For our fourth installment, I spoke with Anton Ioukhnovets, who went from making collages out of what coveted glossy magazines he was able to get his hands on in his native Russia, to being the person whose work aspiring (and established) designers study and find inspiration in. Anton had to hustle to stay afloat once he made the move to New York in the early 90s. Buoyed by a love for design, he worked his way up from what he calls “dead-end jobs” (bike messenger and taxi driver) to shaping the look of publications such as GQ, W and Esquire. Today, he works at the full-service content agency “30 Point” as expert for all projects related to editorial. Freelance work for magazines like the German Achtung Mode round out his creative workdays.

You were born in 1971 in Russia. I read on your website that your first job in the U.S. was renovating gas stations. You also worked as a bike messenger and drove a cab.  Tell me about how your path originally took you to magazines. Was this a field you were always interested in? 
My mother, as her side gig, sewed gowns for the Bolshoi theater’s opera singers. She had a few copies of Paris Vogue, Bazaar, Burda etc. at home. Western magazines were rare and completely exotic in the Soviet Union. The images, the gloss, the letters (the western alphabet was not often seen in Russia)—all of that created some kind of portal into a different world for me. I’d look through the same old issues over and over, then I started to cut them up, make collages, and even occasionally sell a few cut-out ad pages at school for 50 copecks a piece. 

As far as I remember, this is what sparked my interest in graphic design. I liked what I saw on the page, but I was not really able to articulate what it was yet.

Then, maybe in 1990 or so, I saw a copy of Rolling Stone magazine. A street vendor next to the first McDonalds in Moscow was selling used copies. Rolling Stone really blew my mind—I had no idea that you could do such intricate, beautiful, and smart things with type. The typography in the magazine made a huge impression on me. 

Despite my interest in design, I did not enroll in art college in Moscow. Instead, I went on to study software engineering. It only took one year to realize this was not a path for me. I dropped out and did a few different jobs without a clear purpose. 

I was 20 when I came to the US. In the beginning, I had to do whatever job was available in order to simply survive. I was a bike messenger, a construction worker, a security guard, a busboy, and a cab driver. After about two years of doing these jobs, I realized that I had to do something in order to break the cycle of dead-end jobs. I knew I needed to get an education or at least a skill. But I had no idea what it could be. So, I figured why not to act on the long-dormant interest in graphic design? I signed up for a  “Basic Graphic Design” class at SVA’s continuing education program and immediately knew that this was the right direction for me.

After taking two or three semesters I started to look for a job in the field. At the time, SVA was incredibly helpful in giving students job leads. I did not know the difference (and didn’t really care ) if I got a job at a studio, ad agency, or a magazine. The fact that I ended up in magazines was completely random. I was hired at New York Magazine as an art assistant for $6.50/hr..

I liked the job a lot—it was demanding in ways that were new to me. I ended up staying at NY Magazine for four years. Working there became my education in design and magazine-making. 

You worked at many different publications, in various countries. What is it about magazines that you found (or perhaps find) particularly appealing?
I pretty much like all aspects of the creation of a magazine. The first few pages I designed were a back-of-the-book listings section in NY Magazine called CUE. It was completely formatted and not an exciting section, but I found a way to have fun with what I had. I simply tried to create interesting geometry with photos and captions that broke the monotony of listings text. Ever since then, I have enjoyed the design of front of the book as much as I enjoy feature design. 

I divide magazine design into two categories and each category engages and challenges me as a designer differently.

FOB pages are all about information management. There are limitations to a certain format/template and every week or month you have to make these pages exciting. So you have to use a lot of technical skills in order to make these limitations work for you instead of submitting to them. A lot FOB pages used to be dedicated to service and successful design of such pages is about how to communicate the editorial idea of the page in a direct way. Your craft and technical skill helps to optimize the design.

In Feature design, you have a lot more freedom and you can express the idea of a story more like an artist.

