Australian design magazine redesigns
Looks interesting – wish its international distribution was redesigned also. Speaking of which…

Graphic design magazines of the world
…unite! Michael Bojkowski, art director of Grafik, is writing up a series of excellent summaries of others in their field. Perhaps an interesting international content exchange of sorts could be arranged?

Subscribers don’t like magazine going online only
I’m sure there are sound financial reasons for not offering the option of a refund – and instead asking subscribers to give more for the privilege – but in PR terms, it does seem to have been handled poorly

The best and worst selling covers from 2010
Kate Middleton comes out pretty badly from this

Seven years of The Nation covers
Fiddly navigation aside, this site from designer Stephen Kling contains inside stories, rejected covers and a lot of sharp political cover satire. Hit “Table of Contents” for further tales (via Unbeige)

101 Ways to read the New York Times
Well, almost. Such is the power of diversification

Seven ways magazines are using social media
Not as witless as some of the articles on this topic

Emphas.is launches in beta to crowdfund important photojournalism
Part Kickstarter, part lobbying group, part community forum, it has an amazing board of reviewers, including many top magazines represented. I also love that anyone who funds 50% of a project gets first refusal rights on publishing the result (with the photographer’s approval)

This is the best time to be in magazines!
He’s right, though it’s certainly not the best time to be a publisher

Egoïste returns
Four years since the last one, and as heavy as it ever was (thanks Kati)

If you haven’t got a correspondent…
Call a phone box. Lovely sideways piece of thinking by the SZ magazine

JPG brings in a famous guest curator
Great concept that fits the mag well. Unfortunately, the online preview of the issue only features one photo from the set he chose

Archive magazines online alongside yearbooks, newsreels and music
This kind of contextual linking is only going to get bigger. Can’t wait

Test drive a car on a print ad
Via a natty iPhone app and some smart thinking

How the Businessweek cloud cover came about
Always assuming it wasn’t a conceptual copy of this Italian newspaper supplement cover from January. Sidenote: I’m really enjoying Richard’s tumblrlog experiments

New York is placing archives and unused cover concepts on Flickr
There’s a lot to enjoy right there – you can also follow art director Chris Dixon on Twitter

What happened to the staff after the newspaper closed
They should illustrate and publish their survey via The Newspaper Club, for irony kicks

Videogame magazine nostalgia
Cos it’s not just about the pixels

It’s been a fascinating year for magazines.

Redesigns from Creative Review (by Paul Pensom) and icon (by Ken Leung) have added new flair to two of the strongest design titles on the newsstand, while Grafik fell but will rise again very soon.

Elsewhere, Little White Lies reached five years of great covers and thematic movie coverage and then promptly changed its logo, Elle UK made some gorgeous subscriber covers and Elle Collections made me look again at the catwalk with fresh eyes, Monocle continued to defy expectations with further expansion and two newspaper-magazine hybrids for the sea and ski elite, Wallpaper* has continued to experiment boldly with form and content, and GOOD made a tiny shift in its vocabulary to turn its subscribers into “members” of their wider community, a move that others will doubtless seek to emulate.

Self-publishers were given a lift by an improved MagCloud offering, while The Newspaper Club got wider recognition and is now eyeing up an American expansion. And the whole Roger Black/design templates controversy faded away almost as quickly as it swept in.

Pop under Dasha Zhukova did some lovely things, and I’m looking forward to seeing how its former editorial director Ashley Heath will continue the bold, eclectic approach. On the geek side, Wired UK continued to differentiate itself from its American big brother with Europe-focused stories and graphic playfulness. Worth it for the Warren Ellis and Russell Davies columns alone.

So many smaller independent magazines have produced creative, exciting, groundbreaking work in print this year. The Kasino crew unveiled their new project, showing how they can still create an entertaining publication even while using all four colours. Residing several miles further west than leftfield, Dodgem Logic is silly, funny, angry, smart, and subversive in all the right ways – and highly affordable too, as is Manzine which gets better and better with every issue, reaching far beyond its early in-jokiness to become an essential and witty read for people of both sexes.

