SPY
Stephen DoyleI am not a maniac about knowing who cut
what face or if it’s true to the original
drawing,” said Stephen Doyle (b. 1956 ), the
cofounder of Drenttel Doyle Partners in New
York, who in 1986 also designed the format of
the original SPYmagazine and supervised its
first four issues. “I am a maniac about
legibility and whether something is interesting
enough to be set into type in the first place.
With all the expense involved in typesetting
one better be damn sure that a manuscript is
worthwhile.” Doyle described himself as a
“translator” who believes in the power of
typography to induce readers to read.
This may seem disingenuous coming
from the designer who has promoted
typographic anarchy in SPY, the New
York–based satiric journal of culture and politics that defined the 1980 s
while it pilloried its leading players. But if Doyle encouraged the use of
four-point text type and bled copy blocks off the page, it was consistent
with a faithfulness to content. When articles in SPYwere composed in
multiple text faces of varying weights—some on excruciatingly tight
column widths—Doyle was simply responding to the demands of the
magazine. “SPYhad many different voices,” Doyle explained, “so we kept
flipping type styles to reflect that. The editors liked sidebars so we used
them everywhere and even gave the sidebars their own sidebars. We let the
type be the messenger for the manuscript. So the type misbehaved because
the manuscripts misbehaved. It was as though we let the writers design the
magazine.”
Doyle’s design respected the content and rejected decoration for its
own sake. In SPYevery visual element had a purpose. “SPYwas like a
magazine in therapy,” Doyle continued. “It was so much about the process
of making magazines that we let it all show.”SPY’s frenetic pace was a
reflection of media-blitzed America, but Doyle based its visual persona on a
variety of personal precepts, too. “I have a theory,” he said, explaining why
much of the type is set small enough to require a microscope. “People will124