The Year in Editorial Design

Twelve months of covers, grids and one very stubborn trend that refuses to die.

A style guide nobody can change is a document about the past. The fix is process, not more pages.

Four people can maintain a system that serves forty, provided they are ruthless about what it refuses to do.

The feed keeps you longer and leaves you with less. We looked at what readers could recall afterwards.

You cannot ask a portfolio why it made those choices. You can ask the person, and the answer is the whole interview.

It began as an index, became an advertisement, and is quietly becoming an index again.

The first visit is a trailer. Almost every design decision worth arguing about belongs to the second one.

The inbox rediscovered the archive, the permalink and the RSS feed, in that order, over about four years.

A generation that never wrote a table layout is writing one on purpose, and the results are better than they have any right to be.

No investors, no launch plan, and a domain bought at two in the morning. Here is the first year in numbers.