Over the past 12 months, Mono.kultur and Gym Class have exemplified how fantastic one-person operations can be, when that person has talent, a clear vision and the confidence to make what they want to read, while Put A Egg On It deservedly got enough attention to turn it into a going concern.

Apartamento‘s star continues to rise, taking over the mantle of Fantastic Man as the hip mag to be seen with first – only because FM has now all but established itself as a fixture in the alternative mainstream. It continues to innovate with features that merit its chosen adjective. Its new sister, The Gentlewoman, has yet to settle, but there’s certainly an audience for it out there.

OK Periodicals has moved forward boldly, and now runs its own events as well – bravo, say I. Independent publishing needs as many gathering points as it can get. Elsewhere, my fellow Colophon curator Mike’s Nico gets better and better, and The Gopher Illustrated is a top tip to watch in 2011. Its first issue was adventurous, entertaining, and featured stickers of all the images in colour, for you to place on the pages (or elsewhere) yourself. Its creators recently moved from Venezuela to the creative hub of Austin. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Elsewhere, IL, Eureka and the Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin‘s designs this year suggest that the golden age of magazine supplements isn’t over. Freed from the pressures of the open newsstand, supplements should be brave and bold enough to drive the purchase of the newspaper. And speaking of newspapers, i has had another great year of design work. Its art director, Nick Mrozowski, is on his way back to the States – but we should certainly keep an eye on what his successor gets up to.

As for myself, this was the first year of Stack America, and I’m indebted to the makers of Meatpaper, Megawords, Pin-Up, d[x]i, Beautiful/Decay, Little White Lies, GOOD, Embrocation, Put A Egg On It, The Oxford American, PWR Paper, Bad Day, MYMAG, and Abe’s Penny for agreeing to let me share their creative work with subscribers. Choosing the right publications hasn’t been an easy decision, not because they’re hard to find, but because so much fascinating work is out there. There will be plenty more of that to come in 2011. (Subscribe now!)

I’ve also given talks in Bulgaria, Spain and the USA, written about magazines and associated industries for Eye magazine among many others, and wrote the copy for Turning Pages, a weighty tome filled with snapshots of inspiring contemporary editorial design. We also announced a bold new move for Colophon – lots of excitement around that, some of which should bear some fruit soon.

And of course I got trapped by a volcano and made Stranded, a print-on-demand magazine about the experience, created by those in the same situation. Sales continue to come through; so far, it’s raised more than $1300 for the International Rescue Committee. (Buy one now!)

I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch of great work that I really should have mentioned. Apologies if I didn’t include something you’ve worked on – please excuse it as an omission of forgetfulness, and not any kind of implied criticism. I hereby endeavour to review more titles, and faster, than I was able to this year.

There are, however three magazines that have had an outstanding 2010, and which I haven’t mentioned here. This was deliberate, because in the coming days, I’m going to announce my personal top three magazines of the year. It’s an individual selection, and entirely dependent on my mood at the moment of writing.

Though quite different in subject matter, what they have in common is an ability to make my brain expand and my fingers tingle when I turn the pages. No perspex blocks or shiny designer trophys will be handed out, only my respect and admiration.

And of course, there’s been the iPad. We’re in its early stages, but Letter to Jane, The New Yorker, Flipboard, Mag+ and my favourite mainstream magazine app of the year, The Times’ Eureka point to some fascinating new strides in publishing on their way very shortly. I haven’t written too much about iPad publications on Magtastic this year, a function of real-life preoccupations rather than a philosophical standpoint. That will change, quite significantly, early in 2011 – but not here. More on that very soon.

Recession be damned. It’s been a heck of year, and I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has shared their projects with me. Here’s to an even bolder, better year for contemporary storytelling in 2011. As I said in my intro to Turning Pages, this is truly The Golden Age of Print.

