Joshua Gorchov A few weeks ago, I went over to the corner store to grab a bottle of vodka. As they were getting it from behind the counter, I was standing there with my wife Ellen, and I saw Maxim on display. I’ve been meaning to see what you’ve been doing with it since you took the reins, but I never really end up in that section at the newsstand. So we walked out of there with a bottle of vodka and a copy of Maxim—and then we realized it looked really questionable because Ellen was six months pregnant!

Dirk Barnett That’s so messed up, but hilarious.

JG You guys had a baby not too long ago, right?

DB Bodhi. He just turned one on July 13th and he’s walking everywhere. He walks like a little chimpanzee.

JG So I have to ask: as a new father, do you find it challenging to reconcile your work at Maxim with family life?

DB Like I always say to my wife, this is the dream job for the guy I was ten years ago, when I wasn’t married and didn’t have a kid. It’s pretty hilarious that I’m here now, but it is a lot of fun—the content is obviously fun and funny. So that definitely makes it worth it, along with the fact that I get to work with great photographers and stylists. Learning to grapple with that whole end of it is something I hadn’t really done before. I’d shot several celebrities but I’d never been in a situation where I was in charge of photographing girls for the sole purpose of making them look red hot.

JG Is that a big part of what you do there?

DB Yes, that’s a huge part of it. When I was at Premiere and photographing Charlize Theron or Sienna Miller, she’s going to look hot because she is hot and she knows how to look hot—but for Maxim it’s a whole different thing. We just got done shooting Lindsay Lohan for our September cover. She’s on board, concept-wise, but we also have to get her to look “Maxim hot” so there’s a whole other stage of prepping them for that before they even show up on set.

JG So your life is “Entourage” by day and “Leave it to Beaver” by night!

DB The good thing is, I’m able to see my kid every morning and every night, which is huge.

JG How did you make the jump from your last position, at Blender?

DB Blender folded in April 2009. We had just done a tight redesign, and the issues were just starting to look amazing. I thought I could sit back a bit, relax, and just do great work from issue to issue and not have to worry about getting to understand the DNA of a whole new magazine when my baby came along. [Makes buzzer sound]. Negative.

So Blender disappears and Joe Levy and I get to Maxim with the directive to overhaul this magazine, from top to bottom. And three weeks into my third issue, the baby arrives. It was crazy, crazy timing.

JG So you ended up with two babies at once. That’s a lot to process.

DB Exactly, and it was a crash course in learning how to juggle a publicist on set and convince them to let their client take her top off but not be naked, while on the other hand learning how to feed my baby at 3 AM and let my wife get a little sleep because she’s delirious. Dealing with all the things that come along with babies, you just kind of crash course learn. I have four nieces under five, so I’ve been around babies a lot, but it’s never the same when you actually have one in your house screaming at 3 AM, you know?

JG I have yet to experience that.

DB It’s pretty intense but at the same time it opens your eyes. The thing about being a parent in this field—whether you’re an illustrator, photographer, designer, creative director, whatever—is that it makes you realize how what you’re doing now is going to affect everything you do in the future. You study every step you take and how that’s going to affect your next step.

So that’s something I’m grappling with even more now that he’s a toddler. What’s the next phase of my career and how do I set that up so that I’m still able to save money for college?

Meanwhile, the Maxim staff is young, no kids, party all the time. There’s a bar in the office. Everyone is drinking by 4. Sometimes I think, “Get me out of here, this place is like the devil!” It’s like my house is Eden and then I come to work and the temptations of the devil are at every corner.

JG Did you bring anyone over with you when you started at Maxim?

DB I didn’t (no one from Blender would come with me!), so it took some time to build up my team. I got here, inherited a staff and—without getting too specific—things were a mess. It took some time to make some much-needed changes.

Once I was able to fill some key positions with strong talent and get my team up and running, then we were really full tilt. The two hardest things: finding great talent and finding great typefaces.