When I work, I often jump from one, more technical page, to a more artful page, and I love how it engages different parts of your brain. 

But there is one huge thing that makes magazine work special for me. Not every magazine was a fun place to work, but if I was lucky and hit the right fit, editorial design gave me so much freedom. It’s thrilling to read a manuscript and come up with ideas for how these words will look on a page. What type of images are best, what font relates best to the story, is it conceptual typography or something more raw and straightforward, and so on.

If you are creating a whole magazine from scratch, then it is even more exciting because you have so many possibilities to play with.

According to your Memoirs (Vol 1), in 2017, you made the switch from being employed by large publishing houses to working for an agency (30 Point). How and why did this come about? 
2010 was, actually, the first time I left the security of a corporate job for the unknown. I left the job that I loved and enjoyed at GQ for something completely new and untested. 

First, it was Lotus magazine ( A brand publication for the iconic British car company. It has folded in 2012), and then I was working on a variety of independent projects and was periodically pulled back into the magazine universe (it was not decimated at that time) for short stints as Design Director at W, Bloomberg Pursuits and at Esquire in 2016.

The idea to switch to a small communication agency came from an editor whom I worked with at Bloomberg Pursuits. I was not sure about working primarily in the business and financial sector but, ultimately, I decided to give it a try. Fully remote work was a novelty back in 2017 and that was what really sealed the deal for me. 

Were/are there any bumps in the road, or was it a clear new direction, no other options considered?
It was a pretty smooth transition. One of our projects at 30 Point is Onward magazine–a  financial advice magazine for the clients of Charles Schwab. It’s a quarterly, entirely illustrated, print (and online) publication. For me, it falls into one of the categories I mentioned earlier—information management. We, in conjunction with the editors, work very hard in order to communicate the main idea of the article as clear and as fast as we can. So, I feel completely at home working on this project. 

How are the skills that you learned during your years in magazine publishing applicable to other roles and tasks set before you?  
Well, that’s another thing I like about editorial jobs. You acquire such a versatile skill set. When you are a designer or creative director of a magazine, your job is to imagine how each story and the entire issue will look like. You think about a mix of photographic approaches, whether it’s a concept shoot, reportage, fashion photography and what have you, illustration or data visualization, pacing of images and pacing of stories—and all that happens before you start designing.

So the process with many projects that we are working on—whether it’s Onward magazine, DEI or ESG reports, corporate-history books, etc—is very much similar. At the core of every project is a plain Word document that you need to find a way to bring into existence, visually.

Tell us about your work days and/or projects now. 
At 30 Point I work with my colleague, Lily Chow, who also comes from the magazine world. It’s only the two of us; we work remotely and I find that we work together very efficiently. Depending on the size of the project, we split them differently. If it’s small, one of us will do the entire thing. If the project requires a lot of infographics, Lily will take the lead on that, I will create a general design container where these elements live. Onward magazine, we split down the middle.

I like the fact that our projects have very different timelines. It makes it easier to fit them like into a workday like Tetris. 

I tend to work at all times of the day and weave work with my family life. Mornings are the most productive for me. But sometimes it helps to begin something in the morning, put it away after a couple hours, and then come back to it at night. Let the idea percolate and look at it in a new light later, instead of forcing a solution simply to find it. 

I also have freelance projects that I have been doing for over a decade with Markus Ebner, the founder and editor of a German fashion magazine, Achtung Mode. We produce two issues a year. This year we are currently working on Achtung’s collaboration with FAZ magazine as well SEPP magazine, which is Achtung’s sister publication that comes out once every two years for the football Euro and World Cup. SEPP is about the intersection of football and fashion cultures and is completely free-form and a lot of fun to work on. 

We also created a bi-annual bookazine for Mytheresa.com back in 2018 and were producing two issues a year up until the end of 2023.  

