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Tag: raw

Published April 16, 2015

Françoise Mouly on Voice

francoise-mouly-photo-sarah-shatz.

Grace Bello interviews the always interesting Françoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker and founder of Toon Books, for Guernica:

I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books—whether they be books of comics or books of literature—is a window into somebody’s mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it’s so specific. It’s a new way to look at the world. It’s as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary’s skin, you do get a sense of what it’s like to be that person. It’s a kind of empathic response when you’re reading it.

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Published November 23, 2013

Françoise Mouly: “Can I just show you, and not have to tell?”

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)

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