How a Band of Design Misfits Brought Anti-Aesthetics to Bloomberg Businessweek
Bizzaro stock imagery, internet humor, and an embattled business magazine amidst a global financial crisis
By Cliff Kuang
There was a time, around 2013–2016, when the most experimental magazine in the world wasn’t some Berlin fashion zine that doused its models in crude oil but Bloomberg Businessweek, a once-dowdy battleship of American journalism. This was a time when you’d see a new BBW cover about an airline merger that showed one airplane humping another or one that looked like it had been assembled from PowerPoint clip art by some sales manager on a cocaine bender and think, “How the hell are they getting away with that?” And the answer happened to be some strange wrinkle in the universe that aligned certain people with one another, at just the right time, under rare circumstances. “Richard Turley, BBW’s creative director at the time, and I had done conventional work. We had our shot and we didn’t want to waste it,” says Josh Tyrangiel, who was hired as BBW’s editor-in-chief at just 37 years old.