JG So, how much of the magazine is yours at this point? Have you made your mark on the whole thing or are there parts you still want to reconsider?

DB We redesigned but the first priority was changing the photography. The photography had been very mid-nineties—girls greased up,  airbrushed to death and always leaning against a cracked wall or burnt car. So the first thing I did was bring in a new team of photographers that immediately transformed the magazine. They’re higher caliber people who would never have shot for Maxim before. I basically sat down with them and said, “Listen, I’m here to change the magazine. I’m totally redesigning it and we’re refocusing it. It’s not the cheesy Maxim that it used to be, now we’re trying to be a little more smart.” It’s just more fun and more sexy. That’s been the main push, so we’ve been able to get some really great names in here.

Once that was established, it was time for the design phase, starting with new typefaces to enforce the Maxim brand. Beyond that, we had to refocus the visual storytelling of the magazine, while obviously respecting the heritage of Maxim and not totally abandoning it.

In the end, we won a silver medal from The Society of Publication Designers for the redesign. We beat out the New York Times, so that was really exciting for the team. It was the first time Maxim had ever won a design award so everyone was pretty psyched.

We’re making an impact with the new visual language, but still struggling on the newsstand just like everybody else. At the end of the day, do those design awards really make a difference if we’re still struggling? Hell yes. They boost the morale of the team and help draw strong talent to contribute, to make it a better magazine. That’s when those awards really count, they keep us on the radar of great photographers and designers and illustrators who think, “Oh, Maxim is starting to do some cool stuff. I want to work for that magazine.” That just makes it a better quality product, and the publicists love it too.

But now we’re sort of in the second phase. I’ve been here for almost a year and a half, and we’re thinking about another design overhaul.

JG So, this isn’t a fine-tuning of the first redesign? You’re actually starting over?

DB Yeah, we’re pretty much starting over, but this redesign is focused more on the front of the book and the columns. We are a little bored with the way it looks. But beyond the look, we need to think about the structure of these sections. We can’t just redecorate the house—we have to move some rooms around. If we’re going to rethink this thing, then let’s really rethink it. Let’s take the front of the book sections and mix them up. Let’s create some new things. Let’s get rid of the old things that we don’t think work anymore. A new typeface alone is not going to cut it.

JG A lot of the photography is very narrative. How do you conceptualize a shoot like the “Desert Fox” spread in the August issue and get the design so integrated with the photography?

DB We always want to give the girl a story, so she isn’t just half-naked in front of a camera. There’s a purpose, and something for her to work with. We approach a girl with a style sheet and a story idea, first, then typically have a back-and-forth with the publicist about this clothing direction or that story idea. For Kelly Brook, we wanted to take her out into the desert, all clad in black leather and big motorcycles, Russ Meyer-like. Kelly’s a big star in the UK and just making it big here. She’s got this sort of ‘60s retro look to her. And she has huge boobs. She’s in the new “Piranha 3D.” We had Harley send out a few bikes, and worked with the stylist to bring a bunch of black leather, vests, short shorts, and high sexy boots. We came up with that whole concept and sent PDFs to her agent and her PR, so it was all approved before they even showed up. These conversations are crucial before you get on set so there are no surprises. They need to understand completely this is a Maxim shoot, not GQ or People Magazine. It’s about being as clear as possible so both parties know what to expect. But even then, there can be fits on set. That’s when things get really fun….

For Kelly Brook, once I had the photos laid out and received the headline, “Desert Fox,”  I just blew up “Fox” really huge and intertwined her with the typography.

Competing with all the other men’s titles, our visual language has to set us apart with a distinct look. Obviously the typefaces are key, but we also have tried to come up with a templated design approach that can apply to some of these girl shoots, because after a while it’s just another girl shoot. What can we do that still feels organic and inventive but also has a sameness to it, so that it feels like Maxim? Something that we do a lot of here is blow up type really big and intertwine it with the girls. A leg will be going through the letter G or an arm will be sticking through an E, just to create some interaction between the design and the photography and make it a little fun.

