FOUNDER AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Perrin: Heya, it’s issue #01, and we’re making a big splash by going Invisible. So savvy, right? At least if no one notices us on the newsstand, we can say we planned it that way. Your beloved editors will talk more about why, out of all our brilliant ideas for a theme, we went with this one. But more importantly, why’d we go with a magazine at all when we can publish to our hearts’ content online (going long and strong at eyeondesign.aiga.org since 2014)? As the oldest and largest association for design, AIGA has a long history of print. But in the 1990s we sort of stopped the presses when funding for Steve Heller’s AIGA Journal dried up. Now the Eye on Design team has blundered its way into enough of a budget to publish a new kind of design magazine for a new era of design reader. Created as a companion to the daily stories we publish online, this tri-annual magazine format gives us the breathing room to dive deep into one specific theme, covered in a wide range of ways.
SENIOR EDITOR
Meg: Scattered as we are across countries and time zones, the first chance we got to talk face to face about this magazine was after slipping away from the 2017 AIGA Design Conference in October. Initially we wondered if Invisible was counter-intuitive for a magazine about design, a profession that makes systems, entities, and messages visible. But the more we discussed it, the more it revealed itself to be a perfect framework for thinking about some of the industry’s most important issues today—those of representation, identity, attribution, and security.
