Typically, Brodovitch would begin his layouts by designing the layouts as illustrations by hand. His assistant would receive these sketches to look over, but the photographers and freelance writers were often given little or no direction at all besides to come up with something new and unusual. When the photographs for the issue arrived, he would pick the most visually interesting and have a variety of sizes of reproductions made on a photostat machine. From these, each spread would be made one at a time, then arranged among the others to create a well-paced magazine.[38]