JG I was surprised by the extreme variety of topics squeezed in there. It’s got girls. It’s got books. It’s got movies. And then I find myself in a spread about “Horrorcore.” I have to say, by the time I got through the issue, I think I felt a little disturbed!

DB Sorry, dude.

JG Things got serious when I turned to that spread. At first I was just admiring the hand lettered type. I tend to look at design before I read it, which might be backwards…but then I noticed that it looked kind of smeary. The severity of this story slowly dawned on me as I read the captions, “I kill people for real” and “photographs by Dan Winters.” That combination automatically signals to me that this is some heavier journalism.

DB That’s a good example of what we’ve been able to achieve here. We have Dan Winters shooting for us, which he’d never done before.

JG You go through this range of emotions and then on the next page are sunglasses.

DB It is like a roller coaster ride. After that you get to a photo that has the word “sunscreen” written on boobs. We had to do a story on sunscreen. The ideas come easily because it’s so obvious. Let’s get a pair of amazing breasts, and make it look like she sunburned the word “sunscreen” onto her chest. Done. Stuff like that makes it a lot of fun, to balance out the heavier stuff.

JG Overall the magazine is light-hearted and it’s got a sense of humor, but then it’s got some serious stuff too. With this incredibly diverse content, how do you stay true to your aesthetic? Is that something you think about, or does it just come naturally at this point for you?

DB Well, I definitely have a specific design style. But it just sort of comes through in the way I do things and the way I art direct. I’m only designing about 20 percent of this book: I do the cover and a couple features, etc, but my team is usually designing most everything. So it’s a lot of me setting the tone for the way things look and overseeing them as they work through their pages. That way I’m able to focus on the big picture, like bringing in new typefaces, and working with (Director of Photography) Toby Kaufmann on all the photography. I’ll be strategizing the next three issues while the pages are being designed for the current issue.

I do still get in there and design things, because as a Creative Director you can never stop designing. You should always have your hand on the mouse because if you don’t, you’re going to start to forget. We do it because we love the craft of designing pages and designing typography. It better equips me to speak the language of art directing graphic design if I’m actually designing.

The other thing is that I trust my team (Deputy Art Director Drue Wagner, Assistant Art Director Chandra Illick, Designer Eric Ku) a lot , so I know what they can do and they know what I expect. I usually start with, “Okay, we’ve got this story that I want you to do next month and you’re going to do this story this month, so show me some ideas.” I don’t sit down and over art direct, or tell them which directions to try, because there’s no fun in that for them. We usually start with a conversation, bounce some ideas around, then get cooking.

JG When we’ve worked together, you’ve never been heavy-handed with art direction. So your tendency is to pick the people you know are going to give you what you want and let them do their thing?

DB Exactly. That’s the way I’ve always done it and sometimes it works and sometimes it’s a total disaster and you need to totally overhaul it.

For the design I’ll start something, get the design going, and then it’s a matter of passing those templates off and saying “I’ve done the front of the book section. I want it to look like this, so follow these guidelines. Follow these templates, follow these headline styles and let’s see where that takes you. I’m not saying you have to do exactly that, because I want you to make it look a little different from section to section, but these are the basic rules.”

And that’s where some of the best ideas come from. Oftentimes they go spinning off in another direction…sometimes it’s gold, sometimes it’s not, it just depends.

At the end of the day, magazine designers are branders. In any branding situation, you’re doing 4 or 5 pitches for one idea. You can’t get set on any of them because either they’re all going to get thrown out or they’re going to love one and scrap the rest. You just don’t know what the outcome is. If an editor doesn’t like any of them, we’ll do something else because we have to. I’ll tell my team, “These are great ideas, but don’t get married to them because you’re not designing for you, you’re designing for a magazine called Maxim, which is owned by ten shareholders who don’t really care if you love that design or not.” It’s a tough lesson to swallow.

