Words, Pictures, and... oh yes, Ideas

    For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the way that words and pictures can inspire, engage and enlighten. My first inkling of this came as a kid reading Art Buchwald and Nicholas von Hoffman in The Washington Post, Russell Baker in The New York Times, and Herb Caen* in the San Francisco Chronicle. (We moved around a bit.) The ability of these writers to reduce huge chunks of wit and wisdom to often a thousand or fewer near-perfect words not only excited me, it showed me that the world actually valued  such flashes of nimble intelligence.

    At the same time I marveled at the way that magazines like Life, Look, Time and National Geographic used compelling photography to both broaden our understanding of reality and totally shake it up. Later, reading the edgy Esquires and Rolling Stones designed by Roger Black and the early, sassy New York magazines art directed by Milton Glaser and edited by Clay Felker, I saw the way that style and design could transform media. I came to understand that the way one puts images and words together communicates a whole  other sort of intelligence and how this is done can make or break the rest of the content.

     As a career writer and editor, I have been fortunate to be able to do what I love, and while doing it, to work with and learn from many of the best designers, editors, writers and photographers in the business. The one constant I have found that separates the great media they produce from the merely good and the not-so-good, and the media that gets seen and read from all of the stuff that doesn't, is clear evidence of an active mind with lots of ideas, imagination, and inspiration on constant display in every aspect of their presentation.

     The wonderful thing about the rise of electronic media in all its many forms is the opportunity it offers for exploring new ways of combining words, pictures, and, yes, ideas. It is the promise and challenge of this new multi-dimensional world that makes the work of communicating, in any form, so exciting. And I count my blessings every day that I get to be a part of it.  ~ Peter Lemos

* One of the thrills of my professional life was having Herb Caen applaud a piece of mine in one of his columns (see Metropolis in Portfolio).