Jonathan Halling

For my money, these are the most challenging and yet the most rewarding covers to create. I usually make multiple versions to get the final just right—and expect to lose a few of my favorites along the way.

The final selection process is arduous and can test your mettle, but the end result: very sweet.

There are so many variables to consider when creating a design for a great nnf (narrative nonfiction). The author's wishes, the editorial team's direction for the book, the marketing strategy, and of course, sales concerns.

As a creative/design director, you are always considering the full array of products your team is developing. Your goals is to maintain and improve the stylistic integrity and quality of your brand. The nnf titles at NG were not highly branded—mostly just a logo on the spine. But that little mark stands for so much, that its importance can't be underplayed.

These examples show just a few of the many conceptual ideas along the way to a finalized cover. The images were used for mock-up purposes only and are not commercially licensed.

National Geographic has moved vigorously into the digital realm. Our Core Books team developed a large selection of Readers and single-topic "Shorts" and played a key role in the development of several apps. As Creative/Design Director, I set the cover style for the Shorts and developed the app icon for our National Parks product.

On the NG Kids side, my hands-on role was pivotal, designing the prototype and first generations of the NG Kids magazine app. We began our endeavors with a Zinio product, and later migrated to Adobe's Digital Publishing System (DPS). I oversaw the design and visual usability of the NG Kids Dinopedia app and developed the app icon and Apple marketing materials.

Weird But True, a workhorse product in Children's Publishing, was developed for NG Kids magazine. I'm proud to have created the prototype and to have established and refined the look and feel of the product during my years with the NG Kids group. The iPhone app is another extension of this successful line.

I have always loved magazine design. While at NG Books, we created many single-issue publications in partnership with Time. Our Design Assistant Anna Zusman's first cover (Your Brain) was the best-selling of all time—at over 250,000 copies. As a design manager, I take pride in knowing that I've helped to establish and nurture a design career. To me, it's far better to share knowledge and empower those around you than it is to gain the world yourself. I tried to make that happen everywhere I managed.

Before my time with the Kids group, I designed features, departments, and special sections for NG Traveler magazine. Our editor-in-chief, the late Keith Bellows, was an incredible visionary and brought an unimaginable energy and sensibility to the magazine.

Keith hired Michael Grossman (Saveur/Garden Design) to redesign the publication, and he introduced our design team to an intricate, mathematical gridding system that I still use today.

One of the many benefits of working for Nat Geo is the strong emphasis on photography. While there is no shortage of excellent imagery coming into the campus, there is also a bounty of amazing photography that has never seen the pages of National Geographic.

As a visual manager, I always tried to incorporate the absolute best photography for our books. The standards at Geo are set very high, and those of us responsible for the overall look and feel of a product line worked tirelessly to maintain and even elevate those standards whenever possible.

There's no better gift than the perfect book. Whether you're trying to brighten someone's day, inspire them, or just know that a certain subject speaks directly to their heart. The gift line was introduced by Melina Bellows, our fearless leader for all things kids and, during my tenure, all things books as well. Melina's knew that these would be a big hit in the marketplace, and would sell to a much wider audience.

Our teams excelled at creating these, and their passions are evident in each and every page.

Our map teams at Nat Geo are the best in the world. During my time with NG Books, I had the privilege of working with many of the Society's talented (and very cool) cartographers. Carl Mehler is one of those outstanding talents. I'll forever be grateful to Carl for his stellar skills, wonderful demeanor, his ability to suffer cartographic neophytes with a smile. He and his team developed the wonderful 10th Edition Atlas, The Global Atlas, Family Reference Atlas, and many more hits for the Society.

The guidebooks are another essential part of what Nat Geo brings to the world. Whether it's birding, survival, travel, National Parks, you name it... the products are simply wonderful.

I was fortunate to be able to offer my design for the covers of these publications, and to offer suggestions for the interior pages of quite a few atlases and guides.

My mission at National Geographic Children's Books was to fully integrate the award-winning Kids and Little Kids magazine styles into a new and exciting design formula for the division.

I worked very closely with the editorial teams to build a stylistic consensus based on the need to unify the look and feel of the brand, and then led teams to follow through with an easy-to-understand style guide and continual feedback.

It didn't take long for the teams to fully embrace our new look and feel—and the market was soon to follow. The products began taking on lives of their own in the marketplace and sales went through the roof. 

As Design Director of Books and Children's Publishing, I always pushed to hire the right people for our teams. I like to think that my track record in this arena is extraordinarily good. Hires that I made all went on to do great things for our division and thereby, the Society. I've always brought strong, talented, mindful, and driven employees to our teams. Each with the capability to do my own job. I find that keeps a manager on his or her toes and makes movement and change within the division much more possible.

When my manager, Melina Bellows asked me to join her in our Core (Adult) Books division, the Children's team was in very good hands. Eva Absher, my Associate Design Director, filled the position perfectly and has succeeded on countless levels. NGCB is now the leading children's nonfiction publisher in the country.

Okay. So it wasn't all fun and games... but what a blast! For 13 years, my bosses were tweens. Sure, I had work bosses too, but the real power-wielders in the Kids division were 8 to 12 year-olds across America. We had an amazing marketing team, led by Donna Sprague and Tracy Stone, who managed our survey responses from a hand-selected pool of tween advisors. From those hundreds (later thousands) of surveys, we learned everything we could about what kids that age are looking for in a magazine that's just for them.

