There are a few, remarkable people who show us that there’s another way.

They take the tools from our hands, and do amazing things with them that we could never have contemplated. Where we see unbreakable rules, they see uninteresting choices. The results leave some people so affected that they never again look at their tools in the same way.

These people generally fall into three categories. First, there are those who were so far ahead of society’s ability to comprehend their efforts that their work is only “discovered” and lauded after their deaths. Kafka was one. Van Gogh another.

Second are those who break established rules again and again to increasing acclaim, yet always stay ahead of their imitators simply because they don’t know of any other way to behave. Picasso, let’s say. Radiohead, perhaps.

And then there are those people who have a single flash of genius at the very moment that society’s mirrors are perfectly aligned to catch its light. Though the rest of their work may be perfectly competent, everyone clamors for the lightening to strike again and again. It’s not these people’s fault that they can’t replicate that moment.

Given the title of this piece, you can probably see where I’m going with this one.

David Carson’s editorial design career currently has three significant phases of its own. Firstly, there was Transworld Skateboarding, Surfer, and Beach Culture. A former professional surfer (ninth in the world at one point, apparently) Carson created a sprawling, gridbreaking design style for these publications, taking every element he was given for the page and treating them as visual objects to play with, often whimsically.

He essentially set himself up as an artist who had taken on the position of a graphic designer – text, typography, photography were all elements of equal weight, to be treated like free-floating pieces of a collage. This sensation continues to echo in his work.

Then came the extended flash of genius that was Ray Gun – a lightening strike that lasted three years. Under the almost-criminally overlooked editorship of founder Marvin Scott Jarrett (who went on to create Nylon), and working with art directors such as Chris Ashworth, Carson invented a sprawling, gridbreaking, unpredictable, and above all highly distinctive design language. It was strange, experimental, and often unpleasant. Yet it was rarely less than interesting, and its look and feel matched the nonconformist attitude of the grunge music that the magazine covered.

Graphic design is about content and message, and his designs only truly succeed when their message (usually attention-seeking confusion, chaos, nonconformity) match the story within the rest of the content. Some grunge tunes were barely more than unlistenable rage; some of Carson’s designs were unreadable messes. Purists and industry leaders hated both; at a time when computer-based DTP was encouraging typographic homogeneity, they were a perfect match.

The magazine’s aesthetic was widely copied by design students everywhere, and richly deserves its place in the unofficial hall of cult editorial fame.

And so Carson became a hero figure to many designers aged under 30. The phrase “The End of Print” was coined in reference to him, tongue in cheek, by another contemporary typographic enfant terrible, Neville Brody. Never one for deadlines or even necessarily turning up to his own events, Carson’s legend became as rebelliously romantic as it was untouchable.

Often passed over by those searching for a nonconformist idealism to match his visuals is the fact that he left Ray Gun in 1995, in order to focus the work of his studio on corporate projects and personal artwork, with the occasional editorial commission for old times’ sake.

Now, sixteen years since he left Ray Gun, we have Carson – a bimonthly magazine named after the man’s own legacy. It’s edited by Alex Storch, previously the editor-in-chief of a counter culture online magazine about Los Angeles, with creative direction by DavidCarsonDesignInc.

Here’s the first strange thing about Carson: Beach Culture appeared as part of an emerging surf culture, documenting what it meant to drop out and surf. Ray Gun was created as way of discussing and contributing to the rise of grunge, and everything it stood for. So what is the cultural driving force that led to the introduction of Carson?

Independent magazines. It feels like this magazine exists principally because of independent publishing. Even though magazines aren’t its theme, the often nonconformist energy in this ever-growing field is what has made it possible, and made it happen.

However, the first issue of Carson isn’t a reaction against all that the editorial establishment stands for. Instead, it’s a kind of mishmash of unconventional storytelling, self-aggrandizement and shameless promotion loosely connected to the magazine’s opening theme, Survival.

First, the positive:

The best piece by far in both design and content are Mike Doughty’s Ten Kinds of Survival. Its personal, engaging, bloglike style points to a possible direction for the whole concept: tight, sharp, witty, dark personal publishing, echoed by Carson’s slightly creepy, individual twist on the images and (literally) on the text.

The design forces the reader into a more active level of engagement with the words, questioning without obstructing. The piece is not easy reading, either literally or figurative. The design complements it well without becoming overbearing.

Though I’m not entirely clear why it was applied, I really like this typographic bar code, too. I felt very positive about what was to come.

The inverted pyramids on this piece also made for an unexpected reading experience.

However, that’s about where my warmth ends regarding this issue of Carson. Some of the content, as I mentioned early, reads as thin PR-led copy by people pushing furniture/books/themselves on the reader in self-important terms. Writers’ biographies often stretch to two paragraphs (and are styled like body text, which doesn’t help, as they read like the end of the article.) There’s a lot of vapid writing, without much evidence of a tight, unconventional editorial remit. Potentially the best piece of the lot, by Neil Strauss, collapses due to poor editing on the second page.

Many of the designs are unusual, but without a strong editorial concept behind their strangeness, they just seem willfully hard to read. Paragraphs without indents or separations might look pretty, for instance, but they’re hell on the reading eye. That’s never Carson’s main concern, of course – his designs only ever referenced a text’s content in passing, if at all.

But if you’re going to hire him to design a magazine, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, then you have to provide content that is not only enhanced by his stylings (some of which feel quite fresh, most of which feel like they could have been taken straight from 1994), but also reward the inevitable strain of trying to read most of the words. Almost nothing in Carson did.

