Editorial design is never boring for Pitchfork and GQ’s Chris Panicker — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Chris Panicker has spent three years as Pitchfork’s sole designer, and now also works on GQ – two brands with quite distinct identities. From the outside, his projects can look disparate. Quarterly cover-story zines built around artists, the Best of the Year lists that swell into a full editorial package across web, social and streaming, the weekly Rabbit Holed and Off the Dome columns, and Selects, the staff-curated playlist he calls his favourite. The throughline he names is experimentation, and Selects is where it incubates – a low-pressure weekly blank canvas for motion, glitch and analogue animation that then feeds the bigger work. In our chat, he talks through building temporary identities, scripting hundreds of artist cards, and where his glitchy, jittery aesthetic comes from.

TBI Hey Chris! How are you?

CP So good! Thanks for asking :)

TBI You’ve spent the past three years as Pitchfork’s sole designer, originally brought in by Marina Kozak. Before that chapter, how did you first find your way into editorial design?

Prior to Pitchfork, I was in the undergraduate Communication Design program at Parsons. I was also a reader and fan of Pitchfork throughout high school and college. I had the opportunity to learn Motion Graphics from Drew Litowitz (former Pitchfork designer, motion wizard, and amazing art director) at Parsons, so a lot of what I do today is because of the inklings of interests I had gained from his class.

I will say I didn’t specifically seek out only editorial work; I was interested in a lot of different forms of design. I spent a lot of my time in undergrad coding and tutoring for code, as well as analogue animation and stop motion classes. I just happened to throw a Hail Mary and apply to a designer position at Pitchfork (that I was probably underqualified for) during my fourth year. Drew graciously introduced me to Marina (who I must add was a joy to interview with and amazing to work with and learn from). We went through a few rounds of interviews, and the rest is history.

TBI You now work across both GQ and Pitchfork. How do you handle two distinct editorial voices at once, and what shifts in your approach as you move between them?

CP It’s always been an exciting challenge for me to design for both brands. I love reading about fashion and…uh…gentlemen almost–if not just as much as I love reading about music. I think part of the fun is that the brands have quite distinct identities. With GQ we have a pretty tight design system that essentially stems from and points back to our magazine. There’s room to play and experiment within each print feature, but every project goes through a few rounds of review and buttoning up before going live in GQ print and web. One specific difference is that most of the GQ design projects and web illustrations will be static, and motion is used more exceptionally on the website.

Since I’m the sole designer working at Pitchfork under Keir Novesky and Michael Houtz, I have a lot more freedom to experiment with design and motion graphics. I’m basically aiming to hit the same bar that we hit in GQ, with fewer rounds of revisions and more room to follow my personal interests. It’s been such a fun opportunity to be working across all of our projects from our Cover Story zines, longform YouTube videos like Over/Under, social video series like My Perfect 10, and our Best of the Year lists on the web. My overall goal with my Pitchfork design work is to surprise people with how many people work on the brand’s art and hopefully lead to some speculation for how each illustration, identity and zine was made. 

Working between the two brands, I’d say that the main skill I had to pick up very quickly was time management. No matter what brand, I want to challenge myself to try something new, but also always keep in mind the timeline and scope of the project. It’s been a difficult balance to strike, and I’m always learning how to manage my time and workload better.

TBI The quarterly cover-story zines are small-print issues, each built around one artist, from Bladee to Olivia Rodrigo. How do you find the right visual world for each one?

CP With the zines, I’m usually laying out the page in a way that both responds and speaks to the energy of the interview and the creative direction of the photoshoot. Prior to Pitchfork/GQ, I didn’t have a ton of print experience, but everything I’ve learned about print design has come from working with Michael Houtz and Keir Novesky on the GQ issues and these Pitchfork zines. With these cover stories, there’s always a bit more freedom to play, but there’s a tricky balancing act of bolstering this beautiful commissioned photography, ensuring that the reading experience is both engaging and clear, and experimenting with different types of layouts to make something I’m personally excited about. I think I’m still learning what the best ways are to strike that balance, but it is a very exciting challenge for me to explore.

TBI The Best of the Year lists grow into a whole editorial package across the site, social and streaming – something you likened to a short-lived branding project. How do you build a temporary identity like that and keep it together across so many surfaces?

CP When I think in terms of scope/workload, these year-end lists are the heaviest. They involve building an identity and system that can be carried out in multiple features and platforms. Style and approach for the lists vary from year to year (mostly based on what has been exciting me throughout the year, and what I think could represent that year well), but the goal with the system is to design something that is templated but never monotonous. All of the content settles in fairly close to the publish date, so my goal with this system is to make something dynamic but efficient to render/export/share. The output is always web art, social carousels, hundreds of individual artist cards, playlist art for streaming platforms, etc., so I’ve developed my own ways to tackle the challenges of designing for multiple aspect ratios and sizes. 