So what did I miss out?

Stranded is now digital! Available exclusively via the Zinio platform alongside side projects with similar budgets such as Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Esquire and The Economist, it’s a clean $5, all of which goes to the International Rescue Committee.

Zinio’s reader is available on iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, Game & Watch, all LG front-load washing machines (not the 89T washer-dryer) and ZX Spectrum.

And you can buy the Zinio edition of Stranded here.

For the story behind Stranded, click here.

(Image: an Indigo digital printing press by HP)

The last ten years or so has been a remarkable time for personal publishing. The rise of online is very well documented; however, we’ve also seen a huge reduction in the barriers to entry for self-publishing in print.

Desktop publishing software has become affordable (or even free), print-on-demand suppliers such as Lulu and MagCloud now remove much of the financial risk of short-run creations, and The Newspaper Club has made newsprint available to everyone. All you need is some design knowhow, and some words.

If you’re an adventurous designer who wants to experiment with such media, the only question is: where does the content come from? If you’re a designer who also blogs, however, then you already have access to plenty of your own content to play with.

Lineread is a terrific compilation of Michael Bojkowski’s always-excellent Linefeed blog. He’s experimented with Lulu and more recently MagCloud to republish some of his postings, taking advantage of the full-colour format to integrate the graphic stylings of his subjects in a far more magazine-y way. Each one reads as a commentary on that year’s design, and stands alone from the blog, while also promoting it. Blog comments are also occasionally integrated as well. iPad owners can read the last two editions for free via the MagCloud app, while a new issue seems to be in the works.

Elsewhere, I realized recently that I hadn’t yet told my faithful flock to get MagCulture.com/PAPER (don’t try going to that URL though – it doesn’t exist). It’s Jeremy’s fun reimagining of his fantabulous blog. That was remiss of me, because it’s a lovely piece of design, as one of course would expect.

I mislaid my copy in a recent house move, but my recollection of it is as a piece that leaves you hungry for more; it doesn’t feel as strong as Lineread a standalone piece (I sometimes felt a pang for bigger photographs to illustrate many of the articles, and also missed some of the comment discussions that had taken place on his site) – but it’s a fantastic taster of a great blog for those who don’t yet know of it, and a fond remixed souvenir for us many and avid readers.

Sidenote: as a newspaper, it will ironically probably not last as long as the more-ephemeral-feeling blogposts, a neat irony courtesy of The Newspaper Club. Beautifully printed, though. Grab one here (pics borrowed from Magculture.com.)

Non-bloggers can always find content elsewhere, without the tricky business of having to ask permission for reproduction. Found magazine began in 2001 as a zine, and has since spawned glossy mags and books, curating and reprinting entertaining, often disturbing found material – mostly letters and photographs – all discovered completely out of context.

With an unsubtle nod to its American inspiration, Swiss magazine Faund offers image-based, internet-sourced compilations from guest editors on different themes, kind of a print version of the hypnotic fffound from a parallel, and terrifying, dimension.

Or you could commission amateur photographers to make content for you. Via eBay. As long as they wear your web address.

Room Service is one of my favourite magazines of the year so far for its simplicity and dark edge. It contains (with the exception of an editor’s letter at the back) nothing but eBay listings of auctions of people who offered themselves, their babies, their bald heads, or their skin as advertising space. Each auction that Room Service won insisted on the same conditions: the self-advertisement must contain the web address of the magazine itself, and they must photograph themselves wearing it in various situations.

So perhaps Room Service is the ultimate in delegated content generation: a magazine that advertises nothing but itself, and contains only images of and by those who have been paid to advertise it. Apparently, the first issue cost about $2,000 in bidding and associated costs. Their Twitter feed suggests a second issue is in the works – at least two people have already been tattooed for it. You can read an interview with Jacco Kranenburg, the creator of this Real Life Transactions magazine, here.

The November issue of Spanish Elle is trumpeting “12 famous women without Photoshop or make up” – four of them are featured on the cover.

