Chaos, Creativity, and the Soul of Print w/ Marvin Scott Jarrett & Chris Ashworth
with Marvin Scott Jarrett & Chris Ashworth
Marvin Jarrett and Chris Ashworth join Chris Do to explore print, creative constraints, and the value of chance.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · August 7, 2025
A reunion is not a reason to repeat
A celebrated past can become a creative liability. For Marvin Jarrett, the publisher behind Ray Gun and the magazine MARVIN, and Chris Ashworth, an art director who worked with him on Ray Gun, their reunion brings a specific test: make another music magazine without making a monument to the last one.
Their shared history gives that test weight. In conversation with Chris Do, Jarrett describes Ashworth as one of the best art directors he has worked with, while Do credits Jarrett's publishing with helping shape his own design life.
That admiration creates an obvious temptation. Reassemble the people, revive the textures, and give an audience something it already knows how to love.
Ashworth wants something harder.
“It felt progressive,” he says of the requirement he set for the new work. Recognition alone would not be enough. The magazine needed to show that his response to music had changed, not simply that his older visual language remained available.
This is the real tension beneath the conversation's affectionate return to print. Do remembers magazines as a connection to design, music, and culture before the internet became his primary source of discovery. Jarrett and Ashworth share that attachment, but neither presents the new collaboration as an exercise in preserving a vanished moment.
The past is material. It is not the brief.
Ashworth describes a wider range of tools than he used in the 1990s. Paint, stencils, paper, and other physical processes now enter his work more freely. His ongoing experiments responding visually to songs have expanded what he can bring to an editorial assignment.
Progress means changing the response, not repeating the signature. That distinction matters because an established style can appear productive while quietly narrowing the questions its maker is willing to ask. A recognizable surface can conceal a process that has stopped listening.
For Ashworth, listening is literal. The music comes before the layout, and the artist's work supplies a reason for choosing one visual treatment over another. His identity remains present, but it does not have to dominate every feature in the same way.
There is a useful parallel with the question posed by The Futur's How to stay curious: how to keep exploration alive once a creative person has become associated with a particular kind of work. Here, the answer takes the form of a magazine that asks its art director to encounter unfamiliar musicians rather than continually illustrate his own reputation.
The partnership is therefore not interesting only because two former collaborators are working together again. It is interesting because they are returning with different resources: Jarrett with a more focused publishing proposition, Ashworth with a broader physical vocabulary.
They are not trying to prove that the old work mattered. Do's attachment to it already makes that clear. The harder task is making something that deserves attention without borrowing all its authority from what came before.
A magazine built to be wanted
Jarrett's route back to music publishing began after selling Nylon, which he says he worked on for 15 years. He took time away, produced films, and worked on a Ray Gun book with Rizzoli. Making that book renewed his engagement with music.
Then came a visit to London, where he was speaking at a D&AD conference. Looking through magazine shops and bookstores exposed him to creator-led publications and sharpened the desire to make another music magazine. MARVIN, he says, came together during COVID.
The ambition was specific rather than comprehensive. Jarrett wanted a large-format publication about music and style, with everything approached through music. A musician belongs on the cover. The magazine should introduce readers to artists while also making room for established figures.
Its editorial scope crosses generations:
- Duran Duran and Depeche Mode appear alongside newer musicians.
- Music supplies the organizing lens for style and personality.
- Large images give the publication the presence of posters.
- The magazine serves as a central object within a broader media brand.
Do describes the issues he owns as hefty, unbound, and packaged in a resealable bag. Ashworth says each spread he designed functions as an A2 poster. The physical format is not an incidental container for content that would otherwise look the same anywhere.
It changes the proposition.
A loose spread can be encountered as part of a publication or treated as an image in its own right. Scale gives photography and typography a different presence. The reader is handling something designed to be kept, moved around, and looked at beyond a quick pass through a feed.
The magazine is a desired object, not a smaller mass-market product. Jarrett is not describing a plan to restore the economics of the magazines Do remembers. Asked about the condition of publishing, he says the days of mass magazines are dwindling and returns to a more personal starting point: making the music magazine he wanted himself.