Ultimately, however, the biggest problem of the magazine doesn’t come from its big-name designer, but its overall concept. I just don’t understand what it’s about, who it’s for, or why it exists.

The very best titles justify themselves through everything they do, because without them we wouldn’t adequately follow, understand, analyze, enjoy, learn about, react to whatever corner of the world we inhabit. They force readers to subscribe because the idea of missing an issue actually feels painful. They convey the passion of an editor for whom every word is a result of a painstaking decision process.

But far too many pieces in this first issue of Carson felt rushed, undramatic, and left me thinking, “So?”

This is only the first issue, and I will watch to see how it improves. It has a long way to go. Right now, it feels like Carson exists because a) his name means something, and b) now is a time for independent publishing. It’s not enough.

So here we go: The Relaunch Issue, on newstands till March 14th. What’s it like? Multiple personalitied, that’s what.

Firstly, the cover: there’s some subtle touches of silver ink (strange echo of NYT mag there, except they used gold), and a slightly bland redrawing of the classic logo – which is then tucked behind Hillary’s head. She’s a good cover star, though it’s a slightly awkward-looking photo.

Also features the smallest bar code I’ve ever seen on a mag cover.

Elements of The Daily Beast design are visible in various places in the magazine – here, it’s in the use of thick black portrait-style frames. Opinion is clearly still a mainstay of the mag – the first thing mentioned is “Columns”, and there are eight of them.

Tina Brown’s intro – called “Notebook” – opens the content. She mentions that this issue is themed “Women in the World”. I suddenly had a dizzyingly exciting feeling of “hey, the entire content is going to be themed around this – every news story through the lens of the female experience. Wow!” And then I realized it wasn’t, and felt a little disappointed.

The piece also asserts the existence of the word “newsmagazine”. I guess “newspaper” gets away with it, but this is on paper too. Perhaps it’ll catch on in other areas, too. Newsnewsprint? Newsglossy? Newsapp? Newstweet?

“Perspectives” is the first of a few Daily Beast-esque pages scattered throughout the issue. It’s about “what they did and said on Newsweek’s website, thedailybeast.com.” It includes quotes from the news, and “The Daily Beast’s take” – single lines, each. Not sure if these are edited from longer pieces on the site, or just reflections from their staff – no links to further reading are suggested.

There’s one of The Daily Beast’s notoriously spurious, headline-grabbing “Top Ten City” lists, a cartoon and a series of “Oops! Leaders cozying with dictators” photos that is remarkably unnuanced in its message given that this is a serious news magazine. This disconnect between gossipy gag and proper analysis continues throughout the issue.

Free! A small white square of card. It’s the flip side of a bound-in subscriber card that appears near the end of the mag. Shame not to use it for something. The first proper piece, underneath its card mask, is a column by a Washington Post writer who makes some interesting and well-written points about female inequality in between reminding us of her book, the fact that she’s met some of the famous people in this issue, and a speech she gave where she said something important. Kind of reminds me of the self-importance of the Bill Keller opening piece in the NYT mag.

Historian Niall Ferguson’s column talks about the fear of male-dominated Asia, then a non-female-focused piece from an American political figure with one of the more demonic byline sketches I’ve seen for a while. Though none of these three really brings any incredible insight or amazing information to the table, there’s a plurality of knowledge and opinion in there that could become pleasing enough.

There are some icons used where drop caps would usually be – which is fine until a couple use a dollar sign, and I instinctively read them as an “S”.

What this Newsweek does do well is the photo editing, particularly in this News Gallery section. Strong images, printed large, with informative captions.

There’s another odd Daily Beast addition with “Xtra Insight” on these pages – sometimes it’s an interesting fact, sometimes it’s a fact and a place to read more, but in the case of a story about Steve Jobs, the best you can get is “Read Wozniak’s book”.

There’s a bigger problem with one of them, which reads “Visit THE DAILY BEAST online for Dirk Vandewalle’s look at the future, “Libya After Gaddafi”. Finally, thinks I, some genuine interplay between online and paper, even if it’s the most traditional kind – and then I go the THE DAILY BEAST, and the piece mentioned wasn’t on the homepage, nor even on their politics page. I had to search for it under the author’s name to track it down. The piece in question says it was originally published in the magazine, so presumably it was spiked at the last minute. Really should have changed that intro.

For an issue about female empowerment around the world, this is a strangely sexist / menacingly misogynist “jokey” headline about Sarkozy and Bruni’s relationship.

The First Report piece about Libya is really excellent. It points a direction for the magazine, and even a reason for its existence. It’s an insightful piece about the diplomatic background we don’t know about, in particular a man called Musa Kusa. The odd thing is that there are no pictures of Kusa used to illustrate the piece – only Gaddafi, who isn’t actually the focus of it. I like the illustration, above, but it really isn’t what the piece is about.

The section name NewsBeast makes me think of CurrencySusan, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, it includes a timeline with its design taken from The Daily Beast:

Neat synergy, but there’s some strange events included – such as Bin Laden’s 54th birthday, don’t let’s forget about him now – and a strangely gossipy politicised picture caption “John Boehner licks his chops after persuading the Democrats to slash $4bn from the federal budget”. Or he might have had dry lips. It might be very Daily Beast, but such mocking partisanship don’t help the magazine seem impartial or mature.

