Simmons Review

The alumni magazine celebrated its success over the past ten  decades in 2010. Its longest serving-editor, Professor Dorothy Williams, led the magazine from 1947–1977. During this time, the magazine thrived as a publishing laboratory for communications students, who design-directed, wrote, and edited the content of the entire magazine as a required course, and in addition provided frequently visual material of graphics, illustrations and photographs. Provocative articles and innovative designs earned the magazine more than 160 honors during these decades, including the coveted Sibley award from the council for advancement and Support of education.

Dorothy Williams was a dedicated powerhouse, making her being bound permanently to a wheelchair into a twenty-four hour asset. One could expect a very long telephone conversation around midnight. There were no escapes.

Way before Muriel Cooper or any other of us emerged, Williams provided, as required reading, issues of “The Journal of Typographic Research” which morphed into “Visible Language”, the oldest peer–reviewed design journal, first published in 1967. For it’s first four years, it was published under the title The Journal of Typographic Research. Founding journal editor, Merald Wrolstad, understood that research and scholarly information were essential to the development of communication design and in particular to the development of typography in its support of reading and writing. Under these broader implications, he changed the nomenclature to “Visible Language”.

Williams was in touch with Wrolstad, as well with some of the visionary authors of the journal, like Aaron Marcus, who had written extensively about the emerging digital processes for generating type, a decade before the event of Macintosh.

It is through Williams that Cooper is introduced to the term “visible language” of which she selects the inherent philosophical framework when she develops the “Visual Language Laboratory at MIT”.

Williams invited members of the Boston design community to work for a semester with communication students to shape the visual contents and contexts – it is my introduction to teaching design studio courses. Students, destined to become writers, journalists, editors and managing editors, where taught to break the monotony of publishing traditions. Therefore all formats were on the table, each issue presented in differing dimensions and style. No style was barred as long it fit the contents and context. That is why one will find formats like “the mag in the bag” or “the mag in the can” generated by Muriel Cooper’s group or the “round mag” by Harold Pattek’s. Because the course was closely linked to the pragmatic production processes for each issue, namely writing, editing, copy-editing, typesetting, proofing, correcting, letterpress or offset printing and post print finishing, students had to explore various folding methods for signatures in relationship to binding styles or the efficiencies of “impositions” or benefits of split fountain effects, varnishing and die cutting. Because Williams was very budget conscious, students learned to explored the quality of papers rarely considered for magazine production, like “news print”, to elevate it to a much higher aesthetic value, or use “odd lots”, papers that had been erroneously trimmed or had defects, and returned to paper houses or sat unused in warehouses of printing plants, and were sold at dramatically lowered prices. There may have been courses of same breadth and intensity at schools like RIT, but in comparison with art and design programs of the east coast, there were no competitors.   

The Simmons College “Valz Project”

In the early sixties and long before the dawn of digital imaging and production, before automated planning, estimation, and page-imposition, I was made aware of the “Valz Project” at Simmons College. Seniors, preparing to become editors, managing editors or production managers in publishing had in their portfolios a report on their “Valz Project” . It was the result of a production-management course, created by Dino Gris Valz, who was lecturer on book and magazine publishing. After working almost twenty years with the Andover Press, Valz had joined a Boston advertising agency in 1943, where he became media director. He began teaching at Simmons about the same time. After he retired, the project was put into the hands of Professor Virginia Bratton and continued under the same title. Valz died September 14, 1991.

The gist of the projects was for students to prepare detailed and comprehensive production plans, with realistic timetables and cost estimates for book or journal publications, enabling management to way options and make informed decisions. The Valz Project included everything: determination of quantities, physical formats, comparative cost analyses, directives to authors in relationship to estimates of lengths of text matter ascertained from manuscripts in relationship to the number of pages allotted, as well as solicitions of competitive, not ball-park, but and realistic and comprehensive production estimates from type houses, printers, and post print finishers, etc. The project was one of the major reasons that most graduates from this program found immediate employment.

I was impressed, because most designers or typographers, that I have encountered, rarely were able to match the skills of a Simmons undergraduate senior. Even today, at most design schools formal  editorial conventions and issues of production management are still being ignored. Over the years, I have worked not just with few but quite a number of Simmons alumni, who always impressed me with their skills and concerns for quality; fidelity of editing and word smithing, and their ability to control detail and enforce consistencies.

The Simmons experience was decisive for me to accept a full-time faculty appointment at SMU, Southeastern Massachusetts University, in 1973, which had been formed about a decade earlier and provided the opportunities that other established schools cannot offer, namely to start more or less from scratch, plan and build in regard to contemporary means.

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