His initial distribution idea was to place it in 50 of the coolest stores around the world. “Let's think of it as like a sneaker drop,” he says. Selling out each issue was the intention, not a reported result for every edition.
That distinction keeps the business argument honest. The conversation offers no circulation figures, margin analysis, or claim that this approach solves publishing for everyone. What it does establish is a deliberate choice of scale and context.
MARVIN also has an agency that works for outside clients, whether or not they appear in the magazine. Jarrett calls the publication a halo piece for the brand. The object carries the taste; the business extends beyond the object.
This makes his proposition narrower but more coherent. Rather than asking a magazine to be everything to a broad audience, he gives it a clear cultural role, a physical reason to exist, and a place inside a larger creative enterprise.
The song comes before the surface
Ashworth's method begins with an idea carried forward from Ray Gun: Sound in Print. He describes the magazine's back pages as a place where people could submit visual responses to songs they loved. Photography, illustration, and other forms could translate listening into something visible.
The premise is simple. The execution does not have to be.
Years later, Ashworth began sticking pieces of paper together again, playing songs, making responses, and posting the results. What began as a physical practice outside a magazine assignment became a way to widen his range inside one.
Do recognizes the resulting work from Instagram: imagined album covers, press-down lettering, paint, and stencils. These are not merely a collection of effects applied to suggest an earlier era. For Ashworth, they are ways to respond to a particular piece of music in the present.
He sets a strict production boundary for MARVIN: only the body copy is typeset. The rest of the page gives him room to make, manipulate, and assemble material through other means. That limitation prevents the entire publication from defaulting to familiar digital habits.
Respond to the artist before reaching for a house style. Ashworth does not want a feature to look like the page before it. His reasoning is editorial, not simply aesthetic: different musicians make different work, and their stories deserve different responses.
He describes receiving a Ken Carson story without already knowing the artist. The assignment became a reason to listen. He put on the music, read the story, and began making.
The process has recognizable ingredients without becoming a rigid formula:
- Listen before designing. The artist's music establishes the starting point.
- Read the story before deciding what the feature should look like.
- Choose from physical materials rather than automatically repeating a treatment.
- Allow the time needed for a response to vary.
Ashworth says a piece can take 10 minutes or two hours. The variation is important. He is not presenting speed as proof of talent or duration as proof of care. The design develops through contact with the material, and the time it needs is not known in advance.
His account also resists the polished mythology of the master plan. Explaining the work afterward makes it sound more predetermined than it felt while he was doing it. The actual sequence contains discovery.
That does not make the process directionless. The song, story, artist, page, and production rule supply direction. What remains open is the form of the answer.
The result is a different understanding of consistency. A publication can be coherent because its pages share a seriousness of response, not because every feature repeats the same graphic arrangement. The recurring commitment is to the music, while the visual expression changes.
Ashworth's signature survives that variation. It simply stops functioning as an instruction to make every artist look like an Ashworth project first and a musician second.
The accident still has consequences
One Ray Gun cover exposes both the pleasure and the cost of this approach. Ashworth and his collaborator Neil had developed a way to bring some analog unpredictability into computer work. They called it “leave it where it lands.”
They would build elements in separate files, then paste them into a layout without automatically correcting the positions. The intention was to introduce a result that a careful, controlling designer would not necessarily choose in advance.
For a Jane's Addiction cover, Ashworth had already composed most of the design together because he knew what he wanted to execute. The barcode remained separate. He copied it into the finished cover and accepted where it landed.
It covered the drummer's head.
Ashworth recalls thinking the placement was compositionally perfect. He also says he would never have deliberately put it there. The useful accident was precisely the one his ordinary decision-making would have screened out.
Do adds a corrective to the romance. Computer placement is not pure randomness: an element can land at the center of the visible working area. The exchange grounds the story in a tool's behavior rather than treating software as a mystical source of invention.
The important point is not whether the event was mathematically random. It is that the result arrived outside Ashworth's conscious compositional plan, and he recognized something worth keeping.
