Lifetime
Achievement Award
Jan White is this year’s award winner
Visual journalist,
publication designer, teacher, and author to receive ASBPE’s
career honor.
He was a graphics editor before the term
came into vogue. He was a visual journalist,
in the broadest sense, before Google
had 96,000 entries for the phrase.
Now Jan White, the charismatic 79-year-old
consultant and publication designer,
is this year’s winner of the ASBPE Lifetime
Achievement Award (LAA).
White will receive his honor at the
Azbee Awards of
Excellence banquet the
evening of August 2 at New York City’s
Roosevelt Hotel.
Uniting design and editorial
For the first time, ASBPE bestows its
lifetime
achievement recognition on someone
primarily from
the design side of
the business-to-business
(B2B)
community.
Yet White long
has been a leading
voice for understanding
between
editors and art staff
about the role they play together in the
success of B2B publications.
A major White tenet, in fact, is that
“word people must think visually and picture people
must think verbally.” In the symbiosis that results,
designers and editors
work together, understanding the vocabulary
of both disciplines. Combining
their skills helps the reader grasp information
quickly and understandably.
“As professional communicators,
our
task is to achieve what our clients [readers]
need, blending each of our specialties
into one product,”White says.
“Our work may be judged by its excellence as splendid writing, innovative creativity, emotive image-making, but those
are just secondary qualities, essential
though they be. Our value to clients depends on how good we are at interpreting their problem, because that’s the very root from which our verbal or visual communication-solution grows.”
Design contributes to service journalism
While he doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge that B2B magazines are commercial operations — not fine art or literature — White believes that skilled editors and graphic designers can combine to deliver well-designed information that is rational and logical, rather than primarily emotional, as some publication designers prefer. And as is true for so many great journalists, Jan White’s views lead him into the realm of service journalism.
Past
LAA honoree Don Ranly, longtime service-journalism proponent and professor emeritus at University of Missouri School of Journalism, describes White thus: “Jan White has always taught that the purpose of design is to enhance the message — nothing more, nothing less.No one, no one has done or taught that better.” Once, when someone approached White and said that she, too, was a designer, Ranly recalls, “Jan replied, ‘Well, dear, I hope you grow up to be a journalist.’”
By his own count,White has given more than 1,800 seminars to publishers, editorial organizations, and technical associations around the world.
“Ask a regular attendee at ASBPE’s National Editorial Conferences to list her or his favorite programs, and you’re likely to hear Jan’s name — and to see a smile,” said ASBPE president Roy Harris, a senior editor at CFO magazine.“His way of combining common sense and the tough day-to-day requirements of making articles clear and psychologically appealing to readers is a model for teachers of journalism, as well as for writers on all educational topics.”
A prolific author
White has consulted for numerous publishing
companies and publications, including National
Geographic, The New York Times, CBS, and the McGraw-Hill,
Advance, Reed-Elsevier, Webb, Meredith, Gorman, Intertec,
Kalmbach, Bill Communications, Cygnus, and Dowden organizations.
While he took on fewer design jobs for specific magazine
titles after the late 1980s, his work continued in locations
as distant as Brazil, England, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden.
“I worked with and for publishing companies and associations of various kinds, all over the world, and they showed me titles that I would comment on, suggest, cajole, beg, and generally excoriate, as required,” notes White. “Some I spent a day on, others 10 minutes after a lecture in a corner on a couch in the corridor. Those were the most useful consultations, always free! How can one not answer good questions? Besides it is so much fun, and maybe even good for our professions.”
He has taught courses on communication design at schools from New York to Anchorage, and for seven summers instructed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
White has 15 books to his credit, including Editing
by Design, Graphic Idea Notebook, Color for Impact, Using
Charts and Graphs, Designing for Magazines, and the Xerox
Publishing Standards.
His articles have appeared in Folio:,
Step-by-Step, Ragan Reports, Magazine Week, and Credit
Union Marketing. He has been a columnist for Dynamic
Graphics, Technique, Graphic Solutions, Computer Publishing, and EP&P.
In Editing by Design, White
examines how a magazine is “used” by the reader — offering
a virtual lesson in physiology, psychology, and common sense.
The book is in its third edition.
He presents the subject with the same verve, wit, and intellectual stimulation that color his conference sessions and workshops. And, of course, he shares his gifts with audiences both visually and verbally.
Now living in Westport, Conn., where he tries to hide from magazines by sculpting, he still finds time to speak and to write. He has degrees in architecture from Cornell and Columbia Universities.
But it was during White’s first job as a temporary draftsman for Architectural
Forum that he fell in love with making magazines. That “temporary job” lasted 13 years, as he moved from Architectural
Forum to become art director of its sister publication, House & Home.
His first talk on the relationship of designing to editing was delivered to the New York Business Press Editors’ Association in 1958.
In 1995,White was awarded the Swedish
Word and Picture Academy’s Lidman Prize “…for
his extensive authorship and exceptional services to design
education.”
Lasting advice
In a recent interview in Publishing Executive,
White suggests that the way to approach readers/clients was “not
to be creative…. Cool it — solve the client’s
problem. Don’t build monuments to yourself, don’t
decorate.… Simplify. … Understand the message
so you can express it clearly. Understand what your reader
buys your product for.”
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