At the L.A. Review of Books Sarah Boxer interviews Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker and the editorial director of Toon Books:
At RAW, I felt I was the advocate for white space. There’s a certain kind of comic esthetic that is chock full, you know, very Mad magazine, with a million different details. Art is more tolerant of this. I can be brought to tears by a few simple lines. There are so many things where we complement each other very well.
To me design and printing are important. For Art these are a means to an end. When I met him, and he was doing production for [his first book] Breakdowns, he was thinking about printing because the cover was about the printing process. For him, this was something he had to master to sell his ideas. I’m a much more limited thinker. I’m not an abstract person. I can only find things when I’m touching them and making them. I’m eager to do paste-up, mechanical, production. I love to learn new programs, techniques to art, I like things that stand in the way… Art makes things because that’s something he has to do in order to express his ideas. I don’t have ideas outside of making things. I can’t do what he does, expounding on the theory of this and that. I’m like, “Can I just show you, and not have to tell?”
I know I’ve been posting a lot of links to interviews with Mouly recently, but I think it’s really interesting that an art director — someone deliberately behind the scenes — is talking so much about her work and her approach to magazines right now.
(Pictured above: the cover of the most recent New Yorker by Frank Viva)