Chance produces an option; judgment makes it a decision. Pasting the barcode did not complete the creative act. Choosing to retain it did. That distinction separates openness to surprise from the habit of defending every accident as inherently meaningful.
The decision also affected someone outside the design process. According to Ashworth and Jarrett, the drummer objected after publication. They responded by sending him a large, framed version of the cover without the barcode.
The cover stayed. The relationship required repair.
This is where the anecdote becomes more useful than a slogan about breaking rules. Visual conviction did not erase the musician's experience of being obscured. Jarrett accepted the design, then helped deal with its consequence.
Ashworth describes another method of interrupting control: swapping seats with Neil halfway through layouts while they worked beside each other. Each designer inherited something already underway and could take it somewhere the other had not anticipated.
The surprise was social rather than mechanical. Another person's judgment entered the page before its original maker had finished claiming it. The pleasure came from seeing the work become something neither would have authored alone.
The Futur's Learning, Collaboration, Critique & Feedback offers a related point of entry into shared creative work. Ashworth's seat-swapping example makes the stakes tangible: collaboration can mean letting another person alter the object, not merely inviting comments after the important decisions are protected.
Both methods interrupt ownership at the level of process. Neither eliminates responsibility at the level of publication.
Freedom needs someone willing to decide
Jarrett's support for experimental art direction is not the same as unlimited permission. His account of working with Ray Gun's first art director, David Carson, makes that boundary explicit.
He says he encountered Carson's work in Beach Culture and saw an opportunity to bring that visual sensibility into a music magazine. Surfing, in Jarrett's telling, had a more geographically limited frame of reference. Music offered a broader subject for the kind of design he admired.
The proposal included considerable freedom. Jarrett wanted Carson to do the work that had caught his attention, not to translate it into something safer before publication.
Then came David Bowie.
Jarrett describes Bowie as his favorite musical icon since age 13. For the cover, he says Carson delivered an image focused on Bowie's neck with the masthead above it. Jarrett wanted a face and would not publish the proposed treatment.
In Jarrett's account, Carson did not want to make that change. Jarrett altered the cover at the prepress house and sent a fax explaining that he was taking the art direction elsewhere. This is the publisher's recollection of the disagreement, not a jointly established account of its motives.
The distinction matters. There is no need to settle the personalities involved to identify the editorial problem: a publisher and an art director reached incompatible conclusions about what a particular cover needed to do.
Creative freedom does not erase editorial accountability. Jarrett had granted broad room to experiment, but he still understood the magazine as his responsibility. The Bowie cover was where his own commitment to the subject overrode his willingness to defer.
The contrast with the barcode story is revealing. A strange placement that covered a musician's head survived because Jarrett accepted the result. A different unconventional crop did not survive because he rejected it.
There is no mechanical rule hiding underneath those two decisions. Both require someone to weigh the specific image, subject, relationship, and intended publication. Taste becomes visible through choices, including choices that disappoint collaborators.
For Jarrett, that taste developed through exposure. He describes growing up in Florida, surfing, and visiting an uncle in New York during summers. Exploring the city gave him more to absorb.
When Do asks how a young design student could develop similar instincts, Jarrett points toward concrete inputs:
- Music that informs a creative practice.
- Magazines and movies that provide inspiration.
- Familiarity with artists who came before.
- A determination to create a distinct lane.
His advice contains a productive tension. Learn what already exists, but do not let familiarity become obedience. References should make a designer more perceptive, not merely more fluent in imitation.
Ashworth calls this “consuming on the edges.” For him, unfamiliar music and alternative radio help keep the input from becoming too predictable. Jarrett's taste is not presented as a professional pose switched on for work. It is a continuing appetite that eventually becomes editorial judgment.
The brief is not the enemy
Ashworth describes himself as a responder. That word explains much of what can otherwise appear contradictory in his practice: strict rules and loose outcomes, supplied material and personal expression, instinct and editorial duty.
On Ray Gun, he says, he did not need to be involved in every photo shoot. A strong photo editor was already there, and Ashworth liked receiving a selection of images to work with. The assignment began with something concrete rather than an unlimited field of possibilities.
