UP FRONT

By Richard Mandel
Editor in Chief

The Son of the Parts

Writing this magazine is not like ice sculpting or whittling a good piece of basswood into a toothpick. Designfax has to be designed, as we are using a diversity of bits to make up the magazine you see before you. To that end, I like to juggle several topics onto this page.

I’ll start by mentioning The Award. At the beginning of June, some very nice people from the American Society of Business Publication Editors, Central Region, selected our magazine to receive a Gold Award for 2002 Magazine Re-Design. Because of the number of awards being handed out that evening, there wasn’t a chance to make an acceptance speech, in which I would have acknowledged the efforts of Sandy, our artist, Norma, the production manager, and Steph, the associate editor. Nor did I get to point out that our readership (the best anywhere) has already given many warm reviews to our re-formatting. But, I can do that on this page, so please, stand up and give yourself a hand.

For three days prior to the awards ceremony, I was in New York City attending MD&M East/Atlantic Design Show. I succeeded in gathering a ream of information for companies new and old, for dispersal over Designfax pages in the coming months. Several weeks earlier, I was on a six-day media tour in Switzerland, similar to the one I wrote about on this page exactly three years ago. The Switzerland of this trip appears slightly more succumbing to American influence — Starbucks is making inroads where McDonalds has already established its quarter-pound presence, and I actually saw one Lincoln Navigator picking its way through the Smart cars, micro-Volvos and Twikes. (Interestingly, the most common American cars, after Chrysler minivans, appeared to be Firebirds and Camaros.)

This time out, our tour group was busied with companies involved in industrial and graphic design. The creative process looks the same in the birthplace of font Helvetica as it does here — engineers and designers peering intently at screens while rearranging the data so displayed. However, Swiss nationalism was a key subtext of many companies we visited. Places like USM and Schindler (maker of elevators and escalators) are owned by third or fourth generation descendents, yet operations are retained in Switzerland. Mass-produced Swatch watches roll off Swiss production lines with the words “Swiss made” stamped on the back case, and the company cleaves very tightly to that statement. Victorinox management says that the company was established in its present location decades ago to provide work for local people, and they’re not about to change that by moving manufacturing to China. Besides, they suggested, how Swiss is a Swiss Army knife not entirely made in Switzerland?

Back on this side of the Atlantic, at the New York show, there were a greater number of small service companies and manufacturers than large companies. When taken in combination with area economic development booths promoting opportunities in Florida, North Carolina, Irvine (CA) and Rutland (VT, UK, wherever…), one sees a continued breakup of American industry into small shops, like the dissolution of Ma Bell. I’ve had the pleasure, in my work with Designfax, to meet and talk with companies that are also transgenerational and decades old. Such companies are hard to find, in a bandwidth the size of the US industry, but they’re every bit as solid and golden as Zurich bullion.

And an adjunct to last month’s editorial — my brother e-mailed from St. Louis just before we went to press, and wanted to meet me at Wright-Patterson AFB with his son and other relatives. If you were in Dayton, OH on the 27th of June, you may have seen this moustache lurking between the aircraft. After that, I have hopes of taking the advice of Joe Marshall at DCC Corp., and visit the Oshkosh fly-in one day. Otherwise, it’s off to Semicon West for me, my first time to that show, and the promise of more news and components.