The next spread feels more like Radar than Newsweek – silly cartoons, short pieces out of context and without explanation, and a very strange sense of levity compared to, say, its columnists and lead feature writers. It doesn’t really work. I’m not saying that all should be frowningly serious, but this style of lifestyle content doesn’t complement the rest of the magazine at all – and can be found in a thousand other mags, done better.

And then there’s this Charlie Sheen spread – well designed, but I have my doubts about a spread called “Big Fat Story” fitting snugly as part of the Newsweek brand.

Reliving History is a nice touch – usually the sort of thing that magazines put on the inside back page, to give some historical context to the issue you just read. Here it’s halfway through. I am, admittedly, a sucker for magazine history. Obviously.

The main cover story is a good one – about Hillary’s mostly unreported work to improve the lot of women and girls around the world. It’s sadly lacking in much from the lady herself, though. At six pages plus a double-page opener, it’s the longest piece of journalism in the mag.

The 150 Women Who Shake the World is a strong concept, and well designed – though I can’t help feel that 50 covered in more depth would have done all of them more justice. A few get a couple of paras, some five or six sentences, most a single line that asks more questions than it answers.

And, weirdly, there aren’t 150. I counted 146 pieces, with the subjects of some being of very indeterminate number – “Women of Italy who protested against Burlusconi” is an odd inclusion, as are “Runaway brides in Yemen”. I’m not saying they’re not worth featuring, but if you have a piece ostensibly focused on 150 individuals, perhaps there would have been a better way to talk about these issues elsewhere.

The Feminists in Tahrir Square is the best piece in the mag. It’s a great insider article, carefully researched, showing an unreported angle on a story everyone knows. Again, as with the First Report, it was missing an image of one of the key figures, however: Mrs Mubarak, described in the piece as the country’s Lady Macbeth. It would be good to put a face to such a prominent and hated figure in the article.

The rest of the magazine is pretty lightweight. The Dior piece has a great photo (top), but is a glorified catwalk review with little new to say, the lifestyle Omnivore section (note the Daily Beast iconography again) feels like Reader’s Digest. However, I have to point out some serious reservations about this piece:

It begins thusly: “Popular uprisings, while inspiring and (we hope) good for the citizens who spark them, aren’t just bad news for dictators. They’re often trouble for tourists as well… Political upheaval – in the Middle East or elsewhere – can suddenly limit access to some of the world’s most breathtaking sites. With that in mind, NEWSWEEK offers a guide for seize-the-day types.”

Really, Newsweek? Are you really saying “quick, go visit these pretty dictatorships and give them your money, before the people demand some rights”? Or is that a joke? I can’t decide which I’d rather it was. Whichever, it’s quite absurdly offensive in the context of all the previous pages, including the strong talk about women’s rights.

And though “My favorite mistake” is a cute idea for the inside back page interview, perhaps someone with whose money Tina Brown wasn’t so closely identified in her last big magazine failure (Harvey Weinstein famously part-bankrolled Talk) would have been a smarter choice for this highly scrutinized first issue.

What surprises me most, however, is how little print-digital synergy there is. I can’t easily follow Newsweek journalists talking about events in real time online. The only website featured is The Daily Beast, but Newsweek.com is not only still going, but carries more of the content of the magazine, clearly labeled, and without any Daily Beasting around it.

I can only presume that there will be a proper digital relaunch, and that some synergy will emerge – but right now, the two are as separate as if still produced by different companies. So much for the duality of digital and print. I hope to be able to report something more interesting happening on that front soon – and am surprised it wasn’t at least trailed in the mag. There’s a great opportunity to do something interesting in that area.

Summary
There’s some really strong journalism in there, and some really mismatched, poor-taste news-related gossip. And without the excuse of SEO bait, the gossip doesn’t really wash. This magazine has to stand or fall on the authority of its opinions, and the strength of its knowledge.

In a couple of pieces, I felt they were genuinely giving me well-written insight I might not have found elsewhere, on big news items I thought I understood. Much of the rest felt like cheap news-themed gags surrounded by throwaway, poorly researched information – and for that, I’ll stick to the web, thank you. At least there I don’t expect anything better.

As for the design, it’s crisp, clear, does its job, and good photo editing/placement allows the whole thing to work. Not groundbreaking, but serves the content well enough, has some smart nods to its online sibling, and doesn’t shout too loud. Nice to see some illustration in there, too.

Does it justify itself? Not yet. But, despite some missteps, I still feel that it’s a good enough platform from which to build. I don’t have any truck for those who say there’s no space for a weekly print news roundup in the internet age – just look at the success of The Week and The Economist.

The last relaunch had high aims, but thin prose. Tina Brown is known for having better instincts, and if she can get the news balance right, and truly make a content relationship between web and print thrive – for which she has the best opportunity yet to make something interesting, as her web platform existed independently of the mag first – then Newsweek might just become strong and, crucially, relevant again.

Very early days yet, though. Other critics have been sharpening their claws on it. Tina Brown responds to them here. What did you think?

NB: this is not the only model for an interesting, in-depth news magazine. Keep an eye out for my forthcoming review of a very different, new publication about current affairs, which proudly labels itself “The last to breaking news”.

A Brit and a woman created and nurtured Newsweek. Now a British-born woman is moving it forward, pinning its hopes on a high-profile, print-digital merger. Can it survive – and is it any good?

I’m dividing this into two pieces, because I think that, in order to better judge and understand the magazine, it would be helpful first to understand something of the history and nature of American news weeklies, and their previous digital forays.