A dozen images or a larger selection gave him choices without requiring him to direct every stage that preceded the layout. The boundary kept his attention on the work he wanted to do: responding.
Do identifies the broader principle: “constraints actually are the fertile place to be creative.” An open-ended invitation to do anything for anyone supplies little to push against. Images, copy, and a deadline give creative judgment a problem.
This is not an argument that all restrictions improve work. It is a description of how specific material can activate decisions that remain dormant in abstraction.
Ashworth remembers receiving photographs for a Radiohead cover and finding them beautiful but difficult to imagine as a cover. His initial reaction was not delight at their potential. It was resistance to the problem they presented.
Working through that resistance produced one of his favorite pieces.
The anecdote corrects a familiar assumption: that the best work begins with ideal ingredients. For Ashworth, the gap between a strong photograph and a workable magazine cover forced invention. He had to discover how the image could function in a role it did not immediately appear suited to fill.
His examples suggest a practical working posture, not a formal framework:
- Accept a defined set of images as material to interpret.
- Let the story and the music establish the subject.
- Set a production rule that interrupts habitual choices.
- Stay with an awkward starting point long enough to find its possibilities.
The common element is engagement with what is actually present. A designer can spend the assignment imagining the better photograph, more exciting subject, or more generous conditions that would have made the work easier. Ashworth instead describes learning to work through that first disappointment.
There is an important difference between lowering standards and changing the question. He did not decide the Radiohead cover no longer needed to be good. He stopped insisting that a good cover had to announce itself immediately in the supplied photography.
That shift also changes the meaning of control. Control over every input is not the same as command of the design process. Sometimes it removes the very resistance that would have required a more inventive response.
The brief does not make the work automatically interesting. It makes the problem specific enough for the designer's judgment to become visible.
Keep the judgment, loosen the grip
The conversation's turn toward AI brings the question of judgment into sharper focus. Do separates the ability to produce an image from the ability to recognize a good one. If making becomes easier, selection does not automatically become more discerning.
Jarrett is open to AI as a human-directed tool. He says he has not yet seen visuals that astonish him, while describing impressive possibilities in well-directed use of ChatGPT. Ashworth remains undecided about its place in creative work.
Neither position supplies a universal verdict. The more useful continuity is with everything that preceded the exchange: tools generate possibilities, but people decide what belongs in a publication and what the work should mean.
The conversation then moves into spiritual interpretations of creativity and experiences of absorption while making. Ashworth refers to reading Rick Rubin and describes moments when the finished piece surprises its own maker. Those are personal accounts of creative experience, not evidence establishing where creativity originates.
What can be carried into practice is more modest and more useful. Ashworth has repeatedly made room for an outcome he could not completely specify at the start. Listening, assembling, receiving difficult images, and surrendering a half-finished layout to a collaborator all create that room.
None requires abandoning standards.
His memories of reader mail make that clear from another direction. Ray Gun did not receive unanimous approval, and Ashworth says the magazine particularly enjoyed printing negative letters. Some readers found the art infuriating; others attacked the publication's taste and attitude.
Those responses demonstrate friction, not automatic proof of quality. A furious letter does not certify that a design succeeded, any more than it establishes that the design failed. It records an encounter that the editorial team still has to interpret.
That is a useful companion to The Futur's Dealing With Negative Feedback. In Ashworth's recollection, criticism becomes part of the magazine's public character rather than a command to smooth every edge.
The practical challenge is to distinguish resistance worth working through from consequences worth repairing. Ashworth wrestled with difficult photography. Jarrett enforced a boundary on a cover. The team sent a drummer a new print. Different problems required different responses.
A creative process sturdy enough to accommodate all three cannot rely on a single posture of rebellion or compliance. It needs attention to the object, the subject, and the people affected by the decision.
For a designer facing the next assignment, the useful test is concrete: whether the material has actually been heard, whether the constraint has been explored, and whether an unexpected result deserves to stay. A signature is not an answer to any of those questions.
The accident can be unplanned. Keeping it is a decision.
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“constraints actually are the fertile place to be creative”
— Chris Do
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