JG I still feel a consistency when I look at your body of work, which, when so many factors are involved, must be difficult to pull off.

DB Joe Levy, my Editor in Chief, has given me freedom and trust because we already worked together at Blender and he understood the kind of work that I do and the direction that I take things. He took me on for a very specific reason: he knew that I could elevate this magazine and he knew that the two of us working together could do that. So that’s been good.

JG I noticed the “Kicking Asphalt” story that Peter Oumanski illustrated and was totally blown away. There’s this great illustrated type, and incredibly intricate maps, and it just keeps going, page after page.

DB It was a monster feature, just massive. Peter did such an amazing job.

JG What were your expectations going into it? This is a pretty intense illustration assignment.

DB It was one of those instances where I got this idea and just asked him to take a hack at it and he comes back with about ten awesome sketches. I had an idea to do the headline type in the style of old postcards. That’s all I said. I didn’t tell him to put roller coasters and bears and all these little funny things that he did in there. That’s all him. We had things that needed to be on the maps, but he came up with everything else. He’s an amazing storyteller—he comes up with great, really detailed narratives. He’s also incredibly fast. He’ll give you a sketch and then a couple of days later he will give you this beautiful finished piece and I just think, “How the hell did you do that so fast?”

JG I think it just comes out of his pencil.

DB Yeah, it just flows. For the travel story, he did spots for a sidebar titled “Field Guide to Hitchhikers” that are hilarious…little illustrations of character types like The Vigilante or The Sob Story…they’re just so good.

What I would love to do is publish a little minibook of all the stuff that he’s done for Maxim because you could easily fill up a book with all that stuff. He’s definitely helped to create the visual language of the magazine.

JG Have you gone on any epic road trips of your own?

DB My wife and I quit our jobs in 2006 and we traveled around the world for nine months. It was incredibly refreshing, exhilarating, wonderful and something every couple should do, especially before they have kids. While traveling, we kept saying, “This would be so awesome to do with kids.” Once they’re old enough to speak at least, and there are no diapers involved, because that would be a drag in India!

We traveled all over the world: South East Asia, India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore…We hit something like 13 countries with backpacks on our backs. I had just been at The New York Times and my wife had been at Men’s Fitness, and we both just left.

JG So that was right after what, Key and Play?

DB Yeah, actually I was able to work it out with Play and Key to leave for nine months and then come back and pick it up again. Janet Froelich said “Listen, when you come back we’ll just put you on the schedule,” so that was amazing.

We were gone for nine months and people were saying, “Oh my God, I can’t imagine that. I feel like my life would end. How are you going to pick up your career again?” We got back in June and I immediately went back to the Times, and then in September, Blender called.

Your life is not going to stop because you leave for nine months. That is such a myth. It doesn’t happen. It’s so much more important to recharge your batteries, man. Get out there and see the world.

JG What’s your favorite part of traveling?

DB Just seeing new places. We were in India for two months. That was our highlight, because India is such a diverse country and there’s so much amazing architecture and ruins and food and beaches and temples everywhere. We experienced a completely different way of looking at the world.

A large part of the attraction is just seeing how other people go about their daily lives. That’s the best part, because you get entrenched in your daily life and routine and you don’t really think about other people’s lives in other parts of the world. You’re just so deep in your own world, thinking “I’ve got all these things I’ve got to do at work and then I have to go home and feed my kid, make sure he’s in bed by 8:00, and then walk my dog, and say hello to my wife, and then go to bed.” You have this routine and that’s what everyone’s life is like, but it’s just interesting to step into other parts of the world and see what their routines are like.

JG And then when you’re back from your adventure it’s like your life is more noticeable. All the little things are more special, in a way, because you’ve forgotten about them.

DB Exactly. And when we came back people would ask, “So, did ever you go on that trip?” People are so entrenched with their lives and they don’t even realize it. I had to tell them “Yeah, I was gone for nine months!”

