Karl Gude

There was a bloody leg stump and a gross severed hand behind Lynn as we talked. They were distracting, but they served as a vaguely appropriate backdrop to our discussion. I had met Lynn Staley a few months before at the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona during the closing night banquet of the 1995 Society for News Design conference. Dinner was held inside the bullring and I couldn’t help scanning the sand for blood. Of course there wasn’t any. But living in South America as a kid I had seen about a dozen bullfights and after each one I noticed how red the sand was in places, usually with the bulls blood, but once with a bullfighter’s. I had been standing with the crowd yelling “Ole!” with each charge at the cape when suddenly the matador (“killer”) was thrown into the air like a rag doll. It looked pretty inelegant, for a guy with such good posture.

On the flight home from Spain I saw a side to Lynn that I liked, one that I would see again and again over the next decade. She called me to her seat where she was sitting next to a young newlywed couple who were staring, confused, at a handful of Spanish money she was holding in front of them. Lynn asked, “Karl, could you please tell them that I want them to take my extra pesetas and buy themselves a beer to celebrate their marriage.” Once they understood, they lit up with huge smiles, but no larger than Lynn’s.

The grisly, plastic appendages in her office were leave-behinds from a previous tenant, and they were in stark contrast to Lynn’s easy manner. But talking with her as they circled around in my field of vision somehow fit right in with having met her in a place of slaughter. I felt as nervous in this interview as I would have been facing a charging bull.

Lynn was considering me for the number two spot in the information graphics department at Newsweek and working for her would be one of my toughest challenges to date. The bar there was very high, and she would expect nothing short of phenomenal work. Despite my years of experience in news graphics, I found I had a small, but annoying sense of doubt tingling in my stomach.

Lynn Staley

For years Lynn had been the AME for Design at the Boston Globe where she had done some ‘phenomenal’ work and was often the one to beat at SND design competitions. During slide shows of the winners her page designs would flash on screen, usually accompanied by the words, “Gold,…Gold,…” and “Best in Show.” It was no wonder that Newsweek had come begging. Now, she oversaw their photo, design, cover and graphics operations; basically, she ruled all the visuals in the land.

By coincidence, I had also met Bonnie Scranton, Newsweek’s Director of Information Graphics —who had studied with Edward Tufte at Yale— in Spain the same year as Lynn, but on a different trip. At the time I had been working for the Associated Press graphics service and been asked to judge the Malofiej graphics competition in Pamplona. Bonnie’s work stood out and she happened to be there, so we met. During her reign at the helm of Newsweek Graphics Bonnie and her staff won a lot of awards, the coolest one being the gold medal for best color portfolio worldwide (I’m proud to have been a part of that team).

We became friends. On the way home to the U.S. a bunch of us from the conference were sitting happily at a café in the Madrid airport gabbing away and like a dope I wound up missing my flight. When I realized how late it had gotten I blew away from that table with about as much elegance as a bullfighter being thrown into the air, but my plane had already left the gate and I got quite a ribbing about it from the others.

So, Bonnie and I wound on the same flight sitting several rows apart next to strangers. I thought it would pass the time better if I could hang out with her so I went over and told the man next to her that “my wife here” (gesturing toward a surprised Bonnie) and I had been separated and asked if he would mind switching seats with me. Graciously, he did and Bonnie and I chatted easliy during much of the seven-hour flight home. After we landed at Kennedy and were taxiing to the gate an elderly couple turned around in the seats in front of us and, displaying wide grins, said, “You two are such a lovely couple.”

The lovely couple!

A short while later Bonnie asked me if I would consider a job at Newsweek, and I almost said “no.” I was very happy at the Associated Press where I had been doing the coolest job in the business after a long stint as Graphics Director: I got to sit in a corner and do graphics on whatever I wanted. But I also fretted about taking the job because most of what I knew about typography, layout and design I had picked up on my own through trial and error and by looking at other people’s work. I also had a couple of good friends show me a few things (Joe Scopin and Don DeMaio). At Newsweek, I worried that it would be “Karl Judgement Day” and I would be called up before some fearsome design God holding court high in the clouds, about where that Newsweek bar was.

Lynn and Bonnie design like they’re cooking an incredible dish, with every ingredient thoughtfully chosen for a specific, delicious, sensory experience. When art directing someone else’s bland graphic they thoughtfully dig around in their rich, spice rack brains, single out the exact right flavor and BAM, it’s a taste sensation! I’d find myself walking back to my desk wondering, “Damn, why couldn’t I cook up something like that?”

