Tar is one of the most thoughtful, well-designed new magazines I’ve seen in a while. And yet something doesn’t feel right.

The magazine is the creation of Evanly Schindler, one of the founders of Black Book, and Diesel’s former director of advertising and communications, Maurizio Marchiori, as part of a bigger agency creating books, films, websites and brand communication.

The magazine states its intentions clearly from the beginning, in Schindler’s opening letter. “Tar magazine is about art and aesthetics with a social awareness… As a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture, tar mag is about the process as much as the result, the ride more than the destination. And the ride is about living a meaningful life through an artful existence.”

The rallying call, repeated twice in bold caps in the opening letter, is “LET THE WORK SPEAK!”

So what does it say?

The first thing it says is that this is an ambitious, thoughtful, creative and well-designed magazine.

On the cover, the distinctive, ghostly photo plays a supporting role to the white splurging masthead and then the handwritten cover line.

The masthead itself is reproduced in a delightfully 3D varnish, with all of the ridges of the white paint represented beautifully.

Inside, the magazine opens with the usual long line of ads (Barney’s gets the first pages, and they also devoted window space on Madison Avenue to the mag), and then, before even the contents page, a surprise: a series of hyper-glossy pages, containing photos that look like ads but carry no brand names.

This is, it turns out, an installation piece within the magazine by David Sherry, called “Advertisements for myself”. It’s the first of a series of pieces that play on the magazine-ness of Tar, and demonstrate a bold and intelligent awareness about the nature of their creation, ads and all.

The design team, led by Neville Wakefield and Evanly Schindler, have created a confident and clear structure (Features / Communications / Projects), and a neat delineation of editorial and advertisements through a border that contains a splash of tar overlaid on top of the vertical folios. From editor’s letter onwards, it’s clear and consistent, the epitome of good repetitive design.

And then at one glorious moment, for the Del Toro / Che Guevara article, it becomes physical without warning, the “tar” glued onto the page and gritty to the touch (perhaps this is the way they delineate the cover story?). Again without warning, it drops back into 2-dimensionality at the next piece. Lovely.

It’s one thing to have a big budget, but quite another to spend it wisely. What we have here is a number of different papers (I count five including the cover and subscriber card), and they’re used intelligently. The start of each section has a semi-translucent opening with a splash of that tar across it; translucent also makes an unexpected appearance during a discussion about television news, and most successfully, in a self-promotional feature where the photos are printed on the special paper, the captions underneath underlaying each image.

If only every society party page were done this way.

Scattered throughout are fake business cards for artists, some of whose work is featured elsewhere in the magazine. It’s another art installation, recurring throughout the magazine right up to the inside back page, and one that makes you smile. Next up: business cards for other kinds of well-known people?

In the vast majority of articles, pre-existing art is used to illustrate features, rather than commissioning photos / illustration. It’s a bold idea, but for me doesn’t work often enough. I’m accustomed to images drawing me into the article, and somehow enhancing it – this just feels like two parallel reflections on a theme, and they don’t always coincide enough.

Far stronger are the opening spreads to many of the articles, bold and graphic in their own way.

Also great is an unexpected double gatefold Andreas Gursky image used as the opening for a piece on overpopulation, for me the best designed feature in the magazine.

There’s also a reprint of material that they admire and has dropped out of print, in this issue being an essay from Joan Didion’s book The White Album, designed in the dimensions of a book, with white printed on white to form a shiny background for the “book” on the page.

In the back section, monochrome Ryan McGinly photoshoot of adolescents is counterpointed with a bright series of photos called (with a slightly colonial tone) “Fashion Anthropology”, of African woolen ritual costumes.

And the back page is used as a mini gallery again, where Nate Lowman has created his own, childlike take on a Warhol classic.

So, some clever ideas, a clear and coherent structure, intelligence without being too clever, and some good-looking graphic design and physical playfulness that could only work in the format of a magazine. It’s well worth picking up for these reasons alone, and I’m very interested in seeing what other work will emerge from the agency.

Some of the features make great reading too, including Matthew Barney and David Cronenberg discussing opera and film design, the story of Labeisha the Diva, and the entertainingly silly Third Dates with World Leaders.

Some of the articles, however, feel more than a little out of place. On the face of it, this isn’t Tar’s fault per se. Fashion + art + social conscience have always sat uneasily together. Long before Benetton tried to Unite the Colors, fashion and art have tried and mostly failed to get a conscience by addressing the most basic human needs, while completely ignoring them in the process.

What we have in Tar is a story about a Lebanese Arab-focused news service, an anti-establishment piece about the fall of journalism by John Pilger, a short admiring discussion with CNN’s Christine Amanpour and a squabble about Israel/Palestine and the use of women as sexual torturers in Abu Graib by Naomi Wolf and Coco Fusco. On their own, they feel a little unfocussed, a scatter-gun approach to global issues via big names. Rather than a conscience, the magazine has guilt, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. So far, so New York, you might say. In the context of the whole magazine, however, these articles are somewhat more troubling.

Schindler states at the beginning of the magazine that Tar is “a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture”, with collective conscience meaning “moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society”.

