Editors are always right, aren't they?

Like any good relationship, the one editors have with art directors should make life easier, not a daily battle of wills. If your art director is causing your hair to fall out or keeping you up at night, you can easily remedy the situation by showing him the door. Nobody is that artistically gifted.

So says Mark Newman, the editor of Southern Breeze, in a recent blog item for Folio:. He argues that there needs to be mutual respect and an understanding that the editor and art director of a magazine are partners, but that the editor is the senior partner.

You show me an art director with too much power and I’ll show you a weak, ineffectual editor who has no business being at the top of the masthead. Powerful art directors are intrinsically responsible for redesign after elaborate redesign that typically signals the last throes of a magazine’s existence.

Of course, Newman's point of view was not universally applauded, as evidenced by the following anonymous comment to his item.

Art directors are rarely given the credit they deserve. It's often ironic that a visually driven magazine will often be cited as a success because of the editor, when the art director is actually making all the choices. This really started in the 80s, after very powerful art directors worked for Esquire, Look, Harper's, etc., seemed to lose their power. Computers, as much as a godsend also made art directors production artists, retouchers and typographers. While art directors were busy learning Quark and Photoshop, editors went about the job of editing. In the end, it is a mix, a marriage, and a relationship. "Nobody is that artistically gifted." I can only imagine working for this guy must be hell.