In the Studio with Richard Turley

You could potentially describe Richard Turley as an art director or creative director or graphic designer, and he does all of these things, but it still feels a little reductive for the breadth of forms his work has taken over his twenty-year-long career in publishing. It is a useful shorthand, even if it doesn’t get to the heart of the singular way he arranges ideas into words and images on a page. His Chinatown studio is full of words, images, books, cut outs, print-outs, all collaged across every available space on the walls. His colleague, Echo, is busy putting the final touches to a project. 

Richard started his career at The Guardian in 2003, before spending four years at Bloomberg Businessweek between 2010 and 2014, turning a 100-year-old business magazine into a print publication full of experimental, avant-garde graphical storytelling. A famous cover about the merger between United and Continental Airlines featured two planes, midair, caught in flagrante delicto. He moved to MTV for a time, before heading to the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, where he ended up leading the rebranding of Formula One, which is a mad and strange thing to be able to tell people you have designed. He joined the team of the then newly-relaunched Interview Magazine in 2018 as Editorial Director, and started his own agency of sorts, called Food, as a home for all his various other creative and commercial endeavours. 

Those recent projects include Nuts, an anti-fashion style magazine, and Civilization, a broadsheet newspaper which feels a little like a haemorrhage to read, and is designed for the abbreviated attention spans we all suffer from now, where everything seems to be happening on the page all at once, but actually rewards time and reading, and a magazine called Offal which was designed entirely in Microsoft Word.

Here, and in the wealth of other experimental projects he’s led, he’s forged a unique place in the history of print design. It’s easy to place Richard as part of a lineage that includes people like Tibor Kalman, Neville Brody or Terry Jones, and their work using fashion and typography as ciphers for contemporary culture. Turley’s work at Businessweek, for example, was a chaotic visual representation of data, absurd and meme-like before memes became a cultural currency, a reflection of how most of us think about the abstract world of “business”. His layouts at Civilization mimic the psychology of the moment, fragmented, overstimulated, compressed, volatile. He’s arguably one of the few contemporary designers making work that feels theoretically alive, not just visually innovative or elegantly moodboarded. 

“Both Civilization and Nuts are experiments. They start with simple assumptions about how words collide, leak, and create tension. I still believe new ideas are possible within these old structures.”

Civilization, which had been dormant for a few years, has just released a new issue, their seventh. It was a welcome return. Civilization began as what he calls an “anti-image project.” It’s vertigo-inducing to read. Almost existing beyond “content”. “The starting point for Civilization was: if our cultural experience is now shaped by rapid visual collision—scrolling, swiping, the gambling-machine logic of social apps—could you recreate that energy with words instead of images?” Richard says. “Both Civilization and Nuts are experiments. They start with simple assumptions about how words collide, leak, and create tension. I still believe new ideas are possible within these old structures.”

Civilization is a newspaper in form rather than content. And Nuts feels like a new kind of fashion magazine, a medium that often fails to communicate much of value, especially in its more mainstream expressions, which are opaque and glossy and commercial: the same famous photographers, shooting the same beautiful women, wearing the same very expensive clothing, again and again, month after month. In that ecosystem Nuts felt new, and what felt new about it was that it felt real. 

In Nuts and Civilization, their design, which includes what is commissioned and why, as much as how those commissions are arranged on the page, expresses how the world feels; noisy and expansive and at times illegible. He describes each project as “trying to complete a puzzle, without a picture to guide you, and where each piece fits in multiple places. It’s tiring and maddening,” he says, laughing. Nuts, for example, is totally black and white in its image making. It’s anti-glossy, anti-pristine, and overflows with the character of its contributors. 

“My interest—and really the only thing I consistently do—is explore words: Nuts is about how words modify pictures; Civilization is about how words modify other words. Those are the two pillars of my work,” he says.

“Nuts was also about removing photographers by using self-shot imagery, and pairing it with personal texts: inner monologues, abstract poetics, the feeling that you’re living in a film of your own making. Then the second issue of Nuts became a group writing exercise, which almost looped back into Civilization, which was always very communal in spirit anyway.” 

“Often new ideas arrive coupled tightly with new technology, making it hard to separate them. But can an old form like print still produce something we haven’t seen before? Can printed words be used in a way that feels genuinely new?”

In a way the last issue of Civilization before this one, released in 2022, also became the first of Nuts. That issue, before stopping, Richard describes as his Metal Machine Music, referencing Lou Reed’s infamous 1975 album of pure noise and feedback, with no songs or recognisable structures. That issue of Civilization pushes words and their readability to the extreme. It was, he says, an attempt to "destroy the project.” It was full of AI, used, Richard says, as a way of tapping into the collective unconscious, almost illegible, an image as much as a text.  

In Civilization’s new issue a lot of that noise gets stripped back, although it's still quite maximalist in tone, it’s more about navigating “between accessibility and experimentation,” rather than exploding that. Civilization began as a reflection of New York culture, that title a playful bit of pomposity about the exact content of the reflection it was proposing. But it’s grown into something singular, beyond geography and chronology. They celebrated the launch of the new issue with three days of readings and events at Earth, an arts venue in the city. It was a new experience for Richard, who is a bit more content to be behind the scenes.  

“I’m not naturally comfortable being public-facing, so it was emotionally exhausting. When you release work, you’re engaging with energies outside your control. It’s exposing. One discovery we made—through those conversations and events—was a renewed belief that new ideas are possible. Often new ideas arrive coupled tightly with new technology, making it hard to separate them. But can an old form like print still produce something unseen before? Can printed words be used in a way that feels genuinely new?” 

That’s why Nuts is interesting. So many fashion magazines exist simply because they already exist. Nuts’ purpose was immediately clear: people, clothes, and the relationship between self-image and self-expression. It’s a user-generated experiment in looking at style and what we wear and how we communicate that. Magazines now, even as they retain print products, are increasingly disembodied, digital experiences. They are amorphous vibes of content, constantly producing new things to flick through and not pay that much attention to. This is one of the things Richard is working against.   

“A digital cover of a magazine feels cheaper than an actual print cover, even if we only ever encounter it the same way. It comes down to energy—somehow we can tell a ‘real’ JPG file from an ‘unreal’ one. There’s a tangibility we intuit,” Richard says.

“In Nuts, every picture was physically printed, handled, re-photographed. That physicality shaped the whole energy of the project. If a shoot is on film, that piece of celluloid existed for a moment in the same space as the subject, and that matters. Old magazines often worked with images that were third or fourth generation—negative to positive to scan to print. The deterioration added character. Some newer magazines lack that texture.” 

“The starting point for Civilization was: if our cultural experience is now shaped by rapid visual collisions—scrolling, swiping, the gambling-machine logic of social apps—could you recreate that energy with words instead of images?”

Richard’s work, across Civilization and Nuts, and the constellation of smaller experiments orbiting them, points to a broader belief that print is still interesting. But none of these projects are nostalgic, they aren’t looking back at some imagined, hallucinatory golden age. Instead Richard rewires things, is interested in the design languages of friction and texture and volatility, allowing us to find new joys in familiar mediums. In that sense, his greatest contribution may be less a particular design language than a way of thinking.