Wired.com has posted the final entry of its Storyboard blog, which followed the magazine's design and edit staff through the entire process of producing an article about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. For magazine wonks—you're reading this blog, aren't you?—it's an irresistible look over the shoulders of a smart creative team.
Playing off the self-referential, Möbius strip-style world of Kaufman's films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), senior editor Jason Tanz proposed tracking the story's development online. The blog would be a "profile of a profile."
Reading Storyboard grunt-by-grunt for a month might have proven a little tedious. We didn't. But looking over the whole collection of posts now that it's complete is fascinating.
Among the artifacts:
- Video of an early meeting exploring the idea with Tanz, creative director Scott Dadich (who is very into chronicling the creative process at his own design-oriented blog, The Process), senior editor Nancy Miller, design director Wyatt Mitchell, executive editor Bob Cohn, and editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
- The pitch memo that Tanz used to get approval of the magazine article. It's a nice parody of the Kaufmanesque paranoid internal monologue that Nicholas Cage delivered in Adaptation, a vehicle that Tanz rejected as too predictable for writing the actual article.
- Excerpts of e-mail messages about headlines and other display copy
- Written comments on the developing manuscript from editors and fact-checkers
- Design layouts in various stages of evolution.
As interesting as it is to magazine makers and journalists, we can't help wondering what Wired.com's main audience made of the Storyboard blog. And did Wired learn anything from this exercise that will shape its publishing plans online, in print, and in the Kaufman-like realm in between?
