Raising the BAR on Design

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Making piles of rocks and broken pottery look appealing can be difficult. But we have been fortunate in our long-time partnership with designer Robert Sugar and his studio, AURAS Design. Every other month they take our raw materials and turn them into an attractive and accessible magazine. On this occasion we let Rob share some of his favorite moments and challenges designing BAR.

I wasn’t the first person to design BAR, but I have worked on it for 32 of its 34 years, including four redesigns. Each time we do a redesign, we try to find better ways of engaging our readers.

When I met Hershel Shanks, I was still in college, and he was a crazy lawyer who thought it would be easy to start a magazine. Since no one told him that was a ridiculous idea, he did it anyway.

The initial horrible BAR design was essentially Hershel’s. The cover was supposed to represent the two Tablets of the Law supporting something that was supposed to look like the shape of the famous Siloam Inscription. It was executed by Barbara Levine, the wife of one of Hershel’s lawyer friends.

After a year, Barbara turned over paste-up (we physically pasted the type onto the page to be printed in those days) to Hershel’s neighbor, Judy Mays. She did this for a year at five dollars a page. At the end of the year, she raised her rate to $7.50. Hershel was astounded by what he regarded as an extraordinary 50 percent increase and asked Judy to find him a designer who would work for a reasonable fee.

Judy found me! I was a college student who had helped out with Judy’s workload from time to time.

I’ve been with the magazine ever since, although I now have my own design firm that designs numerous magazines.

Not long after I started to work on BAR, I suggested a redesign because the small journal size (7 x 10 in.) of BAR was not less expensive than a standard magazine size of 8.5 by 11. When my observation proved to have merit, Hershel decided to go ahead with the new look. The new design had a few pages of color added and for the first time, we could open a feature story with a big image.

The first real magazine covers of BAR were a trial for Hershel. He was frustrated with the nameplate getting in the way of the image and wanted it smaller. He ultimately suggested that we change the nameplate size and move it around as needed from issue to issue to suit the photograph on the cover. This seemed to run counter to my own (limited) experience, so when I was ordered to change the size, I would simply say that I had and leave it alone. I think he ultimately caught on.

Hershel and the other BAR editors (Sue Singer, Jim Alley) were always up for trying 118an interesting approach to open a story. To illustrate the (tenuous at best) theory of the Hebrew origins of Superman, we opened with the Caped Crusader flying over Jerusalem with a paleo-Hebrew samekh emblazoned across his chest. Warner Bros. threatened a lawsuit for copyright infringement, but Hershel, always ready for a good fight, stared them down.

Over the next decade the circulation grew, and the magazine grew in size and in the number of color images in each issue. Stories became longer and more ambitious in their scope. We spent more time working on charts and plans and creatively visualizing the complex archaeological propositions of our archaeologist-authors. The pinnacle of this was the Temple Mount issue in November/December 1989. The article required multiple large plans to demonstrate the author’s conviction that several of the basic assumptions about the size and position of the Second Temple were incorrect and that the evidence was in the rocks on the mount itself. The graphics we created presented a convincing argument that BAR readers could understand.

BAR became known for its January Dig Issues (see “A Groundbreaking Call for Excavators”) featuring excavation volunteer opportunities, and in-depth coverage of what it was like to participate in a dig at a Biblical site. These issues always proved to be a design challenge, and finding the right “cover girl” (or guy) for each year became a sort of obsession. We always felt that if the cover didn’t generate at least one letter of prurient outrage, we hadn’t done our job (see “Letters We Loved”).

Despite the changing design of BAR over the years, the aesthetic goals for each issue have remained the same: Every story gets the space it needs to be fully presented. Sidebars and graphics are developed to help readers see the story in context and to help them understand complicated technical issues. And big dramatic pictures that place the reader at the scene have always been an essential element in the BAR design. Well, within limits. Over the years, I have pleaded for double gatefolds—two extra-wide pages that fold out from the center of the magazine—to present especially dramatic images, but I have never been able to justify their substantial extra cost.

BAR has always been a magazine that embraced technological innovation, mostly because it promised to lower costs. BAS bought its own typesetting machine, and for a number of years produced two magazine titles and a number of books in-house. When the desktop publishing revolution came along at the end of the 1980s, we were early adopters and began producing BAR using Macs in 1990.

BAR got its second redesign in 1990, and for another ten years the magazine—along with its sister publications Archaeology Odyssey and Bible Review—hummed along. The design of all three publications became more sophisticated, colorful and engaging as our expertise with digital production increased.

This second redesign of BAR was an attempt to make the magazine a more serious, academically challenging, and yet still accessible read. To a great degree this redesign and the subsequent ones also reflected our growing skill at publication design. This design worked well for another decade, and as the Internet became richer with graphics and readers became less tolerant of 120long stories, BAR was reinvented again. The third redesign of BAR emphasized a clean, modern look with a contemporary logo and more colorful graphics. The design was meant to signal a more accessible approach to telling our stories and to position us for the new millennium.

The most recent reinvention of BAR was in 2006, with a new design to encapsulate everything we have learned and loved about the magazine over the previous 30 years. From a new nameplate that harked back to the original design, to more challenging content, the contemporary BAR represents everything we have always found exciting. We instituted a longer, more interesting “grazing section” of small features up front with Strata and guest columnists, and institutionalized the ongoing back and forth among scholars with a department of their own called Another View. And, in an era of increasingly available profligately mediocre images, we’ve made a commitment to find the most dramatic and exclusive photographs to illustrate our stories.

Throughout the 34 years that BAR has been produced—that’s 200 issues and more than 17,000 pages—we have always approached each story as another opportunity to show readers something new and exciting by thoughtful use of design elements, graphics and especially those big beautiful images.

I’m still hoping for that gatefold.

Making piles of rocks and broken pottery look appealing can be difficult. But we have been fortunate in our long-time partnership with designer Robert Sugar and his studio, AURAS Design. Every other month they take our raw materials and turn them into an attractive and accessible magazine. On this occasion we let Rob share some of his favorite moments and challenges designing BAR. I wasn’t the first person to design BAR, but I have worked on it for 32 of its 34 years, including four redesigns. Each time we do a redesign, we try to find better ways of […]