(The cover that was…)

On December 15th, it was announced that I.D, the reputable style and design magazine was coming to an end; ceasing publication after 55 years in print. A critical source of the design world, I.D’s last issue was their January/February cover; literary pages documenting 40 current design projects striving for social impact.

A few months ago, I got in touch with Jesse Ashlock, the superb and exceptionally talented and witty editor in chief of I.D. His style is smart and full of substance, and at the helm of one of the worlds most innovative design magazines, I wanted to find out more about the voice and vision behind the magazine and who exactly Mr. Ashlock is.

This interview takes place in the weeks leading up to the demise of I.D. It’s one of my favorites…and you will see why.

Plus - take a peek at the “ghost cover” - a prototype of the last issue that never made it to print…

As the Editor in Chief of ID Magazine, essentially, what occupies your day on a daily basis? Take us through a typical day in your professional life.

Usually two or three meetings—both internal and external, on-site and off-site—a boatload of email, lots of niggly administrative stuff, and, if I’m lucky, some actual work. Of course, the “day” is no longer limited to the 10 or so hours you spend in the office—you carry it around in your pocket with you wherever you go, and when you get home, you open up your laptop and stare at it some more. Sometimes you dream about it.

(January Cover)

After contributing to ID for many years, in May 2009, you transformed to Editor in Chief. What was your initial thought before taking on this new role?

Do I really want to keep trying to rise in print media, and if so, is this position a good next step for me? After talking to an awful lot of people, I decided the answer to both questions was yes.

Prior to your current role - you served as a an editor at V Man where you helped increase their online digital presence. How important do you feel the digitial sphere is in the realm of printed editorial?

It’s essential, and only becomes more so with each passing day. Look at it this way: Even if you publish a print magazine that will always have a strong case for remaining a print magazine rather than becoming just another website—which I feel is the case with any decent design, fashion, or art magazine, and lots of others—your website is the barometer by which people who don’t know your magazine will judge you. I don’t think there can be any such thing as just a print magazine anymore—there are editorial ecosystems, which may include a print publication as a flagship product, but must include a dynamic website in order to be viable.

I beg of you, please do not look at the current incarnation of the I.D. website.

(VMan Summer 2009 Issue)

As the “international Design Magazine - what is your main mission you seek to achieve with each issue?

To be international, and to be about design. That can mean an awful lot of different things, and I’m figuring out what it means to me as I go. To put it in a single-sentence elevator pitch, I think that every issue of I.D. should be about how good ideas manifested in our contemporary material culture and built environment can change people’s lives around the world for the better.

What skills do you bring to the table that you think helps enhance the vision of ID?

I’m critical. I’m a relative outsider to the design community. I think about publishing a magazine as a business enterprise as much as a creative one. I’m an editor who likes and respects his writers. I’m an editor who likes and respects his art department. I’m an editor who likes and respects his publisher.

(Nov/Dec Cover)

Tell us about your involvement with the Tribeca Film Festival. What were you involved with at the TFF?

I used to be an editor at RES, a terrific magazine that covered emerging digital culture—independent narrative and documentary filmmaking, music video, motion graphics and broadcast design, graphic design and illustration, new media and technology, music—that had an equally terrific sibling, a 40-city international film festival called RESFEST. In 2006, just shy of RES’s tenth anniversary, our parent company pulled the plug. A small group of my colleagues and I, along with a few new people, received backing from the Tribeca Enterprises, which operates the Tribeca Film Festival along with a number of other interesting Tribeca-branded ventures, to start a new progressive-culture arm of their business. Which we did, launching a daily web destination and putting together events in New York and Los Angeles. Before we got too far, however, Tribeca decided to go in a different direction and parted company with our group, except for me. Me they asked to help turn their site into a year-round editorial destination, rather than just a place to buy festival tickets. Which I agreed to, with, predictably, a chip on my shoulder roughly the size of Rhode Island. I can’t say my heart was entirely in it, but when I visit the site now, I can see that they’ve continued building on a foundation I helped lay, and it feels good to realize that I played a part in making their online presence something more than it was.

(RES Cover - Jan/Feb 2005)

What are some of your favorite magazines? Websites? Why?

Magazines: It all starts with The New Yorker. I don’t know why I feel mildly embarrassed to admit this—maybe it’s because everyone reads The New Yorker, maybe it’s because of the formulaic establishing shots in their profiles, maybe it because of their insistence on putting an umlaut over the second o in “cooperate” and spelling “vendor” with two e’s. There’s lots more that annoys me about the magazine, but the range of topics they cover (though I don’t understand why they never get into the serious side of design), the depth with which they cover those topics, the stable of writers they employ, and, frankly, the frequency at which they publish all conspire to make the magazine a constant presence in my intellectual life. Two other excellent magazines which I read often in print but which—to return to one of your previous questions—have also done an excellent job of establishing themselves online are New York and The Atlantic. I also read—with varying degrees of attention and regularity—Harper’s, The New Republic, The Economist, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Fast Company, Metropolis, Dwell, GOOD, Monocle, Wallpaper, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cabinet, The Believer and The New York Times Magazine. I’ve never really read The New York Review of Books, which also makes me feel mildly embarrassed.