JG When you travel do you plan it really tightly, with a set itinerary, or do you just go out and wing it?

DB We had an itinerary that was very loose and that let us move things around if we wanted to. We did buy an around-the-world plane ticket but it was very loose and the dates were spaced far apart so that we were able to be flexible. I think in the future we probably wouldn’t even do that. We would probably get a one-way ticket somewhere and just kind of go from there. There were a few times when I felt like “we’re supposed to be in Bali right now but I don’t want to go to Bali. I’m having such a good time here right now in Goa, but we have to go or we’ll get charged $350.” Some people like that structure, but I think we would have stayed in India the whole time if we didn’t have a ticket to Sydney! It just depends on how you like to travel.

JG Do you think that sort of mentality applies to the way you approach your work?

DB Yeah, I think so. I’m very loose. I drive some of my designers crazy when I say, “Okay, here’s the template” and they’re like “This is your template? This is a mess. There’s nothing locked in, what is this?” I’ll say, “Well, you see the idea. You make it all tight. That’s your job.” I’m all about locking things to the baseline grid and working with the grid—but I also want to get the idea down so I’m not going to worry about the fine tuning. That’s what my staff is for (they are going to kill me for saying this). I might be a little loose that way, but there are other things I’m more tight on. It just kind of depends. It’s all about balance.

JG It seems like that’s just your personality: you have a destination but you don’t worry much about every little step along the way as long as it gets you there.

DB Yeah, definitely. And I’m also thinking about future steps. You always have to think “How is this step going to get me to my next step?” You always should have a plan because it doesn’t make any sense to just say, “Oh, that sounds cool, I’ll do that for a couple of years.” Okay, where is it going to get you? What are you going to get out of it that will make you more marketable or more creative or more talented, to get to another spot? What’s your ultimate goal? That’s something that I always encourage people to think about.

JG Did you come into this business thinking that way?

DB No, I kind of learned it along the way. At first I just thought it was so cool, so much fun. It was such a different world. It took some time to realize that there are other things this industry and these opportunities can bring, so what are the opportunities you want and how do you get to them?

JG What got you interested in publication design, when you were starting out? Were there inspiring designers or magazines you saw that had an impact?

DB When I first got started I was at journalism school at the University of Oregon. I got a degree in magazine writing and I started designing for the school magazine, so that’s what turned me on to design.

I’d always been really interested in comic books, just the format of things like that. I was obsessed with the Tin-Tin books growing up. But I was also really obsessed with Rolling Stone magazine in college. I know that’s the cliché thing that every freaking designer says, but it was right when Fred Woodward got his hands on Rolling Stone and starting doing some really crazy stuff. I just remember looking at the magazine back then and thinking “What the fuck is this?” I didn’t really understand it. It was so different from anything I’d seen before.

And then right out of college I was lucky enough to get an internship at Men’s Journal, which is on the same floor as Rolling Stone. This was in ‘94, so I was able to be around Fred’s creativity and experience that. It was during this time that he did the Cobain and Jerry Garcia books, which, to me, are benchmarks in American graphic design. Around the same time, David Armario was hired at Men’s Journal, and he taught me everything I know about typography. He hired Tom Brown as his number two, so I was working with David and Tom for about two years, and they opened my eyes to all this stuff I’d never realized before. It was sort of a free fall from there, just becoming obsessed with design, understanding it and learning it and loving it.

It kind of came to me late in life. It’s not a story like John Jay sketching when he was three, or Elvis Presley: “I picked up a guitar when I was five.” It’s just something that sort of came to me and I fell in love with it. The thing I love the most is typography and I got that from David and Tom.

JG So you’re designing the American Photography book this year.

DB Yeah, it’s an awesome project.

JG It’s definitely a prestigious task.