They promise videos to come of the Making Of – which will presumably reveal the use of heavy-duty studio flash, and, in order to get those backgrounds appearing identical, colour correction.

We’ve seen all this before, many times. I’m not the first to point this out, but a sense of perspective among all this holier-than-thou, please. You may not be able to remove pimples in camera with a swipe of a clone tool, but you can sure make them all but invisible with the right studio and camera set up, if you know what you’re doing. Photoshop and make up are not the only tools we have, they’re just the ones that we’ve made the public feel angry about.

The design-related Blogotweetspheroid has been bubbling with bile at new venture Ready-Media, a creation of Satan and his minions well-known designers/typographers Roger Black, Eduado Danilo, Sam Berlow, Robb Rice and David Berlow.

I’ve not commented until now, as I’ve been trying to get my head around the controversy. Here’s how it looks to me, and you might not like it.

Briefly, the company is an offshoot of DaniloBlack, and it offers different, fairly decent pre-baked templates for magazines, newspapers and websites, which can then be used as they are, or adapted for clients’ use by Ready-Media’s team.

The objections, mostly from designers, mostly over on the SPD blog, seem to fall into these broad categories:

And probably the biggest of all,

I should make clear first of all that I’m not a designer, so it’s not my neck potentially on the line. I do however work closely with designers on a regular basis, and hugely value the result of marrying editorial and design to create meaningful, effective communication.

Also, I’m quite possibly not close enough to the design industry to fully understand the implications of Ready-Media. But from where I’m sitting, I don’t see it as the almighty threat that some perceive it to be, quite simply because I believe that it is not, and would never be, an industry-wide solution.

Instead, Ready-Media’s intended clients are in fact those publications who have never sought to utilise an art director to their full effectiveness, and probably never will. When Jeremy says that “as print designers we now have full access to all the elements of page make up on our screen. Yet their solution is one that takes three quarters of the decisions away from us,” he’s right, but he’s also applying the Ready-Media method to the way he works. Not all publications access the page elements as he does, nor would they ever. It’s part of what makes him worth every penny – he does more than most, with every tool available. But however much we may wish it to be so, that is far from an industry-wide truth.

One of the company’s founders said on the SPD blog that “Ready-Media was formed to help smaller local publishers get design that’s too expensive for many of them, help them concentrate on the issue-centered art direction and content gathering, and help them make sound font choices without a lot of fiddling.”

Here in the States, there are thousands and thousands of small-scale, local publications, mostly with very mediocre designs. Some are franchises, others one-, two- or three-person operations – and they already use templates, always have, within which sometimes there is a full-time art director on the team to commission and place images, and sometimes there isn’t. Here’s one example. It’s not beautiful, but it works, and on a very low budget. It’s Slot A into Tab B. They don’t have the resources for anything else, and their audience/ad base is good enough for them to make enough money not to worry about it. The results are for locals, if not for the purists. Headlines are this big and go here, body copy goes here, image goes there. Rinse. Repeat.

Right now, many of this kind of publications’ templates are being created by pretty mediocre local design agencies, simply because they are easy and cheap – and the dirty truth is that many of these companies already probably recycle templates between clients, without admitting it. This is the existing, small-scale, small-budget marketplace that Ready-Media wants a piece of.

Michael has stated that “Creativity will be come subservient to ‘the template’ and fledgling editorial designers will be expected to switch off any overtly creative intent by over jealous publishers who paid for these goddamn things so now were going to use them.”

It’s true, but it isn’t anything new. If publishers wanted to shut off design individuality from their team, then they’ve already been doing that for years (and I know of many who have). To reiterate, small publications are often designed to rigid templates put in place by paid, outside designers. That’s not a Ready-Media invention.