So, in recent years, I would have about four additional projects a year that come in short bursts of busy activity that lasts about four weeks at a time. During this time I don’t mix my 30 Point projects with the side hustle. Working from home it’s easy to split the day and work in blocks. 30 Point takes priority and since Achtung and Mytheresa are on the European time, I have plenty of time in the afternoon to work on them.

I would add that my freelance projects are completely different from my day job and I love having this balance—I’d even call it “work and play”. Achtung and other projects let me experiment and be completely irreverent , which I can’t really do while working on a report for Deloitte, for example.

How does working for European clients compare to working for American ones? Are you noticing differences in the creative process or in what is deemed "good design"?
I think it really depends on the genre of the design project rather than where the client is based. For example, Achtung is a German independent fashion magazine and what I do there is very experimental and irreverent. For the most part, I’m left alone —which is a huge luxury. Mytheresa is also based in Germany, and while it is in the realm of fashion, the aesthetic is more classic and restrained. However, I’d say when it comes to photography they might be a bit more open minded and accepting of the “casual”, off the cuff shooting style. 

When I work for financial and business clients in the US, there are a lot more limitations. Design has to be unambiguous and direct, there are brand guidelines, regulatory and legal considerations, many layers of approval—so you tailor your work to what’s appropriate to this genre and that keeps you out of trouble, so to speak.

If you could chart out your trajectory until retirement (if you believe in retirement), what are important stations and/or goals still ahead for you?
I find it funny that we even talk about retirement. I don’t usually make grand plans or set goals. In the past I was lucky enough that the flow of the universe brought opportunities in front of me. So I think I’ll continue to adhere to this principle. Having said that—I like what I do. I still like creating on paper, whether it’s a book or a magazine. And I hope that I’ll still be able to do that for a number of years. Books have been an interesting continuation of editorial work and while I’m not designing many books, I do find book design, especially art-book design very interesting. Working with images and creating a visual narrative of the book by pacing them in a certain order is a skill that I learned a while back from Fred Woodward. And it’s a skill which is very different from a layout of typography. And I really enjoy the process of pacing. 

So, while a variety of forms of digital design are prevalent now, print has not died completely it just shrank. And that’s fine—digital and podcast landscapes are all fragmented into niches too. So if I work on the print project with a very small audience but it  gives me a great freedom to experiment—that is just fine with me. I hope there are a few good surprises for me to find along my path : )

Is there something that you think only magazines can do? I’m thinking in particular of your conceptual typography in places like GQ.
I miss conceptual typography or using typography to create a certain tension and visceral effect.

Magazines were and still are a great vehicle for this. I think movie credits and motion graphics can give you the same outlet. As I mentioned prior, editorial design had this incredible freedom to experiment. We were not selling a product but rather creating kinda like a “poster” for the story and that poster then can generate a certain emotion and has a visceral effect on a reader.

What is the attitude and the skill set that a creative should bring to the table to navigate today’s creative industry and its demands?
Anyone who spent years in magazine publishing  and got used to the “language” and shorthand and the expectations of it will experience a bit of culture shock when they cross over into the world of corporate design. A lot of times you'll be working with non-visual people, so you need to be able to speak a different language but also learn the language that they speak. Your communication skills are super important.

Another thing is flexibility. Most of the projects that I’m currently working on, be it a report on a specific topic or a corporate history book, can go through multiple layers of review and approval by many departments and people within organizations, most of whom we do not interact directly with. These reviews generate all sorts of feedback, some of which, speaking from a designer’s perspective, might greatly affect the look that you’re trying to create. And here I use one of the skills that I learned working at Condé Nast, where instead of being disparaged by an editor’s comment, you often can find a solution that satisfies the client and at the same time keeps your vision intact.

And of course, learning new technical skills. Whether it’s digital tools like Figma, Sketch, Ceros, or video-editing software or motion graphics. You might not be fluent in all of the apps, but knowing a myriad of applications is just a reality nowadays.

Visit Anton’s website to see more of his work: ioukhnovets.com