Websites: Here it all starts with nytimes.com, and this doesn’t make me feel embarrassed at all. It’s been years since I bought the paper on any day other than Sunday (and even then it’s infrequent) but I check the site three or four times a day. In the face of tremendous uncertainty for newspapers, I think they’ve done an extraordinary job of combining the traditional strengths of newspapers with the new possibilities offered by a real-time, interactive publishing environment. Ask me to pay, Keller—I will. Besides the Times Online, there are the two trusty online newsmagazines that have kept me company throughout the decade, Slate and Salon. For whatever reason, I rarely visit Salon anymore, but I go to Slate almost every day. Others I spend a lot of time on include the online homes for the two print mags mentioned above as well as the Fast Company and GOOD sites, along with Design Observer, Core77, Gawker, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Kottke, Inhabitat, Cool Hunting, Refinery29, and a bunch of others. It’s funny, when I was writing the previous paragraph, I was thinking about the many print magazines I used to read but never do anymore, and I’m even more fickle when it comes to the web: I lost interest in the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast was a passing fancy. In the months before the election, I was on Talking Points Memo, Politico, The Hill, Daily Kos, etc., constantly, but haven’t visited any of those sites in months. When I was doing more film stuff, I would troll through the many great film blogs (mad props to Spout Blog) in my Google Reader almost every day, but I rarely look at those now. Of course there’s also social media, which I don’t think this question was about so much, but I definitely get a lot of news from Facebook and Twitter now. Also, People of Walmart is my favorite photoblog of the moment.

What do you think makes a good writer? What grounds do you believe a piece is “inspiring” vs “mediocre”?

I’ve become a big believer over the years in the idea that anyone who is literate can be a good writer. There’s that hoary old dictum “Write what you know.” Like most hoary old dictums, it’s fairly trite, and it’s certainly not absolute, but it carries a lot of weight because people who write what they know are people who write with a high degree of specificity and palpability. They’re people who write truth. That’s the difference between inspiring and mdiocre writing. If the prose is sloppy and the syntax garbled, a good editor can usually sort it out, so long as there’s truth underneath.

(RES - Jan/Feb 2006)

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I’d like to have published a book (maybe more than one). I’d like to have been involved in the making of a documentary. I’d like to have spent some time living abroad, something I’ve never done. I’d like to have a house in the Catskills. I’d like to be married and have kids and be making a good life for my kids. I’d like to feel like I was someone who made a difference in other people’s lives.

Who are some of your all time heroes? What is inspiring you right now?

I had a high-school American history class taught by an avowed Marxist and former film-industry executive—an amazing guy—who informed us one day that we didn’t have heroes anymore in American culture. He invited us to disagree with him. I offered up Neil Young. This was about 1993 and I lived in the Bay Area and was a bit hippieish. He asked what made Neil Young a hero. I immediately felt like a douchebag. I didn’t really have an answer—I just liked Neil. I felt like even more of a douchebag not long after, when I saw the large coke rock lodged in Neil’s nose in The Last Waltz. Today though, I still think Neil Young scores hero points, not only for his work with special-needs kids, but also just for the awesomeness that is being Neil Young (I have a poster that says “What Would Neil Young Do?”).

This is a hard question. Maybe we don’t have heroes in American culture anymore. I will say, however, that the late David Foster Wallace always inspired me, less for his literary acrobatics (though that was part of it) than for his nonpareil thoughfulness, generosity, and humor. I was really, really sad when he committed suicide last year. Werner Herzog is something of a hero for his humanity, fearlessness, spirit of adventure, and steadfast eccentricity, not to mention the astonishing beauty of his images. Jane Jacobs forever changed the way I think about cities. Townes Van Zandt never fails to make me cry. A few others, off the top of my head: The Obamas, Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, Vaclav Havel, John Cassavetes, John Lennon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Stanley Kubrick, Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King, Joan Didion, James Baldwin.

(ID Sept/Oct Issue)

Who would you mention as your most influential mentor?

Are mentors like heroes? Do we still have those? Could we bring back the apprentice system? I’ve often expressed my regret that I wasn’t mentored more when I was younger, though the blame is partly mine for not seeking out people I wanted to be mentored by. There are, in fact, a lot of people who’ve had a big impact on my professional and personal growth, but rather than make another list, I’ll mention just one: Dan Quinn, my high school drama instructor, who often talked about “making the familiar strange” and excused himself for changing his mind by quoting Walt Whitman—“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” I say both of those things now. I’m kind of a dork.

(Mr. Jesse Ashlock - Photos by JD Ferguson)

What can we expect from the next issue of ID?

The next issue, out in January, is an established annual called the I.D. 40. Traditionally, it’s been a set of 40 profiles, usually of young and emerging designers; this time, instead, we’ve made it a collection of 40 current design projects striving for social impact. It’ll be followed by an issue delving into health and healthcare, and then another exploring manufacturing, fabrication, and getting things made.

(The “Ghost Cover” of what would have been…)