But this is not a magazine that acts as a uniting force – quite the opposite. It retails at $20. The first pages you see when you open it are ads for Barney’s, Prada, Armani. It contains expensive contemporary art for its own sake, glorious as some of it is. Though I haven’t seen Schindler talk anywhere about the intended readership, Barney’s creative director has described the magazine as the perfect fit for them to advertise in, as “we have tons of art world glitterati shopping at Barney’s.”

The magazine is aimed squarely, and accurately, towards the worlds of high fashion and art. Like Black Book before it, it feels like an essential accessory for the designer coffee tables of the New York partygoing set, and when world issues are brought up, it is done so in a context in which these people can feel safe. For all of its social pretensions, this is an elite fashion / art magazine, like so many others.

Which would be fine, if its content had remained firmly within that realm. I don’t have a problem per se with a magazine being elitist (well, not until the revolution comes), but where things jar is when the magazine claims simultaneously to be on the barricades and in the galleries. I suppose the key point is this: if many of the social conversations Tar includes in its pages were taken to their logical conclusions, then the magazine wouldn’t exist.

Though I’m not fan of everything it does, Monocle at least tries to deal with the world’s problems by focusing on social change through innovation and politics, which fit neatly with its designer aesthetics. Tar, however, seems to want change to come from the streets. I’m sure Team Tar do want their readers to think about more serious issues with a social conscience – but in this context, the issues are in danger of appearing as little more than cause celebres, bleeding hearts as accessories. The way it stands, many of the causes they’re leaning towards simply are not compatible with the world Tar inhabits.

Despite being such a clear, thought out and intelligent magazine, and one of the most gloriously magazine-y magazines around, this inherent contradiction at its heart makes Tar‘s mission feel highly problematic. It wants to be both expensive art and social conscience, which is all well and good on the face of things, but hosting a banquet in the name of world hunger feels somehow more offensive than just serving the food for the sake of it.

Esquire‘s 7 greatest stories, now available online
They’re all well worth reading / lamenting the state of the world today, etc

Swedish magazine editors have plastic surgery for a story
One had his nose removed, then put back with the word “stet” stitched underneath

Personalise your inflight magazine
Right now, a gimmick – but not too far off a POD magazine future

Model artificially aged for Vogue shoot
All done through lighting, angles, make-up, posture and costume. Photoshop, know your limits

Teen Vogue creates a buy-nothing popup store
Clever use of branding, advertisers. Everyone wins

Yet another new newspaper supplement
I launches in a marketplace that already has T, FW, WSJ, ST. The future of print is acronyms inside other print

People think digital magazines are green
Though as Tony points out, are they really? Reminds me of another survey I saw a year or so ago, about how uncoated paper is seen to be less harmful to the environment than glossy paper. The reality is that it often isn’t

American Apparel has a rather good online newsstand
Some of the best independent press celebrated alongside pants (thanks Mike)

‘Sexiest men alive’ issue includes Scratch n Sniff
Thankfully not the smells of the men themselves, but the smells that make them feel sexy. Though you can bet it isn’t the chemical reproduction of the smells that does the trick

Cost of DVD partworks adds up
£457.92 for a series of Buffy you can buy for £20 or less on Amazon (thin naff pseudo magazine not included)

PC Magazine embraces the inevitable before its too late
Goes online for real, rather than pretending to while firing all its staff. More reaction here

Google digitises Life’s database
More than 10 million pics, most of them never seen by the public. The first part of a much bigger strategy I mentioned earlier

Free drinks, free magazine subscription too
Following on from Rolling Stone giving away subscriptions with t-shirts. I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the States before it goes away

Teenagers invited to create Dazed cover
Deadline of today, kids. As it says in the small print, 37-year-old graphic designers beware

Bible magazine launches in English
I interviewed the team behind this for the Wall Street Journal back in February, when it was published in Swedish. I haven’t seen yet if the images are different, though I think some will be. And the New Testament is more bankable than the Old in the USA, it seems

Swiss distributor blogs new magazines
One of those things that makes so much sense, it makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it

Japanese fashion magazine for train travellers
Does it include a section called “Rail Lives”?

This is a fairly short review, and it’s entirely my fault.

I’d been saving writing about the relaunch of Icon magazine (not to be mistaken with the bling sleb magazine set up and run by ex-footballers). And then I’d been putting it off. And then I got distracted and oh look a badger.

Now I see that they’re four issues into the redesign, and I’m somewhat out of date. It’s not easily obtainable on the American newsstands I frequent, so I shall make some sweeping statements about the redesign issue, the magazine in general, and otherwise mark it down as “worth a look” for those who don’t know it.

The salient points:

• It’s an architecture/design mag that treads that difficult line between thinking about current projects, and thinking about thinking about current projects.

• That means it puts thought about the way of things alongside things. So “the light bulb” sits next to new architecture, art in public spaces alongside designer furniture.

• That could make it unbearably clever-clever, but mostly it isn’t. Well-chosen images and a design that breathes in the space its given, helps a lot. Texts are either short and newsy or “isn’t it funny when you think about it”, or long essays allowing room for thought without being over-designed.