And so, here is a brief runthrough of the back story, gratefully gleaned from David Sumner’s comprehensive book The Magazine Century (2010) and his excellent 2003 piece on the subject, plus Carolyn Kitch’s Pages from the Past (2005), as well as further personal online research, linked to below where relevant.

Weekly news magazines have always been distinct from newspapers and their supplements. The first significant player in the market was/is Henry Luce’s Time, which launched in 1923 with the aim of creating a short, quick-to-read summary of the week’s general-interest news.

Newsweek followed nine years later (eight years before the other big American news weekly, US News & World Report – lesser known internationally because of its lack of overseas presence).

Newsweek was founded by Time‘s first foreign editor, a one-legged Brit called Thomas Martyn (he left the other leg in Yugoslavia during WWI). The prospectus for his “News-week” made it clear who his new publication would aim at: “Time is too inaccurate, too superficial, too flippant and imitative.”

The new magazine was also to be, its early ads stated, “an indispensable complement to newspaper reading, because it explains, expounds, clarifies.” On the cover of its first issue (shown above), there were seven photographs – one for each day of the week.

It struggled in its early years, before merging with another magazine called Today, and relaunching in 1937 without the hyphen and with the slogan “The magazine of news significance.” Newsweek became a success, with circulations topping a million – still less than Time, but more than enough to make it profitable and influential.

This was because, Carolyn Kitch argues, in the 1930s to 1960s in particular, “media had joined the institutions of education, religion, and civic life as an important disseminator of political and cultural ideals. Magazines were leaders in this process because they were the only medium capable of reaching a national audience and using illustrations and then photographs in a large-scale and dramatic way… The stories the newsmagazines told… created and reinforced a particular view of the national character. If film offered varying versions of national identity, the newsmagazines collectively crafted a unified, patriotic vision.”

These were the arbiters of what was news, who the good guys and the bad guys were, and of how America saw itself and everyone else. With combined circulations of up to ten million, the “big three” of Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report had a huge cultural and political impact.

That’s not to say that its own house was in perfect order. In 1961, a rudderless Newsweek was purchased by The Washington Post Company. New editor Osborn Elliott later wrote that “Newsweek was in shambles.  Not only had the editor left, the whole staff was shot through with drunks, incompetents, and hacks.”

Following the suicide of Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Phil Graham, the company passed into the hands of his widow, Katherine Graham. She trebled Newsweek‘s editorial budget, improved its design, and made it genuinely become what it had originally been created to be: a serious competitor to Time.

Worthy of note in this period is the moment when, in 1970, 46 female employees filed a groundbreaking gender-discrimination case against the magazine, under the Civil Rights Act. The magazine promised to hire more senior female staff. The 40th anniversary of the event led to much discussion about whether things had much improved since.

There doesn’t seem much to report about the magazine during 1980s, other than that through occasional redesigns, the big three continued to be positioned at the heart of American culture, with Newsweek mostly seen as being politically closer to the Democrats than Time. The rise of cable TV had changed people’s media habits somewhat, but thanks in part to vastly discounted subscription rates, readership remained high.

In 1993, Newsweek was the first of the three to dabble with digital, launching an ill-fated quarterly CD ROM featuring “as many as three original articles” called Newsweek InterActive (“At first, “Newsweek Interactive” will be compatible only with the $999 portable multimedia player introduced last week by the Sony Corporation.”)

Later that year, Time started to have an online presence, teaming up with AOL, and Newsweek followed in late 1994, through a partnership with now-forgotten ISP Prodigy, before relaunching at the end of 1998 as Newsweek.com, combining magazine stories with updates from Washingtonpost.com and MSNBC.com

In the mid-2000s, as news audiences moved online and to 24-hour cable news, and one advertising slump followed another, the large expense of Newsweek combined with falling sales and ad revenues to make it a big financial liability. Its stated subscriber base dropped 50% during 2008-10 – though at 1.5 million, it was still not to be sniffed at.

In 2009, Newsweek relaunched as an opinion and commentary magazine, with some bold, polemic covers but little engaging content. The relaunch didn’t seem to stem the bleeding, and in August 2010, the magazine was sold to nonagenarian millionaire Sidney Harman. At the end of 2010, it merged with two-year-old news-aggregation-opinion-gossip website The Daily Beast, splitting ownership 50:50 between Harman and the owners of The Daily Beast, IAC (who also own ask.com, match.com, vimeo and others.)

Which brings us to today, and the relaunch of Newsweek featuring Thedailybeast.com written at the bottom of every page. Is there still a place for a weekly news magazine? Can it explain, expound, clarify news from the internet? Do Newsweek / The Daily Beast together point to a new hybrid model of publishing? Or is it – and perhaps much of the rest of print news media – destined to become a loss-making way for rich men to gain political access and influence?

Click here for my review the first issue of the relaunch.

Two weekly American news-related magazines relaunched in two days. Very different stories, however – and very different results.

First up, The New York Times Magazine.

Sunday magazines are tricky territory. On the one hand, it’s an incredible opportunity: you don’t need to make a cover that sells, and it’s unlikely that your work alone will make or break a sale of the newspaper. And so, it’s an incredible chance to tell bold, unheralded, controversial stories in greater depth, without celebrities or newsstand pressures.

On the other hand, you’re competing not so much with other Sunday supplements (though that does happen) as much as also with the rest of the newspaper that surrounds you. The New York Times on Sundays is a huge tome of various sections, including a monthly style magazine, and long pieces about books, sports, arts and leisure, business, the week’s news in depth… Just to find content that doesn’t tread on someone in the building’s toes must be tricky enough, let alone then hanging onto it long enough that someone else doesn’t scoop you.