And kids tell it like it is. I'll never forget our trip to a local school's fifth grade class for feedback on some new Jaguar cover options. We had a couple of straightforward choices and one artsy cover that was so cool, we were sure it would win. Well, long story short, the kids didn't go for our fave and had countless reasons for their choice, including their desire to see the entire animal, not just a cut-off artistic view.

So we learned something valuable every time we asked, and put that information to use in every aspect of the magazine—editorial, design, and photo. As a result, the magazine's circulation grew from less than 700K to over 1.3 million. We became the highest circulation kids magazine in the world.

While the covers were always a fun challenge, the interior of the magazine was also filled with opportunity to design with bold, intense color and oomph. My overall sense for the magazine was to be organized, daring, and really keep things interesting throughout. I wanted the reader's eye to move around the page seamlessly, always keeping their focus grounded in the heart of each piece.

We didn't design for kids, really. We designed for young adults who wanted to feel as if the magazine was raised to a fun adult's level. And they ate it up. It's funny, but over the years I often heard stories of parents and grandparents reading the magazine as much as their children. 

One of my favorite eras at the Kids division was a time when we were inventing new products. Though our mantra was to constantly come up with new story ideas for the Kids magazine, we were simultaneously a part of even larger thinking.

The results of all this staff brainstorming eventually led to the creation of NG Little Kids magazine. Our editors, photo team, and design team developed this wonderful new product from scratch with a lot of forethought and investigation into the competitive marketplace. The world was ready for this little baby, and we were thrilled to deliver this soon-to-be-award-winning publication.

...and a not-so-great cover. I suppose I'm biased because we had worked for so long with a beautiful WOW! cover (see below) and our last-minute departure from that didn't give us the time to test the waters with this skydiving shot.

That aside, I really enjoyed taking our Kids team's prototype for a new magazine, NG Wow!, and beginning our build of this action-packed "maga-book" with much of the prototype's content. Some of the book's single-pages were taken directly from NGM and given only minor adjustments like type resets and element shifting.

The Kids group was doing very well and for many years it seemed as if we had the Midas touch with new ideas. Melina is a powerfully exciting and inspirational leader who likes to keep things progressing. We fed off the excitement that energy brought to our floor and as a result were constantly moving and shaking. We stayed busy prototyping magazines and alternative products for years.

During that time, we fully conceptualized and designed NG Little Kids magazine, NG Teen magazine, NG Wow! (a large-format rock-and-roll version of National Geographic that felt like a cross between Rolling Stone and Life), and developed covers for NG Parents. The work was incredibly fun, and the visuals outstanding. After all, we were inspired by National Geographic magazine and had access to much of their photographic library. Our Kids photo teams were incredible, and provided truckloads of additional, exciting imagery.

These examples show just a few of the many conceptual ideas from our NG Kids magazine group. The images were used for mock-up purposes only and are not commercially licensed.

Melina Bellows has a knack for honing in on the fun side of teaching kids new information. She called it "giving kids vegetables disguised as dessert." I always liked that and tried to make sure the information we were offering our tweens was packaged in such a way. The magazine had factoids everywhere, and somehow (probably through marketing studies) we learned just how much the kids gobbled it up. Melina's idea to create a page devoted solely to fun facts was truly inspired.

I was fortunate to take the design lead, create the logo NG still uses today, and design the page for many years. The Weird But True department was our highest rated in the magazine in almost every single issue, and led to an abundance of good things down the line.

Here are just a few samples of the page. I always tried to make the facts, typography, and imagery self-contained—and created many of the illustrations myself. They're not the most stylized (unless you consider bad 1980s clip art a style) but their simplicity suited the page perfectly.

I really enjoyed creating art for NG Kids products. We hired a lot of unbelievable artists for both Kids and Little Kids magazines, and their collective works were truly inspirational. They were wonderfully talented and brought a sense of joy to the magazines.

Most of my own illustrations were less refined than the work these artists delivered. I did many illustrations for Weird But True, which complemented the homespun humor and simplicity we'd developed for the department. If we had used beautifully-styled illustrations, Weird But True would have taken on an entirely different look and feel. Somehow these worked perfectly for our audience.

For the Core Books Angry Birds series, I mimicked a style that Rovio (the Angry Birds creators) developed to create the Red image for our Furious Forces title. It's a bit more refined than the Weird But True style, and much more suitable for the book.

Earlier in my career, I had a brief conversation with a renowned art director and we discussed the importance of good Photoshopping versus bad. Together, we looked at some examples of images that were working well, and then recalled images that had some major flaws. Maybe it has something to do with where our interests lie, but we could recall many of the same errors we'd seen without even having the images before us.

One trip to a "Photoshop Fails" website and it's a guaranteed laugh, but it's hard not to feel empathy for the designer. So I've made a concerted effort to remember that when creating files for publication. I have my work checked often by eagle-eyed team members and always pay attention to the finest details.

As I led a team of creatives during the day, my passion for Photoshop became somewhat of a late-night and weekend obsession. One well worth the effort, if you ask me.