MAGAZINE FACELIFTS AND RANKINGS
We’re giving the print magazine a facelift. Plus the creatives who have topped our Rankings.
Stabilo Boss "Capture it" by Made, Mexico City, photographed by Ale Burset. Featured in Vol. 1/2014
2014 marks the magazine’s 30th anniversary and as part of this, we’re going to attempt something we haven’t done in quite a while: a little “face-lift” for our print publication.
Part of this will involve a new typeface which we haven’t changed in 15 years. When Archive was originally founded we used to work with a custom-made version of Gill Sans, then around 1999, on the initiative of our fondly remembered graphic designer Pit Hofmann (he has his own very successful design agency, Knallrot, in Frankfurt am Main today) we changed to Meta Pro.
As it looks at present, from Vol. 3/2014 on we’ll probably be using Franklin Gothic. (Interestingly, the older we become the older the typeface we go for.) But this is of course only one of the ways of making the magazine more readable to a new generation and of cleaning up the overall layout of the pages.
The basic motto behind all of this of course remains the same: We want to present the selected work in the best possible way. Any changes in layout and typeface should not be about us as a magazine but about the work we choose to feature.
As part of this “soft re-launch” we’ll also be paying more attention of a page that could easily be overlooked in the past – yet which an enormous share of our readers – namely those whose work has been published in the mag – may be turning to right after checking the Contents to see if their campaign has made it into a current issue.
I’m talking about the page showcasing our Ranking, which we’ve had ever since we made our first steps on the web as far back as 1999.
Basically, the Ranking shows the number of times an agency, a creative, client,production house, etc. have been featured in the pages of the magazine over the years. For each of their campaigns that get into the mag they get one point and, accordingly, rise in our Ranking.
On our website you can find Rankings for the current year, last year, as well as the past three, five, and ten years. And of course an Overall Ranking which, by the end of 2014, will be spanning 30 years.
As you can imagine, the top positions in each of these rankings are hotly contested. It is quite regularly that we get questions along the lines of “Why is X also in second place with me, when I had one more campaign featured in the magazine?”
Or even requests – some of them years if not decades after the publication of an issue – by creatives who claim that the creative secretary in charge of submitting work to Archive at the time had simply left their names off the credits lists of a certain campaign featured in the magazine at some point and could we please add their names and thus improve their status in the Ranking?
Some interesting facts that can be gleaned from this page: if you look at the Photographers Ranking, South-African-born and UK-based Nadav Kander dominates the overall ranking with a total of 114 campaigns published in the magazine. The very first campaign shot by him was for Qantas and appeared in Vol. 5/1986.
Kander also tops the 10-year Ranking with 54 and the 5-year with a total of 27 campaigns showcased.His seemingly iron grip on the pole position only ends when we look at the 3-year Ranking where Argentinian Ale Burset takes over the number one spot with a total of 25 campaigns (compared to Kander’s 16). Burset defended his top position with 18 campaigns published in the 2013 issues and is so far, after one issue published, also the current number one.
While agency, art director, copywriter, production company and director were always part of this, we have over the years added positions (and icons) to reflect changes in the business, i.e. Digital Artist which we only added in 2009, or Creative Director (the latter only for the past two years because Walter Lürzer, who for several years held this position at various agencies himself, had insisted that “these people don’t do any ‘real’ creative work.”)
As a result we didn’t even have an icon for Creative Director. Since then the 3-year Ranking is topped by Jeremy Craigen of Adam&EveDDB London (24 campaigns), followed by Olivier Altman (20) of Publicis Conseil, Paris and Karpat Polat of DDB&Co, Istanbul in third with 18 campaigns.
Home Base "After Shocks" by Hill Holliday, Boston, photographed by Nadav Kander. Featured in Vol. 5/2013
Guinness "Made of More" by AMV BBDO, London, photographed by Nadav Kander. Featured in Vol. 6/2012
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