far gone down the line. The only people who knew about the original Nova were magazine obsessives. It was just sloppy. A magazine has its life, you can’t resurrect things.

It comes back to something you’ve mentioned a few times, spirit. For me the best magazines are the ones where you can sense the enjoyment of the people who made it

Exactly. They are few and far between these days. I struggle now, when I travel. Books are fine, but as a piece of relaxation magazines are better, you can dip in and out. I get to the airport, to the shop, and I stand there. I look at Esquire, I look at GQ and I come away without buying anything. If I buy anything it’ll be Elle Deco or World of Interiors.

One thing I found difficult was the a period ten years or so ago when photographers like Jurgen Teller and Terry Richardson were shooting pictures of girls that looked like they were about three minutes away from dying. And I remember being in Paris with Harry Peccinotti and I happened to have a magazine with some of these pictures in it, and I said to him, what happened to the days when you used to go through a model’s book and think, who do I want to fuck? Not that we went around fucking models all the time…
…that was my next question…

…but models were real people. I used to fall in love every day. I’ve done a few photographic sessions recently and a lot of these girls you can’t even have a conversation with. We used to all go out to dinner together after a shoot and have a really fun evening. Most models now I can only just about bear being in the studio with them. That’s not being snobbish, they’re just so young and un-worldly.

Moving on to a completely different project twenty years later: The Guardian.

Guardian editor Peter Preston and I had met a few years before doing some judging. In between lusting after fellow judge Sue Lawley, we got into conversation about the future of newspapers. Hot metal technology was coming to an end and Murdoch had just broken the print unions.

Then a while later I got the call from him saying lets redesign the Guardian. He was the dream client. I asked about a brief, and was told everything was up for grabs except the format.

So there were no tabloid dummies of your redesign made?

No, though I did have the idea of it folding down to tabloid and having a cover that opened out to broadsheet. But we pushed things so far in other ways, and they never argued about anything. At the time it was just another job; we moved production from hot metal to Atex and redesigned the newspaper in three months.

One of the things Preston said one day was that we need to have a serious conversation about how we’re going to handle the publicity. I said, what do you mean?’ He said, I can tell you now, you are going to be on every news programme on the morning we launch. And he was right, not only did all the news programmes come and film the actual process of producing the first issue, but also the reaction… I was at a meeting in Covent Garden on the morning of the launch and I got a call from Max Hastings, then editor of the Evening Standard and he asked me how I felt about being responsible for the death of an old friend!

You really had no idea it was going to be seen as such a big change?

I didn’t see it as any more radical than anything else I’d done. I just thought it was the right solution for the job.

In some ways success can be negative, something that radical can hold you back. Neville Brody told me how the worst thing he ever did was publish his first book, for eighteen months afterward he didn’t get a single job. I didn’t get another newspaper job for years after The Guardian. There was a belief that I could only do major redesigns, that I couldn’t just style a newspaper. I had to fight to get work.

Its like being here, there is this assumption that because you are a partner at Pentagram you are incredibly busy, very expensive, and therefore not be interested in smaller jobs. I had one client tell me a couple of months ago he had this little job he wanted me to do, but he didn’t really have much money, and I asked just out of interest just how much money he had. Turned out he had 30-50k. I said I’d have done it and left change! There’s this perception that we are expensive, and that’s one of the reason I’m leaving Pentagram. It’s those 30-40k jobs I enjoy doing.

We’ve discussed American and British magazines. How different are they?

For me it seems the Americans have a much greater passion for editorial than the British. American Esquire is still better than British Esquire, and American GQ is still better than British GQ. We don’t have a Vanity Fair, or a Fred Woodward or a Luke Hayman.

I redesigned People magazine in New York. The art director was just a kind of soldier, he was never there when major decisions were made. He never went to the cover conference, that was the picture editor’s job. The way I see it the picture department should work for the art department not the other way round.

One of the depressing things I found at People was this meeting room with a wall of front covers, the whole year’s covers. Every one of them had a label on it, with a percentage mark indicating the degree above/below budget of the issue. I said to them it’s a shame you have to put those labels on the covers and they explained that’s what the wall was there for. I thought it was to compare the covers!I remember preparing cover ideas for the Diana death issue. There was an enormous meeting about where the cover line was going to go on the cover. They had a black and white Testino shot, the famous picture, with the People logo across the top. Where were the words going to go? I wasn’t supposed to say anything, I was just an observer, but it got to the point where had to say something. I said, why do you need a cover line? She’s the most famous person in the world at this moment and everyone knows why she’s on the cover. Do you have to say ‘Princess Diana’? And they went with that. I hate cover lines.One cover I remember from Nova is the one with just the legs. If I have one thing I regret from Nova its that I don’t think we did enough with the covers. We were inconsistent with them. But it was partly because we were trying to avoid the big face cover.When I was on Nova I was the most arrogant person in the world. There was only one view of the world and that was mine.

But isn’t the reputation of Nova based on the opinionated, upfront attitude of the people behind.

In a way, even though I am so critical of the management of IPC, and they did try to fire me on numerous occasions, I suppose I should be thankful that they paid my salary and allowed me to do what I was doing. A lot of that was to do with the team’s shared passion.At the end of it all, even at my most arrogant moments, I’ve never put a magazine in jeopardy. I might have put my own job in jeopardy but not the magazine itself. I’ve always done what I do because I believe in it, for the good of the magazine at the time. I’ve never done something because it would make me more famous.

You’re leaving Pentagram. What are your plans?

I’ve got a studio, and my clients are coming with me. They’ve been great, they all said they came for the person not the organisation. There’s the Times Education Supplement, a tea packaging company and a signage project in Dubai. The overheads at Pentagram are enormous, I’ve had to earn so much, and knowing I’m going to be doing it all for me again has made me feel like a new person. I can be slightly more choosy now. I haven’t taken on many jobs for the money but I know when I’ve taken on something because of financial pressures I’ve regretted it every time. Its ended in tears and I’ve not been very happy. Its become too corporate here and I’m not a corporate person. So I’m taking one of my designers with me, I start on February 1st and I’ll see what happens.