Dugald Stermer Wanted to Change the World

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dugald_stermer_wanted_to_change_the_world_20111204/


Photo of a Ramparts cover by SPJ
Dugald Stermer told the Society of Publication Designers that this cover, which shows four of Ramparts’ top employees burning their actual draft cards, was his favorite.

Dugald Stermer, illustrator and visionary art director of Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker, died last week after a long illness. He was 75.

Stermer started at Ramparts in 1964, when it was a two-year-old Catholic literary quarterly that resembled, in his words, “the poetry annual of a midwestern girls school.” But as Ramparts began running more controversial content, Stermer transformed its look and earned the respect of publisher Warren Hinckle and editor Robert Scheer. Between 1966 and 1968, the trio produced a magazine that, according to the New York Times, restored the lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into journalism and gave radicalism a commercial megaphone.

Stermer’s art direction was a critical part of that achievement. Ramparts became the first “radical slick” by combining blockbuster investigative stories with high production values, including color, photographs and glossy paper. That combination supercharged the magazine’s circulation and heightened its impact. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came upon a 1967 Ramparts photo essay called “The Children of Vietnam,” which documented the civilian casualties of U.S. bombing in Vietnam, he immediately decided to come out against the war. King wasn’t the only one affected by that piece; Stermer later said that laying it out was “just about the nastiest job I’ve ever had.”

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1. requiescat in pacem,