Hasta La Ideas

Last week you read the official press release denoting ID Magazine’s demise; this week editor Jesse Ashlock eulogizes the magazine in blog form.

It wasn’t until taking the top job last spring that I came to realize how problematic some found I.D.’s brand identity, and to learn that battles had been waged over its mission for years. Was it a consumer magazine or a trade, and what did those damn letters really stand for? Of course, they stood for “international design,” but some still yearned for the days, decades ago, when they meant “industrial design”; others mistook I.D. for Interior Design, and the rise of interactive design added yet another I.D. to the mix.

It’s been said that those varying interpretations kept the magazine from being sustainable in a fractured marketplace, and maybe there’s some truth to that. To me, however, the multiple meanings were complementary, not competitive, and they attested to the way the brand had grown along with the design world over the years. They spoke, to use another i word, to the growing interdisciplinarity of the design disciplines, and the increasingly integral role of design in our lives and collective consciousness.

Read the rest here.

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