Conveniently, a common workflow in motion design is to create one ‘master’ or ‘main’ composition that is essentially one giant canvas. From there, each crop for different use cases can be built. I’ll typically use Cavalry for this type of project, as it has a few specific features that allow this kind of workflow, like ‘Pre-Comp Overrides,’ which can be parameters to scale and adjust elements for different compositions while not affecting the main comp.

One other essential skill I implemented this past year was working with scripting and automations in InDesign and Photoshop to create hundreds of our Artist Assets, which are individual cards for each album in our Best Albums of 202X list (as well as for each song in our Best Songs of 202X). One underrated feature of the Adobe suite is that ExtendScript (which is essentially JavaScript) is heavily integrated in each app, and you can code automations of these sorts of repetitive tasks pretty easily with some basic JavaScript knowledge. So for these, I use a BASH script to automate the album cover downloading process, then I use the ExtendScript to read a .tsv sheet that has all of the album titles/artist names from the list, then replace all of this content in a composition that I’ve designed to align with the rest of the list’s graphics. Just for fun, I always find fun ways to add variation in this automation as well, indexing colours, positioning, etc. I’d say that a lot of what I’ve learned about how to develop a tight design system came from working on these lists, and finding these little hacks to make that process easier. 

TBI Selects is the one you singled out as a favourite – a weekly staff playlist with bespoke art every time. What keeps it fresh for you week after week, and how do you decide where each edition’s art should go?

CP I’ve been making new Selects art weekly for the past three years, outside of the three or four weeks in our off-seasons. The art always has the same content, it has the Pitchfork wordmark up top, ‘Selects’ in the centre, and the publish date on the bottom. 

Outside of those three things, I always have fun exploring different ways to type, paint, glitch-out, and play with the word ‘Selects.’ This project is how I learned everything from After Effects hacks, Cavalry’s basics, to some less graphic design-centric software like Aseprite. As for a given week’s approach, sometimes that is dictated by the time I have to work on it. Some weeks I have time to think and experiment, while for other weeks the first idea has to be the best idea. I will say that broadly, my process is purely exploratory. Most of my recent Selects art is made entirely with Cavalry, trying out different combinations of effects and Deformers, playing with different parameters, until the texture of the motion is just right. Some weeks really hit the mark for me; sometimes I wish I could redo them, but that’s the fun of the project. It’s low-pressure, and a blank canvas to purely explore different flavours of motion design, analogue animation, art forms and more. 

TBI What has that regular, lower-pressure practice taught you that then feeds the bigger projects?

CP Almost all of my new interests in design technology and software stem from experimenting within the bounds of Selects. It’s been my way of incubating those skills, so that when the right project comes along, I know just the right direction to take it in. The time constraint also gives me a good idea of what that software or medium would look like in the average Pitchfork project workflow.

When the right project comes along, I know just the right direction.

TBI There’s a contrast between the long-lead, higher-pressure work like the zines and Best of the Year, and the quick turnaround of the weekly projects. How do you manage that rhythm?

CP It’s tricky, but I think this is the challenge that pretty much every editorial designer has to tackle. I’d say that a lot of how I’ve learned to manage the highs and lows came from talking to my bosses, mentors, coworkers and friends. Just the other day we wrapped up the design of the September issue of GQ, and I can’t wait for that to go live. 

Me, Kelsey Niziolek (GQ’s other ace designer), Michael Houtz, and Keir Novesky were chatting about how crazy everything gets for all of us, and one takeaway I had from the conversation was, ‘at least it’s never boring.’ It’s a little overstimulating at times, but it’s never, ever boring work.

TBI Where does your personal ‘glitchy and jittery’ aesthetic come from?

CP There’s a long and short answer to this. The short answer is that it comes from the Noise behaviour in Cavalry (which essentially adds a bit of randomness/chaos to a value you set). The long answer is that it started with me trying to recreate the jitteriness of retro VHS motion graphics. There are a lot of different ways to fake that, and initially I was using the ‘wiggle()’ expression in After Effects set to wild values. I kept doing that sort of effect until I got tired of it, and then just started to play with any glitchy/shaky effects to add some texture to a composition. I later learned about Noise in Cavalry, and it made that process even more fun and iterative.

TBI You talked about editorial design teaching you to trust your gut and to design ambitiously even with a deadline in sight. How has the freedom to take ownership shaped the designer you are now?

CP I’d say I’m always pushing myself to step back and look at what my projects really are, what they’re saying about the brand, and questioning if I truly am proud of how this reflects on myself as a designer. This will always vary, and I’ve grown to become more comfortable with that, but I always want to ensure that I’m making work that I can look back on and surprise myself with.