Astonish Me

Alexey Brodovitch taught at the Design Laboratory, and he gave his students a single order, astonish me. Russian, trained in Paris in the twenties, he arrived in America in 1930 and from 1934 was art director of Harper's Bazaar in New York for more than twenty years, where he turned the fashion page from a still shop window into a film sequence. Avedon and Penn came across his desk, both of them his students before they became his photographers.

His idea was simple, a magazine is not looked at page by page, you move through it. White space was not empty, it was time, images ran past the margins like cut frames, and his Ballet of 1945, shot in the dark of the theatre with a small camera, coarse grain and blurred figures, looked filmed rather than photographed. The layout set the pictures moving.

The feed is today's magazine, and it scrolls the way his double pages did. A carousel or a reel is layout in time, rhythm and waiting. We still design the single post like an isolated stamp, and not the sequence, which is where the eye decides whether to stay.

Anyone who came up through magazines knows the page was a score. I wonder how many feeds would stand up to the order Brodovitch gave his students, astonish me.