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Spy, published beginning in 1986 and resurrected after a short hiatus in 1994, offers cruel and clever commentaries on the spectacle of New York's high society. Design has always been part of Spy's abrasive personality. The original format was created by Drenttel Doyle Partners (interview), who used the standard anatomy of magazine design to create platforms for editorial play. Founding editor Kurt Andersen had mastered information graphics at Time magazine, which in the 1970s had pioneered the use of graphs and charts to make serious information understandable to a broad public. In contrast, Spy developed an intentionally arcane look for its off-color information, yielding graphics that ignored the conventional wisdom on legibility and yet were irresistible to read. Stephen Doyle's format reflected his sense of the magazine as a literary form--the pictures in Spy often amplify the text, rather than serving as artful illustrations respectfully distanced from content. Doyle recalled, "We let the magazine use its own body parts to point to itself."
Art director Alexander Isley perfected Spy's distinctive use of tables, diagrams, and flow charts, creating a rich and witty editorial form widely imitated in other publications, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Times. A device indebted to Spy is to treat images as if they are type by injecting icons and tiny photographs into the body of the copy. Since the late 1980s, an obsession with the typographic materiality of the printed page--more styles and sizes of type, more dropped caps and pullout quotes, more heads and subheads--has indicated a renewed writerliness in magazine design. Design consultant Roger Black commented in 1990, "Art directors used to be frustrated illustrators and photographers. Now they're frustrated writers and editors."
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