• Like Wallpaper and Esquire UK before them, they have rather lovely subscriber-only, cover-line free covers. The above image is the subscriber copy. Here’s the newsstand one, though I’m not sure it works better than the line-less one. Is Bless really a big enough name to make people pick up the mag? There’s also a bit of confusion between the big pink caps and the lower case. Which is the sell? Is it the CAPS (“SOU FUJIMOTO”) or is it the lower case (“Markus Miesson meets Olafur Eliasson”)? If the caps, do ESSAY, CONVERSATION really do the job? If the lower case, does “Sand, stone and styrene”? Will the extra clutter actually result in more sales?

There are many other design / architecture magazines around, and unlike many, this one doesn’t scream “buy me” for its trendy exclusives and launch party photos. Instead, it’s more like Radio 4 for architects and industrial designers – thoughtful, occasionally too thoughtful for its own good, but also calmly interesting, sardonic and quietly provocative for its dedicated fan base. At its best moments, it rewards the time you give it, which is more often than not – a ratio to be proud of.

For a more indepth, and far more timely review, I point the honorable reader to Simon Esterson on the Eye blog back in September, where there are more images of the mag too.

I hereby promise to do better for the next review, which will be of a strange and both wonderful and morally dubious beast.

Hurray for desktop publishing. A special spoof edition of the New York Times was distributed free on the streets of the Big Apple yesterday, dated “July 4th 2009″, filled with “all the news we hope to print”. The Iraq War is over, national health care has been introduced and all petrol cars have been recalled.

And apparently, the activists behind the spoof paper printed 1.2 million of the things.

The AP claims that a small group of creative individuals, including professional journalists, are behind it all, with the logistical support of the Yes Men. The idea was to show new Prezbama (and everyone else) what could be possible by next July. Whoever it was, the writing is great and detail is stunning, right down to the ads, and the fake website too. (They’re probably safe on parody rights, but may be forced to put a banner at the top saying “This is not the real NY Times“.) They haven’t quite got the design / typography perfect (there are probably copyright implications there too), but hey, when the joint is this good, who cares about a little sawdust on the floor?

The nom de plume H Schweppes registered the website and also has a Vimeo channel showing the papers coming off the press, and people’s reactions. As for how they paid for it, there seems to be a real ad on the back page for KBR. If that’s so, that’s very smart work (or maybe I just don’t get the joke).

More reactions here from Gawker, Gothamist and the NY Times City Blog. Right now, ebay prices are laughable. Wait a few days, and check again.

In the meantime, you can download a pdf of the edition here.

Wonderful. Just one doubt left: why didn’t the NY Times think to do it itself? What a wonderful ad campaign that would have been…

Mediabistro reports that Sotheby’s will soon be auctioning the first 53 editions of Visionaire, the extravagant, silly limited-edition objet d’art/magazine from the publishers of V and V Man. The expected sale price is £15,000-20,000, which isn’t bad for a magazine that often retails for several thousand dollars a copy, especially considering some fool apparently paid $65,000 for the same editions in December. Whether it’s worth it or not all depends on your view of art.

I caught up with some of the Visionaire crew at the recent NY Art Book Fair, where they very kindly showed me the printer’s dummy of their new edition, Surprise (sponsored by a well-known champagne brand, retailing at an unusually cheap $250). It’s rather a lovely box of pop-up art volumes created by the usual mix of artists/photographers, with a particularly lovely fanning credits page. Pictures here and here. I also got to stroke some of the issues I had only read about previously, including the flick books by Spike Jonze, Mario Testino and others.



For those who are considering a bid on the Sotheby’s lot, you might instead want to hold off and save your pennies for their limited-edition Goyard trunk, recently unveiled at Maison Goyard in Paris. The first ten come with issues 1-50 of Visionaire inside. The price? For you, $150,000. Like I said, silly.

I actually own a couple of copies of the magazine in question, but I didn’t pay full price, no siree. Here’s my secret: I bought my copies unopened from this particular eBayer who may or may not be connected to the magazine. They’re still not cheap, but $76 is a darned improvement on the several hundred dollar RRP.

UPDATE: The Sotheby’s lot failed to sell.

Folio reports that Time has planned a march on its rivals by sending its latest issue to the printer a day early. It left at 9am this morning, and will appear on newsstands tomorrow, to most people’s surprise at having a glossy magazine react so fast.

A very smart move; today, all the newspapers have been snapped up in my local grocery store. This issue’s a keeper.

Though I wonder how much planning they did ahead of, ahem, time? I’m sure covers for both possible results were ready, short only of a cover line from the acceptance speech. But did they ask columnists to write two versions of their opinions? Did they have a third, “It’s 2000 all over again”, cover planned too? Will last night’s events fill the first 8 pages of an issue that otherwise would have worked for a McCain win too? (“The Election: A Review”, etc)

Either way, looking forward to it. What a night.

Bonus link: Folio’s Covers of the Campaign, complete with four rather silly fakes. My favourite: L’Optimum, for being so distinctive, so unlike any of the others, so… French.

And… if you think that’s impressive, South Park had a full episode broadcast about Obama’s victory, including quotes from the speeches, last night. Watch “About Last Night” here.