Last updated: Wed Nov 19 17:35:34 CST 2003

Call for a Visionary Art Director

I feel very strongly that the PLAYBOY of today cries out for a visionary Art Director. Blah blah blah. Where is today's Arthur Paul?

A visionary Art Director can help with many issues now afflicting PLAYBOY:

Where appearance is concerned, the magazine is a mishmashed hodgepodge of old ("tired") features and layouts with some new techniques slapped on for a sense of update. The Art Director should be charged with visualizing and driving a unified design for the book. He should have the talent, drive, and vision to play a key role in inventing a design concept for PLAYBOY; that concept will then be PLAYBOY's strength.
PLAYBOY's covers have become mundane and formulaic, and there is little to distinguish them from other titles on the newsstand. This is a great lost opportunity. The Art Director should take charge of revitalizing the cover. He should have an understanding of what PLAYBOY should be about visually. I want the covers to recapture some of the fun and elegance of the old days, and I believe that this goal is not incompatible with producing covers which drive newsstand sales. The Art Director should work to remove the clutter and ugliness from the current covers, and to put a strong visual identity for PLAYBOY in place.
The visionary Art Director could help PLAYBOY rethink how it presents celebrities. PLAYBOY is fighting an uphill battle to get celebrities to pose, and the ones they do get often come with all sorts of requirements and restrictions. A visionary Art Director could be a strong player in conceiving and promoting a new role for the celebrity. Why not try other approaches than cover/pictorial (it has become a very rigid presentation in many ways, I think), or invent new features or new types of layouts? If the Art Director can come up with a great visual concept, he can sell the concept to the celebrity -- now, instead of "posing for a PLAYBOY pictorial" and all the restrictive ideas that entails, she could be helping to realize a specific concept. That could be both easier to sell to potential picture subjects, and an exciting new concept to attract readers.

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