Good Night Old Friend: ID Magazine Closes After 55 Years

After 55 years, ID Magazine, the grand dame of American design publishing, has shuttered. It’s a terrible blow to the design world, and especially to those of us in the extended ID family — I was a contributing editor, and wrote for the the magazine for many years. It was an honor to be a part of such a storied legacy.

ID was a labor of love and labored over by the best designers, editors and writers in the business. I learned a great deal about a great deal from reading the magazine, and also from working as a contributor. This diversity was what made ID such a compelling magazine — it was about all the disciplines of design, from graphics to architecture to industrial design — but this broad view was also a weakness, at least in the advertising department. When news broke that ID was being put to sleep, I was — bitter irony — at work on a feature on new products designed to prevent death via sleep. My last published piece for the magazine was a review of the collected essays of Paul Goldberger, a kind of wistful book that now seems an appropriate finale. My last cover [above at right, adjacent to the magazine’s first, from 1954 and designed by Alvin Lustig] was titled “No More Tears.” I suspect that more than a few tears have been shed this week, and rightly so.