InDesigner: Rob Schultz

Rob Schultz has been a publication designer since college. Now the Art Director at Macworld magazine, he also has stints at Computer Gaming World, PC/Computing, and T3 magazines under his belt.

How would you describe your style?

I love type and composition. The tone and feeling of just about any story can be evoked through the use of type and different type treatments.

It’s my job to draw a person into a story, and I try to do that with bold, interesting type treatments. A strong type treatment should be able to stand on its own if necessary—it shouldn’t need art or photography to prop it up. The art and type design should complement each other.

When I compose a headline treatment, I look at it as a combination of shapes—similar to how someone might compose an abstract painting. It comes down to how all of the different pieces work together. I find inspiration on the web, television, other magazines, even the composition of a certain photograph or piece of art.

How many designers work at Macworld?

There’s one designer in addition to myself. My job is just as much design as it is art direction.

Describe a typical Macworld feature article design process.

The designers and editors get together to discuss the article. First, the editors summarize and describe the general tone of the article and supply the art department with thumbnails so we have a good understanding of the basic elements required for the story. We then collaboratively brainstorm general illustration or photography concepts before deciding on a final.

Next, we assign the illustration or photography to an artist we feel best fits what’s needed. We then work on a general layout, review it with editors, and proceed with a final design.

Why did Macworld switch to InDesign?

Macworld had used Quark for years, and it felt like Quark had stopped evolving. The company hit a wall and possibly got too comfortable with their product.

We have such a small staff that we felt that using an InDesign and InCopy workflow would make us much more efficient. We needed a layout program that would let editors make live edits during production as opposed to making edits on paper, which a copy editor would then have to input. InCopy gave us that ability.

Now we can get a lot more done in the same amount of time for a variety of reasons—from nested styles to an editor and designer being able to work on a layout at the same time.

InDesign feels much more intuitive. It has a ton of features that I had always wished Quark had. There’s so much more I can do in InDesign now rather than doing various tasks in Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.