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‘[Spy] was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all.’ –Dave Eggers

SPY Magazine. The New York monthly. The most influential magazine of its time. The Rosetta Stone of modern periodical publishing. Really.

SPY took celebrities and the super rich to task for being, well, celebrities and super rich. Donald Trump was a frequent target. And the best part: SPY was caustically funny and incredibly smart in the way it did what it did.

crafting spy’s ‘look’
The design itself is a work of art – from the drop caps in the letters column to the details in their Naked City section (above).

A strong house style filled pages – set forth by Stephen Doyle and innovated by SPY’s first art directors Alexander Isley (1987-88) and B.W. Honeycutt (1988-91).

From the tall, thin modern SPY masthead and typography to clip art icons, rebus-like floating celebrity heads and their use of Dwiggin’s newsy Metro typeface – the complexity of each issue was tempered by some great visual organizational skills.

Each SPY was loaded with content – TONS of text – it took some doing just to read each issue.

At the time SPY really hit, I was working for a newspaper. And I remember having the longest conversation about SPY’s design and content with a co-worker. We couldn’t figure out how they manage to pull it off. The detail, the text wraps, the photo licensing. At the time, digital production software not quite yet the standard, SPY was insane for the visual games they were playing.

relive spy
And as of this week, Google is hosting scanned copies of SPY. Half are live, the rest are on the way. Go here.

more spy: the book
SPY: The Funny Years was published in 2006. Written by George Kalogerakis, edited by founding editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen – designed by Alexander Isley Inc. – this hardcover history goes behind the scenes, finally explains how it was done.

How a little operation went out, fucked with the status quo, never got sued for it (tho there is a footnote on this), invented internet journalism and a bunch of other things. Snag your copy here. Dang cheap!

Pictured up top, now former California governor in his early days from SPY’s March 1992 ‘Power Bimbos’ article on celebrity nudity (which, of course, predates the advent of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian)

And at bottom, my SPY stash in its very own genuine unbleached, corrugated fiberboard box with strategically-placed, handdrawn customized lettering

tags: cool finds, design, design history, publication design, thoughts // 4 comments  . . .