Blueprint’s redesign, the very first issue of which you hold in your hands, is founded on a 20-year relationship between two designers. In 1988 Patrick Myles, art director of Blueprint, was just a student
trying to decide which design trail to follow when David Quay, a leading typographer responsible for the D&AD Award-winning Yellow Pages type,
stepped up as his tutor and mentor.
‘David was the main influence in setting me on the career path I am on today,’ Myles says. It was while teaching him graphic design that Quay
first suggested to Myles that he read Blueprint. At the time he could not have foreseen how closely he would be linked to the publication.
Myles’s professional connection with Blueprint stems back to the early Nineties at Wordsearch, a design consultancy run by Peter Murray, which originally launched the title.
In 1983 Murray had noticed a hole in the market for an inspirational magazine that presented lavish images and a critical analysis of the industry – a magazine that would contemplate architecture
and design’s relationship to the rest of the world.
He enlisted Deyan Sudjic and Simon
Esterson as editor and art director and
together the three touted the new publication as ‘London’s magazine of design, architecture and style’. The first 18 issues were put together voluntarily by leading journalists. This group of friends used their contacts in the business to
drum up much-needed funding. Blueprint
wouldn’t exist without Terence Conran
and Norman Foster’s £2,000 and Richard
Rogers’s £500 donations.
It was at Wordsearch that Myles began his long association with the magazine. He worked on Blueprint Extra books and design work that grew out of Wordsearch, such as Eye and Tate
magazines, before moving on to Wilmington Media in 1994.
At this point, the magazine pursued him. In 2000 Wilmington bought Blueprint and Myles once
again found himself working with the title, first as creative director and more recently in a more handson capacity as art director, assisted by senior designer Kieran Gardner.

Throughout this time Myles and Quay continued to take an interest in each other’s work. In 2004, Myles invited his former tutor to take part in the
publication’s A Blueprint for Life exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Earlier this year they met at Quay’s home in Amsterdam to discuss a
handful of works in progress Quay had been experimenting with in between designs for The Foundry, the fonts company he co-founded in 1990.
Myles saw potential in Trip Trap, a stepped typeface formed of bars laid out in columns, a construction that related to architecture in terms of blocks and skylines. He asked Quay to complete the font exclusively for Blueprint’s redesign.
‘It is a simple grid idea that has a strong
structure and vertical emphasis. It was
originally influenced by signage typefaces,
the sort you see on the side of buses and
trains,’ says Quay.
Blueprint New Era is now used for headlines and flagging up the different sections of the magazine. It is also reflected in keylines and the way images
are aligned. ‘A lot can be developed from New Era,’ explains Myles. ‘With it we could construct images, contributor portraits, quote marks and chevrons for
navigation.’ New Era will be complemented with the fonts Officina and Trump Medieval and, for the
editorial, American Typewriter.
There is much to be said for going back to basics. No other design and architecture title can simultaneously make claim to both the heritage and
originality of Blueprint. That is why for its first major redesign in almost a decade the magazine’s publishing team has delved into its past and reconnected with the roots that established Blueprint as the nerve centre for ideas that shape design and architecture in today’s society.

This redesign brings together the attitudes that shaped Blueprint’s past with the free thinking that will generate the future of the industry. You will have
instantly noticed the new size, studied the new masthead and drawn your finger over the new typeface. But how did Blueprint get here and why did it need a redesign?