Mark Porter

There’s a profile of me in today’s Design Week by Jim Davies. Subscribers only on the website unfortunately, so if you want to read, it you’ll have to buy the magazine.

I was presenting a magazine design in Paris yesterday, the preparation for which goes some way towards explaining my lack of posts, tweets, sleep etc in the last week. So I missed the chance to comment in a timely fashion on the Times website and the great ipad magazine layout debate.

After the meeting I had a late train back to London so I managed to spend some time in one of Paris’ very civilised book shops, where I found this…

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In the last two months I’ve been advising the lovely people at Amsterdam’s DeVolkskrant on the transition from the very wide Dutch broadsheet format to tabloid. It’s been great fun and the results are out today. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, thanks everyone for your comments and tweets — it’s humbling to read what some of you wrote, and your interest and support is much appreciated.

I did smile at the speculation over my departure being announced in the same week that Carolyn McCall (CEO of Guardian Media Group) quit to run a low-cost airline. I’m afraid there’s no basis to the conspiracy theories; I’m leaving for two very simple reasons.

The first, as I said on friday, is that I just began to feel that I’d done everything I could at the Guardian. As well as doing the major redesigns of the paper and the website, I’ve redesigned Weeekend five times, G2 three times, etc etc you get the idea. Of course there are always new things to do (don’t mention the ip*d), and it would have been very easy to stick around. But if you stay in one creative job too long it gets hard to keep approaching everything with a fresh eye, and when that happens its time to move on. But I still have a great relationship with the Guardian and the plan is that I’ll continue to do projects with them in the future.

The second reason is that my private work outside the Guardian had grown to the point where it was becoming incompatible with the day job (not to mention the demands of my young children).

So that’s the strory. From April 17th I’ll be independent again for the first time since the mid-90s, and I’m really excited about it. I have no desire to get into the big studio thing — the smart way to work these days is small, fast, flexible and most of all, fun.

I’m already working with some newspapers in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and I aim to keep on designing printed papers as long as there are any left to design! But I expect a lot more of my work to be digital in the future, and it would be great to do more magazines too (I have one magazine project coming up in France but I’d love to do more). So I’m pretty busy in the short term, but I’m also up for talking about anything interesting that comes along.

And let’s also hope that I’ll now have the time to post here more frequently, and get my undernourished Twitter stream (@IamMarkPorter) flowing more freely… Watch this space!

It feels very strange to be writing this, but here goes… I’m leaving The Guardian.

It’s been a very tough decision. I’ve spent 14 amazing years here since I first came in to work on a redesign of the Weekend magazine, and ended up staying. I’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment, and time and again when I felt it was starting to get boring, something new and exciting would come onto the radar. I’ve worked with some wonderful designers and editors and done some fantastic projects. But I’ve been here a long time and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve done it all, most of it several times over. So it’s time to move on. More news to come soon on my plans for the future.

Mario is full of praise for the design of fd, the Dutch business paper I did a couple of years ago.

I recently visited Ljubjana to be a jury member for the 4th Slovenian Biennale of Visual Communication, and give a talk. It was a fascinating, if exhausting, few days. For a small country (2m inhabitants — London alone has 7.5m) theres a thriving design scene, and we saw some great work. Ljubjana also has some terrific restaurants (and we had the good fortune to be there during the truffle season), so it was a rewarding trip in many ways.

While I was there, I gave a few interviews, one of which you can find here. I can’t understand a word of it, but if anyone reads Slovenian, please let me know if I said anything stupid.

The new Internazionale design is published today. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just got back from Rome, where I spent the last few days launching a new project — a redesign of a weekly news magazine called Internazionale. Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Brook (of Spin) has kindly sent me a copy of “Studio Culture”, the first book from his and Adrian Shaughnessy’s new publishing venture Unit Editions. Read the rest of this entry »