Barbara de wilde biography channel

I worked only for about a year at Hearst then I went back to Knopf. And I went back to Knopf and I thought, what do I really want to do? And those are hard questions that you ask yourself, what do you really want to do? Some of us are very good at helping others. Barbara deWilde: So much easier! And I had a wonderful weekend back at my alma mater Penn State.

And I thought, Oh, I know what I want to do. I want to be a teacher. The main attribute that a college wanted was expertise in interactive design. I needed to stop. I needed to go back to school. And I applied and I got in. And I spent the next two years in learning mode just dropping my expertise and starting over. I graduated. Um, I got a job.

I was 51 years old. George Gendron: In a class where the average age was, what would you guess? Barbara deWilde: Oh, George Gendron: Did that make you feel young or did it make you feel ancient or both? Barbara deWilde: Everything! It made me feel weird. It made me feel old. It made me feel terrified. But when I think about that class of peers, there were about 15 of us.

And there were students who came from China. They came from Denmark. They were all from different countries coming and studying with English as their second language.

Barbara de wilde biography channel

And here I am worried about my age. These folks were brave. So I realized I really had to get over myself and just put my massive ego aside and just get down to work. It was a great place to go because I loved the Times as a media company. And they had a really robust digital product group led by Ian Adelman. And I was going to be in a different part.

I was going to be in a new products group. And I stayed in that new products group for eight years. I worked on projects like NYT Cooking , which is an app and a cooking database. And an opinion product and I worked on newsletters. I worked on a couple different, big endeavors. I left in and opened a bookstore. And of course in between going back to school.

But you were part of a group of three other people beside yourself that were—you were it. And at least from my perspective, this was the golden age of book cover design. Barbara deWilde: Yeah. George Gendron: And I guess my first question is what was going on in the world at large where suddenly book covers became and still are just these unbelievably attractive artifacts.

I paid decent money for them. I never read them, and I will never read them, but I bought them for the book cover. Barbara deWilde: There are many great ages of book cover design. And before this Knopf group, the four of us, there was a group of women, Louise Fili , Judy Lesser, Carin Goldberg , Lorraine Louie , that were creating incredibly beautiful postmodern designs.

And they were objects in and of themselves. I think that there was a good foundation that had started to happen. And then, a few other things happened in addition. One, there was a new editor in chief at Knopf, where I was working. Sonny Mehta came from the UK. He had a background in paperback publishing. He was a great enthusiast for design.

He wanted to come to this imprint, Knopf, and really expand the list. So publish more books and publish them in a way that really celebrates an individual design approach. So he was a champion. And you need a champion. We were all new. Carol Carson had recently been hired. Chip had recently been hired. Sonny was the new leader of this group.

Those stores were so large, they were able to put books face out, prominently displayed, and they were building those stores pretty rapidly. In Manhattan, in the suburbs. It used to be that we would go and feel like a million dollars if our covers were face out on a table at Rizzoli. Now, there was so much space. So I think there are a lot of factors.

Then you get the four of us together and we just felt inspired by each other. George Gendron: I remember riding the subway or being on a plane and becoming conscious of the fact that book covers were also becoming fashion statements. People would hold them up as they were coming down the aisle. Now, people have their Zoom backgrounds that tell a story about their reading life and their cultural life.

It is competitive. You want someone to be holding your book cover. You want someone to be holding the book that you worked on. And I mean that for the authors but the designers too. It was also an exciting time within publishing where there were a whole new generation of writers. George Gendron: Two of your book covers come to mind immediately that are iconic, in a lot of different ways, including illustrating what you just said.

This is from the Goon Squad. So you decide at a certain point, you make the move—this is going to be a broad generalization—from the book world, where every single book you had a contract for that book cover. Talk about the project economy! You go from that to a magazine, which is completely different, a completely different process.

At one point you said to me, and maybe this is an overstatement, like, I had no idea what I was doing. Barbara deWilde: I had never designed a magazine before. George Gendron: How did you get hired there then? This inflection point where they had gone public and there was going to be explosive growth. Their business model was fascinating, magazine design was one aspect of it, but they were also producing product for K-mart.

They were producing product of their own for their own catalog. They were doing television. So they wanted to grow across multiple axes and they needed more voices. George Gendron: And there you were. Barbara deWilde: And there I was. George Gendron: What was the learning curve like going from book project to magazine flow? Barbara deWilde: They were so large and they were such a well oiled machine that they had their systems in place.

So for me, I think the biggest difference was when I would start on a book jacket project, I started with a manuscript. I would read the manuscript and then I would pitch a few directions for designs for the cover. But it was all based on that manuscript and that author. With magazine design though, especially at Martha Stewart , all the stories were homegrown.

So you worked in a team with a content editor and a photographer and stylist and art director and writer and you all came together and created the story. You became the sort of the content source in this team format. So the thing that you learn by working at a place like Martha Stewart is how to think editorially. We would often have the story sketched out, the photographs would be taken, and then the text was flowed in after the fact.

Someone once asked me ages ago when I was talking to a journalism class up here at Boston University what was it like when you, a young kid, became a very junior arts and entertainment editor at New York magazine, a weekly. You have no choice and you adapt really quickly. Barbara deWilde: Exactly. They were a remarkable institution of design.

Barbara deWilde: Oh, Martha's funny. We had this project that we were doing which was a special Halloween issue and I had done a story on makeup and she was going to become this spider woman witch. And she came with these magnificent three inch fingernails and her manicurist. I want to contribute to the cultural life of the town I love.

A bookstore could be that addition, a bit of icing on the cake of civilization. If so, why? Nah, I design every day … still. There is so much on the list to do. What are your plans for the store? Will you have a community focus? This is truly a family business, and my husband, Scott, will be running most of the events. We have a very flexible space with a small tea shop in the back.

We are making the space available for them to run workshops and programs. Scott has experience in music presenting and he will be scheduling small concerts. Our town has a new arts center, The Artyard, with whom we are in conversation. Helen, my daughter, and I are planning artisan craft workshops. Should I be? I have a great deal of curiosity about different professional experiences.

I loved working at Knopf, but I was so curious about the magazine art direction at Martha Stewart Living. I was fascinated by the development of typefaces and wanted to commission them. I wanted to know what it was like to teach design. I wanted to know about designing for digital experiences. I guess this is in my nature. I'm not an illustrator, but I like to design visual commentary occasionally.

Filed under user experience. Design for Book Publishing. Filed under publishing , graphic design. Martha Stewart Living. Martha Stewart Living , an editorial and brand leader, initiated a major redesign in The public-facing goals: 1. The internal, production-related goals: 1. Filed under editorial design. Everyman's Library. Knopf in the US.

The new library featured cloth bindings, acid-free paper, silk ribbon-markers, and new introductions and chronologies by leading scholars and writers.