I understand that its template-focused philosophy clashes with that of top, high-minded editorial designers. Good – it should. It’s also true to say that it doesn’t move the debate about quality editorial design forward. But it’s unrealistic to think that all publications have ever shared this idealism. Many, many small and local publishers have always talked about media in commercial-centered terms that make me shudder. Ready-Media simply talks that language. They didn’t invent it, they’re just looking at how their potential clients already think, and have created a solution for them.

Would it be a better world if these small publishers genuinely cared more about effective, tailored design? Maybe, especially for those of us who do. Is it ever going to happen? Probably not. More importantly, have their actions or ideas ever actively threatened the quality of the rest of the design and editorial world? No. In fact, these small publications have often made our work look even stronger in comparison. Which is perhaps ironically where some publications stand to lose most from Ready-Media – by raising the quality of the worst-designed, the best now needs to reach higher, in order to continue to make clear its points of difference.

As someone who mostly works in high-minded, idealistic publications, and dislikes complacency, I’m fine with that as a result.

The big difference between what went before is that Ready-Media has made its template strategy overt, while using the name of someone who has previously been hired by major media companies, to help sell the solution. In the context of DaniloBlack’s strategy as an agency, this offshoot makes sense. They probably wouldn’t have been considered for these kinds of small-scale job in the past, and indeed, to pitch for them might have harmed what their brand stands for. So they needed to come up with a better solution, a way of broadening their customer base, ideally with a gimmick that would make them stand out.

For years, people have accused Mario Garcia and also Roger Black himself of using near-identical templates, even for their top clients. It’s a bold gimmick to state clearly that this is what Ready-Media actually stands for – but it is just a gimmick, albeit one with clear benefits for the client: if I were such a small publisher who wanted to consider this solution, it could be useful to see almost immediately how my current issue would look in a variety of some of these templates. And if I want to spend more money on a bespoke solution, the option is there.

All of which doesn’t address the bigger question: what about the future of design? Do we want people thinking in template-based terms on any scale?

For my answer to that, come and read part two.

The Wired iPad app seems to be the first one that people are really taking seriously, following Popular Science‘s early foray into the arena.

The major sticking points against it so far seem to be based around its size (500mb), the fact that it’s made up of flat, exported PNGs, and how you aren’t sure when to scroll down, and when not, all of which are eminently fixable.

Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects (who design news websites, among other things) however has spotted what he feels are more fundamental issues with the design. Over on the IA blog, he takes a much closer look at the grid and typography of the thing, and in doing so ends up in a fascinating conversation with the font designer of much of Wired‘s content, Jonathan Hoefler, and the creative director of NYT Online, Khoi Vinh.

What you get is a fascinating masterclass in some current design thinking (and disagreements) over designing for the iPad, and for screens in general. Essential reading, basically.

As mentioned elsewhere, things have been quiet here due to unforeseen volcanic inconvenience, and entirely foreseen wedding exuberance. I’m now in Dublin, waiting, waiting for the air to clear. Meantime, some catch up.

New York magazine’s Approval Matrix becomes TV show
More signs that visual media are getting desperate for ideas. Next up: Time Out Theater Listings: The Movie!, and a Radiohead album based on Loot

ProPublica/NYT magazine investigations tie-in wins another award
Not ‘The Future Of Journalism’, but one of them

Jeremy’s guest-posting at It’s Nice That
He’s going to share five magazines that “push the boundaries of what a magazine can be”. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen

A peek inside the new Businessweek
If nothing else, Bloomberg knows how to build up expectations

World’s biggest-circulation magazine gets Latino spinoff
Unless you count Watchtower, that is

Technology as introduced by PopSci magazine
Love that first-ever colour facsimile cover – today it’d probably be done by Esquire

The Lady puts Tracy Emin on the cover
One of those stories I had to check the date of first, to make sure it wasn’t April 1st

BBC looking for magazine partner
Partnerships to help bring more balance to the industry

Yahoo! produces style guide
Containing, one assumes, more online savvy than the AP guide

NYT’s Sunday magazine from 1910
Every week, another century-old story. Lovely contextualization from the archives

I rather like this cover
It’s not new, but it certainly grabs you. I just found it on the ever-superlative Nas Capas

HyPad links

The Six iPad Principles of Mag+
Still lauded as the best interface so far

A mag app roundup
This week’s hits and misses from Exact Editions

(or should the title be “HyPed?”)