A little context. According to this piece published online in 1999 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the first Sunday newspaper magazine came out in the USA in 1869. Using rotogravure printing, 19th-century newspaper magazines were created to offer more detailed images and high-quality print to advertisers who had moved over to magazines from the daily newssheets; The New York Times Magazine launched in 1896, and featured the first photographs to appear under the newspaper’s banner. (Sidenote: there’s a fascinating blog featuring articles from the magazine published 100 years ago. It’s a consistently interesting read.)

In the States today, not many newspapers have their own Sunday magazine supplements any more, and few, if any, break even. Two pretty insipid magazines – Parade and USA Weekend – are syndicated to most local publications. The New York Times, as well as the LA Times, Washington Post, and a few others, are the exceptions.

In September, Hugo Lindgren was hired to be the editor of a relaunched NYT magazine. Formerly at New York magazine, and then one of the senior figures in the highly successful relaunch of Bloomberg Businessweek, he was a bold hire, and he promptly set about changing the entire set up of the publication. “Everything but the crossword”, as his witty introduction has it. And, as Khoi points out, a five month turnaround is remarkable for such a renowned battleship company.

As for me, I’m an occasional Times reader, who felt that the previous magazine could at times seem pretty aimless. It had some well-written journalism and photographs, and a sense of heavyweight portent that only the Times and a few others can pull off, but it was more often lacking in consistency and clear shape. It certainly didn’t stand alone as a strong publication.

So what’s the relaunch issue like?

First, the stats: 56 pages, 11 of which are ads. It also looks like there’s an extra, gold ink used incredibly sparingly on the cover. The writers are clearly important – seven journalists are named on the cover, with only one non-journo (cover photo subject Lori Berenson) identified. Others are represented through epithets: “the billionaire”, “the radicals”, “the graceful losers”.

There are two contents pages – this is the more interesting, its layout irregular enough to drag your eye from one thing to the next. It’s very effective. The first, as has been noted elsewhere, includes the names and email addresses of the editors who worked on them.

Next comes the letters page – now called “Reply All”, with every piece of correspondence originating from electronic sources, be it the website, a journalist’s Facebook page, email or Twitter.

This analytic on Reply All is the only real infographic in the magazine. But it’s a bit meaningless – it’s not clear if these are the top, middle and bottom of their stats, or just five randomly chosen pieces.

Structure: the magazine is divided into The Front (eight pages), The Features (four of them, taking up 20 pages in the middle, plus four at the end for the continuation of the main story), and The Back (seven pages) with puzzles and the inside back page added at the end.

Front consists of a Bill Keller feature on how his experiences connect with the news, an interview (above; here with South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley, who comes across pretty well, despite a strangely aggressive lede); The Ethicist – ethical dilemmas, now answered by a former NYT city reporter; a slightly odd page of jokey shorts called Last Week On The Internet; a column called You Are Here, which has a salmon pink background, and is presumably about a particular location, though this one is stronger on the detail of people than of place, and a return for an old column, What They Were Thinking, which here has Tom Waits explaining why he squatted in a puddle, and Robert Frank entirely avoiding the question in the title, and talking only about Waits.

Some of these concepts are stronger than others, but at least they all have a sense of being front-of-book, and none feels like it deserves more space than it gets.

Then the main features. Two of them – about the billionaire health-food freak who wants to extend the human lifespan (ironically, exactly a hundred years ago a not-dissimilar theme was explored), and a highly readable 8000-word piece on the American who was jailed for 15 years in Peru – are very strong, the kind of involving long-form journalism tales that draws you in with a strong lede, and makes you think that they’re about one thing, before the story twists and turns into something else entirely.

This is what this magazine can, and should, do best, and they’re strong pieces to launch with.

The other longer story, however – Broketown USA – feels like half a story, and one that could easily have been placed in the business section of the paper. Its opener looks great, though – and feels very 1970s.

The whole design feel is one of a return to a previous age. The reason is that, although there are some very neat little touches – different drop caps on each story, horizontal black lines in different positions, colourful column separators on a dance piece, and then a subtle vertical, prison-bar black line motif in Lori Berenson’s piece, a kind of matrix of soup in the recipes bit in The Back – overall there is a seriousness to the design (no guest title fonts, very little colour beyond a few photos), and a firm separation between word and image.

So that means no headlines going over images, straightforward images and captions, no cutouts, very little colour, very few aggressive crops. It is very clearly the New York Times Magazine, with every letter capitalized and in bold. They commission writers to write strong pieces. Images are there to make the pieces seem more legible. It is a serious business.

Surprising, then, is its lack of hard-hitting photojournalism. There’s one (lovely) double-page image of ice hockey games which is a little unseasonal – all the snow disappeared last week – but otherwise images are small and feel distant, used more to break up the page than to illuminate the story. Aside from Mary Ellen Mark’s images of Lori Berenson, which aren’t reproduced very big, and the video stills of amateur dancer Anne Marsen, there’s a real lack of strong storytelling being employed through the photography.

This is a huge shame, because beautifully reproduced photography and illustration are the one area that the magazine should do better than the newspaper. That’s why it existed in the first place, after all, and glossy paper remains better than newsprint at faithful reproduction of colour and detail.

When I think about great Sunday magazines, I think about Espilon (aka “Y“) from Portugal in the early 2000s, and the covers of arts magazine Metropoli from El Mundo in Spain, where El Pais Semenal also does and did some great pieces.

