Editors: How to do modern design—old-school

An “ancient” design guru and practicing pro share what’s right and wrong with corporate publication design

“It’s all just slopped together these days,” a communication veteran remarked desultorily recently. “Everybody’s a designer and everybody’s a photographer.”

It’s no use lamenting the days when every corporate communication department had a crack designer and a photographer on staff.

But the principles and ideals that designers and photographers developed and perfected in those days may be useful to today’s editors who are juggling a pencil, a digital camera and a proportion wheel. (Aw, you don’t know what a proportion wheel is, do you?)

Ragan.com interviewed design guru Jan White to get his take on what’s going right and what’s going wrong in modern corporate publication design. And we asked White—as well as top-notch contemporary designer Dwayne Flinchum—what’s a corporate editor to do?

Graphic design: The tool that’s underused