I’ve always identified myself more as an artist than a designer. Drawing comes fairly easy to me and is handy for doing information graphics because so much of the content is illustrated in a narrative form, like comics.

My latest

But information graphics also require powerful graphic design skills because the content is generally so complex that it needs a rational mind to give it order. In my experience, artists do not always have highly disciplined, rational minds. Balancing the design and drawing sides caged together in my brain can create an internal dogfight because one side likes to dominate the other.

Here’s how I see designers vs. artists:

One is finicky and the other reckless.
One plans, the other’s spontaneous.
One’s snooty, the other just wants love.
One’s cool, the other geeky.
One’s respected, the other, well, misunderstood.
One’s grown up, the other childish.
One’s Paul Rand, the other Paul Conrad.
One loves features, the other breaking news.
One’s organized, the other fosters chaos.
One loves wine, the other beer.
One’s Quark (InDesign), the other Illustrator (Lightwave/Maya)
One’s Manolo, the other Nike.
One’s Garfield, the other Odie…

A meal cooked in my messy brain kitchen is tossed together using whatever is within reach, and in microwave time.

So imagine a great short order cook who can have 30 meals going at once getting a job at an elite French restaurant where each meal is crafted for a single person. That’s how I felt going from AP Graphics to Newsweek.

My first few years there were pretty humbling. Bonnie designed wonderful things and made it look easy. I wanted so badly to be able to do that, and worked hard to learn. Many of the graphics I showed her that I was working on would be justifiably skewered with her red banderilla pen. The good news was that Bonnie hammered my stuff into such good shape that it would usually sail past Lynn, who was the final frontier before getting into the magazine. Both of them had The Bionic Eye, an ability to spot design violations immediately, like 9 ½ point type where there should be 9 point, or worse, a breakdown in the logic behind your entire design. It was scary how well they both did this. If there was a tiny corner of my graphic that was its Achilles heel, its open wound, they would, to my astonishment, spot it every time. Even more amazing, they generally knew the exact right treatment to heal it.

I always took a deep breath before walking into their offices after giving my graphic one last glance in an often futile attempt to anticipate any horrors they might expose in it. Until I went to Newsweek I had never even heard of a ligature, but they’d all be circled when I’d leave Bonnie’s office. The devil is in the spices, I was learning.

“But the drawing’s nice, Karl.” (That which does not kill us…)

So, why would they hire a meat-n’-potatoes guy?

They were looking for someone with hard news experience who knew their way around a newsroom. Maynard Parker, the editor, wanted more graphics in the magazine and I knew, for the most part, what to do when it was time to “scramble the jets,” as he used to say, when news was breaking. I could pull together information and produce graphics in a hurricane, if I had to. He needed me to be Ambassador Gude, a person who would go forth and sell graphics to the various section editors in their own lairs instead of waiting for them to come to me. This meant getting to know them, anticipating their needs and, through some miracle, getting them to respect what you had to say, a tough job for an artist in a news environment. At previous jobs I had always believed it to be my responsibility to advocate for information graphics and to see that a story that needed one got one. And I wasn’t known for being bashful.

Instead of:
Editor: “I need a map, two columns wide, with a big arrow and … let’s see… give me one of those charts there, too.”
Artist: “Would you like fries with that, madam?”

I preferred:
Editor: “Karl! HELP! What the hell are we going to do??? OMIGOD!”
Me: “Relax, oh helpless and needy sir, I shall take care of this. Up, UP and AWAY!!”

Three years after I was hired Bonnie decided, after a seven year run as Newsweek’s graphics director, to step down so that she could concentrate on her own work without the distraction of art directing others.

News flash: I was offered her job.

But, I felt ready. And more importantly, Lynn Staley and the new editor, Mark Whitaker (Maynard had died suddenly from an illness), believed I was, too. I knew my ligatures rock solid (though I wound up ignoring them once I took over!).

Working with Bonnie and Lynn so closely for so long under such deadline pressure had made me a better and more confident designer and the shameful red pen marks that were initially scribbled all over my graphics had become fewer and fewer, so that by the time Bonnie stepped down there were almost none. Working with her day-after-day was like attending classes at Yale. I felt like Popeye who had just eaten a big can of spinach.

Bonnie and I traded workspaces quickly. As I set my nameplate outside her/my office door I knew that I would earn every shred of pleasure I got from my new, dazzling view of Central Park.

I looked down the hall past my shiny nameplate and saw a sour faced foreign editor storming past Lynn’s office right toward mine.

Kind of like a charging bull.

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65 more U.S. soldiers have died since the Halloween graphic below.