I have memories of striking design and photography from the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, and of course the Independent Magazine and the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK, at which Colin Jacobson and Harold Evans did remarkable work, strongly based around powerful photography. For the NYT magazine not to do more than a three-page “Look” section, featuring two folksy photographs, feels like a missed opportunity.

Overall, then, this rethink feels like a deliberate return to tight concepts and old-fashioned strengths, with a few – very few – subtle concessions to modernity.

The big question, however, is whether will it bring new readers to the newspaper, as the Sunday Times Magazine used to in the 1960s-80s. On this evidence, I doubt it. It’s not trying to lead the news agenda – and perhaps the days when that was even possible are gone. It’s not trying to lead the design agenda either – but that’s not its job, and never has been.

Lindgren says that their “overarching goal of the redesign is to monopolize as much of your Sunday as we possibly can.” In these ad-scarce days, that’s a tough challenge. It’s still a thin magazine, and the lack of variety in its serious visual storytelling definitely counts against it.

I can’t say if it’ll still feel fresh in six months, but right now, at least it feels more like an ambitious, serious supplement with plenty to read, which is a good start. And some stronger photo editing would work wonders.

Tomorrow: Newsweek, and then a very different kind of news magazine.

Though I am a subscriber, I can usually take or leave Wired US. Each year, there’s a few good articles and some interesting design choices, but overall it has an unnecessary love of celebrity, and each issue never really hangs together as a package. The front sections in particular are very uneven.

That’s not the case, however, with the latest issue: The Underworld Exposed.

It takes its regular features and subverts them in interesting thematic ways. The piece about “what’s inside a product you know” is about street heroin; their How To is “How To Ship Coke”; the Test page is about knockoff versions of famous products.

The main features are about the small Romanian town at the centre of European internet scams, the value of illegal human organ trafficking, and people who break lottery codes in order to launder money. The text never tries to moralize. It’s surprisingly bold stuff.

It often feels like an issue of mid-1990s Colors, with a bit of VICE thrown in. Which, in my book, is a very good thing.

I really enjoyed the design of this infographic spread about New York sex workers – nothing stereotypical, no fake neon or tittersome burlesque design. Just straightforward facts, letting the banality of reality speak for itself.

Still not sure about some of the design decisions – the layout of Ricky Jay’s superb collection of historical criminals is a little awkward, for example, and as so often happens with Wired, the cover feels like an overly researched missed opportunity – but overall, this is an unusually focused and engaging issue.

Definitely worth picking up or buying on your iPad.

You know the one. So what’s it like?

One-line pitch
According to the press release, The Daily “gives readers everywhere the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the need-to-know content of a newspaper and the immediacy of the internet.”

NB Everywhere is defined at time of writing as “everywhere that people use the US iTunes store”.

Made by
A team of 100 or more apparently, including “top journalists, thought leaders and opinion makers”.

There’s certainly a breadth of experience: the Editor in Chief and Gossip Editor both came from the New York Post, the news editor from AOL via The New York Times news blog, the Sports ed from a New Jersey paper, the Opinions editor from Forbes via The Wall Street Journal, the Lifestyle/culture Ed from the New Yorker, the Tech Editor from Time magazine, and the Creative Director came from AOL Media.

The app itself has no masthead, but the top names are listed here.

Made for
Rupert Murdoch’s email to UK senior staff (none of whom can currently buy it if they don’t have a US credit card) says “audiences everywhere”. At the launch event, the editor in chief said it was a newspaper for “everyone”.

Navigation
The app opens with a short animation, a seven-note Intel-esque melody, then this loading screen. I’m not sure if they updated during the day, or there was a bug, but it reloaded today’s edition three times for me. Each time, you only get the spinning wheel, so you don’t know how long you’ll have to wait.

Once it loads (and every time it loads, regardless of if you were halfway through an article and switched briefly to another app), you see a “carousel” (aka cover flow) of the front pages of each feature. The images on the carousel are low-res jpegs that often look a bit sketchy. You get the category of the article, but that’s all – so you have to rely on the headlines to guess what each one is about. It also marks which features you have read.

There is also a table of contents, but it only lists a few select articles, and feels like an afterthought to accompany the entirely unnecessary “how to use” directions.

There are six topics – News, Gossip, Opinion, ARts&Life, Apps&Games, Sports – and they appear in that order. There’s no customization options to change the order, or to open each day with your favourite section.

The bottom line of Carousel buttons, which you tap to reveal and then slides out of view automatically after a few seconds, offers: a video short of “today’s highlights”, an audio version of the same thing that also animates the coverflow, a “fast forward” button to run through the coverflow images while pausing for a couple of seconds on each, a “skip to a random article you haven’t read yet” option, “my saved pages” (more on that below) and “settings”, which are options to customize local weather, your horoscope, breaking news alerts, and your account information. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to use the linear/static video or audio summaries – I’d expect them to be phased out within few months.

There’s also a top menu that is always visible, providing shortcuts to the front pages of each section, and a “scrubber” – when you touch it, mini versions of the pages appear, for you to tap and jump to a piece. It highlights in blue pieces you haven’t read yet, but otherwise the thumbnails are too small to be anything other than memory aids.

Longer articles are two-column in a serifed font, and most pages are image heavy except for the Opinion section. Pages are images, so you can’t copy/paste, change the type size or search for terms, and zooming has been disabled. Quote marks, by the way, alternate between straight and curly – deep inside my soul, a tiny subeditor is weeping.

