Editors’ Letter + Table of Contents

Perrin Drumm (founder + director): 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.

Meg Miller (senior editor): 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.

Liz Stinson (managing editor): That idea extends to our digital lives, where unseen lines of code power the way we experience the world, be it through communication tools, surveillance efforts, or the software we use to create beautiful designs. In this issue we peel back the layers, and look at code and data as creative media.

Emily Gosling (senior editor): And we wanted to hear from the unsung heroes of the industry—the ones who quietly keep it ticking over, but don’t find their names on flashy decks, portfolios, or conference schedules. We find out what they get up to, giving credit where credit’s due.

Maddy Morley (associate editor): But sometimes, we also realized, it’s better not to be seen at all. In a time of pervasive governmental and corporate spying, it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain our privacy, and remain unseen. So we’re celebrating the designers finding innovative solutions for keeping our data securely hidden.

Tala Safie (art director): So here it is: In your hands you hold the polished results of months of editorial and design planning—from tentative flat plans to proofread mockups to an end design rendered brilliantly by our guest designer, Maziyar Pahlevan.