Editorial design is never boring for Pitchfork and GQ’s Chris Panicker

Chris Panicker has spent three years as Pitchfork’s sole designer, and now also works on GQ – two brands with quite distinct identities. From the outside, his projects can look disparate. Quarterly cover-story zines built around artists, the Best of the Year lists that swell into a full editorial package across web, social and streaming, the weekly Rabbit Holed and Off the Dome columns, and Selects, the staff-curated playlist he calls his favourite. The throughline he names is experimentation, and Selects is where it incubates – a low-pressure weekly blank canvas for motion, glitch and analogue animation that then feeds the bigger work. In our chat, he talks through building temporary identities, scripting hundreds of artist cards, and where his glitchy, jittery aesthetic comes from. TBI: Hey Chris! How are you? CP: So good! Thanks for asking :)