InDesigner: Paul Martinez

When Paul Martinez joined Marie Claire as creative director in early 2004, the Hearst magazine’s art staff had already produced several issues of the fashion monthly with Adobe InDesign. Thrown into a new software environment, Martinez fit right in. “Within five hours, I had it,” he says of his learning curve with InDesign. “And then the fun part came.” Playing with the new software invigorated Martinez, an energy that runs through the pages of Marie Claire. “I had gotten bored with QuarkXPress. InDesign’s features got me really charged up again,” he says.

Martinez, who most recently worked with magazine legend Fred Woodward at GQ, says that his design goal for Marie Claire is “graphic elegance.”

“Fashion magazines have a lot of images and a lot of type crammed into one issue. It’s a challenge to get people to stop and read,” Martinez says. “So I knew I wanted strong typography, type that’s big, bold, and prominent. Most women’s magazines don’t have that. I want to balance fashion elegance with graphic type treatments.”

Martinez says InDesign’s tools are instrumental in achieving the bold and graphic type that has become a signature of Marie Claire. “I love the push and pull of playing with type in InDesign—text wrap, type on a curve, converting text to outlines,” he says.

As a result he stumbles onto unique treatments—for example, the display type that accompanies a fashion spread on fur. “I stroked a serif font with a diagonal line—just pushing it to the limit to see what would happen—and the type got this nice furry texture that worked well with the spread.”

Fur Feature (November 2004)

Martinez says he showed the result to a fellow designer who

was amazed to learn he’d done it in InDesign.

“I didn’t even do this stuff in Illustrator,” Martinez says. “I actually am more comfortable in Illustrator now as a result of using InDesign.”

With 10 to 12 features per issue, Martinez says that his design team needs to work fast. “Being able to do drop shadows and clipping paths without going to another program has made it much easier and quicker to design the magazine.“

For image-intense spreads like the fall fashion runway reports, the ability to place native Photoshop files also speeds up the process, Martinez says. “These files can get pretty big, and with QuarkXPress I was always moving large images back and forth between it and Photoshop. It really slowed down the process. Staying within one program makes a big difference.”

Now with nearly a year under his belt of designing Marie Claire with InDesign, Martinez looks forward to more experimentation. “With InDesign it’s all about what the software can do for me not if it I’m limited by it.”

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Personal Health Feature (January 2005)

Mischa Barton Feature (January 2005)

Charitable-Giving Feature (November 2004)

Shopping Section Opener (January 2005)

Shopping Section Opener (October 2004)