DB Yeah, Fred Woodward and Rob Hewitt did it together last year. Scott Dadich did it the year before and Florian Bachleda did it the year before that. Mark Heflin asked me to do it this year, and working with him has been fantastic because he’s such a smart editor with great ideas. Of course he’s also doing American Illustration at the same time, so it’s like these two huge orbs of creativity, and how he balances them is pretty amazing to watch. Being able to put together such a big book of amazing photography has been so much fun.

JG So is working on such a big book totally different from working on a magazine?

DB Well, the nice thing is that it’s all visual so there’s very little typography involved. It’s all about laying out these amazing images.

It’s all in alphabetical order, which you don’t realize until you start designing it and have to get tricky, moving things around in a way that doesn’t screw up the pacing of certain images. There might be ten images from Mark Seliger that look incredible and there’s another photographer right after him, so you have to figure out a way to keep Mark’s images together and contained while giving the other photos their own space.

JG Are you thinking that this is the kind of book that will sit on the shelf for years, whereas a magazine is pretty temporary? Are you aware of that while you’re working on it?

DB Not until now, now I’m totally self-conscious—thanks man! Now I’m really fucking nervous. No, I don’t think about that. I just think about what’s going to be interesting. What’s a way to make this visually profound and also keep it within my style and the AP family?

It’s also an opportunity to work with new typefaces and try out some things I haven’t done before. Every new project brings along those things that make it exciting. Even if it’s some boring branding thing for a horrible company, at least it’s a way to rethink how you might do something. It’s just another opportunity to do something different.

I just finished directing a short video for WIRED’s October iPad edition, and that was an amazing experience.

JG What’s one of the biggest changes you’ve seen since you’ve been in the publication business?

DB Obviously, the digital aspect of everything today. It’s almost like a 50/50 split when you’re doing a magazine now. You’re working on the magazine and you’re also doing the iPad version. That’s definitely been the biggest shift, but it’s a good shift. It’s exciting for design. It’s a time for us as magazine designers to be able to do other things. It’s an extension of storytelling. You can start the story on paper, and tell more of that story on screen. That’s pretty incredible. For the WIRED project, that actually stemmed out of doing a Splash page they have every month in the magazine. But doing the iPad version meant I had to do an animation of it…literally bring a typographic concept to life.

And I feel like typography has exploded in the last ten years. Post-Raygun, there was this lull of using only Mazarin or Helvetica—and now there are so many incredible typefaces out there. There’s a lot of shit out there as well, but in that shit there are some incredible typefaces. You just have to sift through it all. I’m telling you, that’s the hardest part of what we do, or at least what I do as a Creative Director and designer. Whenever I have a new project and I have to find a new typeface I just feel like, “Oh God, I can’t do it again.” It’s so hard to find a good typeface that just nails it. There are so many good type designers out there doing crazy good work, more than I was aware of ten years ago.

It’s the same with illustration. I feel like there was a real lull in illustration for a while and within the past three years it’s just exploded. There’s been this really interesting morphing going on. Carl DeTorres is a good example: someone who’s so locked in on the infographic portion of illustrating, as well as the creative conceptual part, and he’s able to blend those two together in such a smart way. There’s so much great illustration going on right now in that realm.

Also the crafting of things, actually building things. Yulia Brodskaya’s work is incredible. She does all this crazy cut-paper typography. I think those are some changes that are really exciting.

JG What would you like to see happen in publishing’s future?

DB For magazines to get better. I feel like there’s a lot of lazy magazine making going on and people caving in to the status quo of magazine design, which results in a lot of shit on the newsstand. The quality of magazine design has really gone down lately. A few are doing really outstanding work and the rest is just crap. I’d like to see some Creative Directors out there actually up the ante and start doing some better work—better art directing and conceptualizing, and just coming up with better ideas. And beyond the ideas, just kick-ass design and beautiful typography. We’re in sort of a crisis of magazine design—it used to be so exciting and so fun. I think the iPad is actually going to help people recharge those batteries.

JG We’ve got to keep evolving.

DB Exactly.