Art directing an automotive magazine

It's interesting how I got the job as art director on an automotive magazine.



While working at Al Hutt Studios as an illustrator I was also taking a course on printmaking at the Society of Arts and Crafts, doing lithographs as well as woodcuts.



My fine art was being exhibited at the Arwin Gallery in Detroit. The pieces above are woodcuts and the one below is a lithograph print which was first drawn on a flat limestone block, then printed.



My work caught the attention of the Detroit Free Press art critic, Morley Driver, she was enthusiastic about my prints and gave me a nice review in the newspaper. We saw each other at art openings and became friends. Later I even started doing a lot of art for the Free Press Sunday Magazine, I'll show some of that work in a future post.
Morley also had been recently appointed as the Editorial Director of Ward's Quarterly, a new automotive business magazine that was just at the beginning stages of development. She recommended that Robert Powers, the Editor and Publisher, hire me as the art director. It was a quarterly magazine and I felt that I could easily handle the job in spite of my busy schedule. It would also give me a great outlet to display my design and illustration work, so I accepted the offer.



The first issue of Ward's Quarterly, my goal was to create a high class image for the magazine by using strong contemporary graphic designs on the covers. The magazine was a big hit and it generated a lot of attention from the automotive industry.



The second issue was also received very well. It was an impressive magazine that was published in both hard and soft cover versions.



Here I am working on the above cover. It was created by by using a paper punch on colored papers and then gluing each dot on illustration board, a rather tedious job. If only I had a computer at that time !



Issue number three, I believe that I did a painting for this particular cover. My next post will feature some of the interior illustrations that were done for the magazine. We had a limited budget, so I ended up doing most of the necessary artwork. A few of my artist friends also pitched in gratis which was a big help. They felt that agency art directors seeing their work in print would be great publicity for them. They were right as everyone in the automotive field was reading the new magazine.