Some early thoughts about the iPad:

- It’s surprisingly cheap. I don’t know for sure, but the price does suggest that it’s following the games console model: make a loss on the machine, make your money on the games (or in this case, the apps), and try to dominate the market. The appstore has been hugely successful for them, so that would make sense. And unless Amazon can drop the Kindle to $99, e-ink will soon be sent back to the lab, to work on a proper colour screen.

- It’s what we expected. Back to the video game analogy, the dual-screen Nintendo DS forced publishers to rethink the fundamentals of the game-playing experience. This doesn’t take us anywhere we didn’t expect to go, which is onto giant iPhones. That said, it’s easy to overlook how much multi-touch has already revolutionised interface design.

- 3G+WiFi+easily stealable+limited capacity = The inexorable rise of The Cloud. No bad thing, as long as it never goes down.

- Mid-level software publishers will struggle – $9.99 seems to be a top price limit for most iPhone apps. No reason to think the iPad will be different, particularly as it runs most iPhone apps.

- No word on subscription models for publications yet. Bit early perhaps, but it will need to come, and soon.

- If I were a peripheral manufacturer, the first thing I’d make is a rubber keyboard with force feedback and a strap around the back, to slip over that touchscreen keyboard. Even Jobs couldn’t type straight on it in the demo. Shouldn’t be too difficult, and will be an instant winner.

- The second thing I’d make is a Bluetooth-enabled pair of spectacles with a mini monitor overlay, and a Bluetooth-enabled glove (containing mini gyroscopes and acting as a mouse), to do the tapping and viewing without needing the pad in front of me. It would also have the benefit of making me think that Minority Report had finally come true. Now where did I leave those precogs?

- A flurry of new CSS templates should make most websites nicely compatible, without too much fuss. Magazines take note: you don’t need to spend thousands on consultants, just get one good designer and choose a nice template. Unless of course you’d like me to consult for you, in which case, I’m worth every penny.

- By choosing the ePub format, Apple has made their book reader compatible with Google Books (or easily adaptable to be compatible, depending on how they choose to play with the DRM). Smart move, and cuts off Google at the pass. Note: InDesign also has an ePub option – some magazines may want to choose this route to sell straightforward copies of their print edition in the iBookstore.

- Still no Flash compatibility and no multi-tasking. That limits some of the fun that can be had. They’ll come later, though.

- Expect more than a few web-based online stores to appear soon, to avoid having to be locked into developing an app that won’t work on another device. If I were working on that magazine industry Skiff thing, I’d scrap the hardware plan and focus on a cross-platform solution.

- If my laptop gives up the ghost, and Adobe releases a CS4 patch to make it compatible, then I’ll need a good reason not to replace it with one of these.

- It’s not the future of media, but it’s probably one bit of it.

- No, Europe-based friends, I can’t bring you one over.

- They will sell a *lot* in the first few months.

Google Books has been slowly adding to its magazine offerings, presumably preparing for the day when it starts to charge for content.

However, we’ve had to make do with press releases and blogosphere watchlists to find out when they might add anything interesting. No longer, as they now have a page dedicated to all of the (mostly obscure) magazines they have (occasionally poorly) scanned!

One of my favourite things about Google Books is their word clouds, where all of the text is automatically scanned for word frequency, and the more commonly used words appear in larger type. Sadly, right now there aren’t any clouds for the entire archives of any magazine, only issue-by-issue (any coders like to cobble together a fix for that?).

Above is Men’s Health from January 2006. Below is Women’s Health from the same month. followed by the December 2004 edition of Black Belt. Still burning that Bruce Lee flame.