There’s a sense of indecision regarding orientation – most pages can be viewed both in portrait or landscape, except in news articles where landscape is used for slideshows, and portrait for text. Even more confusingly, if you open an article that tells you to rotate for a photo slideshow, then flick through that slideshow, and finally return back to portrait, the app places you in the middle of the article, rather than back at the beginning. A bug, presumably – and not the only one in there.

There’s a similar confusion attached to the reading method. Most are on multiple pages (between one and three), with no up/down swiping to read on. Except for one article in the Apps&Games section, one in the Sports, and the table of contents containing How to Use instructions, where you are told to swipe vertically to read on. Odd.

Sometimes, exclusively branded videos are included in place of still images, and these can be full-screened without much fuss. Some are genuine exclusives, others made up of wire footage. There are a few interactive “push button to read caption” elements, very few web links, and some stories also feature Twitter feeds on topics or, in one instance, a celebrity’s own Twitter feed.

Each page (not article – so multi-page articles have different, unconnected comments pages) can be commented on in-app via text or by recording an audio comment (a neat option), or via email, Facebook or Twitter (though twice trying to login to Twitter on the app made it freeze each time). Only registered users can comment in the app itself, and it uses a “Report abuse” function to police the commentaries. No sign as yet of Daily editors engaging with the discussions.

Facebook/Twitter/emailing a page created a bit.ly link to web editions of the pages, sometimes as text, sometimes as an image. Not sure why the difference – it might be a news deadlines vs other sections issue. The one time I tried it out, though, it sent a link to the wrong page.

Crash total during review period: five, plus one freeze.

Advertising
There’s 113 pages total, and I counted 11 ads. They’re mostly video-based, loading dynamically. Fox products feature heavily, requiring the user to rotate to landscape to watch trailers, plus Verizon, Pepsi, Macy’s, a neat Land Rover interactive ad, and Virgin Atlantic (their interactive ad from Project fits neatly here). Ads are not labelled as such anywhere, which could get problematic.

What’s inside
It’s a strange mix of content, and it doesn’t really hang together as a single entity, either in its writing or its design.

Each section has its own section front page, highlighting one or more stories.

The News section – 29 pages of the 113 – is very light, similar to the kind of thing you might read in Metro – one or two correspondents, but mostly a lot of wire rewrites. The videos are embedded in the pieces, and rather than enhance the stories, they just repeat the information in each article, in a cable-newsy way. It’s very irritating. Still, at least they don’t start up automatically.

For a brave new force in journalism, its coverage is incredibly limited. Issue one’s news totals, in order of presentation:

* two main stories (Egypt and American snowstorms) with ten pages and one video, and three pages and one video devoted to them respectively
* one non-time-sensitive, non-revealing, wonkish interview with Obama’s former budget director
* two “bizarre/frivolous short stories” pages
* a completely non-news fluff story, with a New York Post-ish headline, that occupies two pages, talking about a disco in New York that admits dogs
* a page with two stories: “Arizona places high tax on medical marijuana” and a two-paragraph story on “American woman pleads guilty to conspiracy to recruit terrorists”
* a very short story with a huge 360 panorama image on a proposed one-euro tourist tax in Venice
* a page with “the number of illegal immigrants in the USA has stabilized, but is still three times larger than in 1990″ and “Anna Chapman, sexy spy, trademarks her name”
* An image of a Japanese volcano spewing smoke
* a page containing “Putin turned on by brave pinups” (including photo of Russian girl in lingerie), a very short story about how American-made products were smuggled into Iran to build missiles, and a one paragraph story that opens with the line “Pump some iron, Gramps – you’ll live longer if you do”.
* A Daily exclusive short video in what seems to be a series labelled “Americana”, about how prisoners in a Louisiana jail make children’s toys. The 2:20 film is the visual equivalent of repeating that sentence over and over. It has no narrative structure, and tries to squeeze in far too many characters. It ends up saying nothing more than its opening statement.
* Biz Digest – Copper’s up, the trader Steve Cohen lost $23m, BP reported profits, and people are using smartphones a lot.
* The Daily reports that Allstate apologized for a report that ranked road users by their star signs. And then reprints the entire study with fancy (non-interactive) infographics anyway.
* Horoscopes and location-based weather.

So, no foreign news that doesn’t involve pretty pictures, and no depth or links on a couple of fascinating stories – “American companies caught smuggling to Iran” and “American woman tries to recruit radical Islamists to kill Swedish cartoonist”. Strange, all round.

Gossip gets seven pages, and leads with the unstory that quotes unnamed sources to reveal that “Natalie Portman has been talking to her friends about her pregnancy”, followed by typical Page Six-style shorts, a photo gallery of press shots that you have no option but to swipe through in order to get to the next page, a shock story that “Palm Beach socialites have never heard of Rhianna”, and then… an apparently exclusive story about how former Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier has been hiding a chic Parisian apartment, with lover in tow, from his people.

Pardon? An investigative exclusive about a former dictator who is currently in the news, dropped in at the end of the Gossip section? Its placement suggests either a stunning lack of news judgement, or more likely, that each section head is fiercely protective of their own turf, and the editor doesn’t overrule to reassign stories to where they belong. Worrying.

Opinion‘s eleven pages open with a predictable “We are the world, We are The Daily, new times demand new journalism” piece that quotes American exceptionalism as the foundation of its foreign coverage (at least they’re up front about it) and claims no other particular political leanings. The news stories are so short and superficial, I certainly couldn’t contradict that claim.

