Among the problems we try to solve here at SIR headquarters is the ongoing problem that Things Need To Look Nice. We're constantly designing things: chapbook and SIR covers, posters, a table layout for the upcoming AWP conference, a new website, and a new SIR logo. In nature, plants and animals are born and they grow naturally into aesthetically-splendid things, but in the artificial world of literary publishing (despite all of the parent-child metaphors writers love to use for their relationship to their work), everything is faceless and without personality until we have sat for days in front of a bright screen, manipulating lines and text until our eyes are puking.
We're amateurs at this, of course. It takes us entirely too long, and the revision process is grueling. I hesitate to put a percentage on the amount of our office time that goes into graphic design - a thing we never claimed to be qualified for (Well, I once did, and faked it well enough to land a job as a graphic designer/web programmer in New York City, but that's another story that ends just as pathetically as it begins...), but it's somewhere around 100%. It's almost all we do. Editors, ha! Let's be honest here. We're underqualified, overworked, graphic designers.
- Chris Dickens, Associate Graphic Designer for the Southern Indiana Review
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