This essay is followed by a remarkably intelligent, indepth, wordy piece about the connection between Bollywood and the rise in moderate Islamism. Yeah, you heard me.

Just as you continue to reel from the shock of your brain being forced into gear again, it pulls out a tech think piece about the rise in “ephemeralization”, then a quick piece on the situation in Egypt in Numbers (again, why not in the news section?), and a History page about the greater significance behind the launch of Voyager 1 (no links to the ace Voyager2 probe Twitter feed though). I spent more time reading these than the other sections put together. It feels like it belongs in a different publication.

Arts&Life gets 14 pages, in which it tells us to choose stripes, and shows catwalk shots to prove it, includes a few pages of style-related gossip (erm.. isn’t there a Gossip section elsewhere?), gives us love and male fashion advice, includes a Straight-Up taken for some reason in Mexico, and then suddenly leaps to intelligent movie summaries, including a three-page in-depth look at hipster spoof Portlandia. Strange to see Arts have so much style/fashion – it would probably go better with the gossip section.

Apps&Games gets 11 pages, and opens with “Last Minute Travel Apps” including iTunes store links, a non-critical blurb about the game Oregon Trail on Facebook (including a trailer and “tips”), a three-page interview with the founders of Quora (but no link to it), very well-programmed Sudoku and crossword puzzles that link to the Game Center (but no indications of difficulty), a one-page “What I have on my iPad” yawn, and one-paragraph shorts under the title “System_Update”.

Sports is perhaps the most content-intense section. It gets 26 pages in this issue, in which it covers American Football, basketball and ice hockey. There’s no way to skip to your favourite sport, so you have to go through it page by page.

It understandably goes big on the Super Bowl (though it’s still four days away), with videos about the atmosphere, columnists, plenty of in-line polls, some wacky shorts, and plenty of videos. Seems disappointing that the animated plays are only videos, not interactives. There is a tappable timeline about previous Superbowls, but the information is very brief and superficial.

Articles are brief, but expertly look at different aspects of their theme. Headlines appear on a black background, caps only, and the whole thing has a ESPNish feel to it. There’s also a “learn the tricks” basketball video, and a scrolling ticker of college basketball results on one page – though it looks as though that’s not actually live updated, just a gimmicky way to display the previous day’s scores.

There’s no single “results” page in the sports section, though there is an odds page for forthcoming games at the end. At least, I think that’s what “today’s line” means.

Summary
The Daily is very strange.

Firstly, the structure, and the design, feel very much like print. It is intended to be flicked through, every page of it, and the design and typesetting are as print as you can get without digging up a zombie Gutenberg.

The only non-printness of it all is its use of video, Twitter feed boxes (more than half of which are entirely superfluous, placed there because they can, not because they should), the occasional “tap here to read the caption” feature, a local weather display telling you what’s happening outside your window RIGHT NOW, and the limited ability to comment in/share pages – but these are added layers to what is clearly essentially a print product with bells on. There is no live reporting, no updated feeds from their correspondents, no new stories throughout the day. Nothing to make it feel “live” and digital.

This first issue feels like the product of competing personalities – half of it reads like an American-style Daily Mail in its approach (not its politics though), being deliberately and stereotypically female friendly in its gossip and fashion coverage.

It covers news lightly, without much insight or investigation, often leading with an image rather than a gripping story. This matches the formula of the designed-to-be-throwaway Metro, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post – all of which have far higher female readership percentages than the average newspaper.

And then there are the Opinion and Sports sections, which are densely packed with huge amounts of content, much of it on themes that are more traditionally male oriented. Men get depth, women get fluff, except of course for the “hot Russian spies/students in their lingerie” news stories. Is this really what journalism has come to?

The content and outlook of the six different sections suggest that The Daily is aiming to be a generalist news roundup-in-very-brief, for people of both sexes who somehow don’t get to read the news elsewhere. A breakfast read, let’s say, for those who want short, fast snippets to talk about at work. Almost like cable news, in fact, except that cable news already exists, and does it better.

Is the iPad market even mature enough yet to provide enough paying users who aren’t very connected to current affairs, in order to make money? As Joshua Benton at the Nieman Lab perceptively asks, Who is it trying to reach? What problem is it trying to solve? The Kindle, perhaps, might at a push have enough of an older demographic who want short summaries to support this venture. Does the iPad? Will the iPad?

And then there’s this: on the Bizarre/Frivolous News pages, four articles are linked to under the heading “What we’re reading”. The four stories are a video on BoingBoing coherently explaining Senate filibusters, an inside story from someone who went to Thailand for breast enhancement surgery, a fascinating and damning ProPublica investigation into nationwide coroner mismanagement, a long and interesting New Yorker profile of Guillermo del Toro, and a new study that shows how traffic cameras save lives. So, smart analysis, clever infographics, indepth reporting, a detailed arts profile… you’re reading it, but even with $30m at your disposal, you’re still not writing it.

At least, not yet. This is their much-delayed launch issue. Making a daily product is not easy, especially when your deadlines are shortened by the need to convert each page to be iPad ready. No launch issue is perfect, though it surprises me that they didn’t have a zinger of an exclusive to pull out, either in interactive graphics or investigative reporting, to showcase what can be done and to get their name out there even more. Maybe they’re saving it, to pull people in again post-launch. But right now, there’s not much exclusive or even interesting anywhere in this “pioneering digital venture.”

I’m going to follow its progress, and will absolutely post a revised review if it merits it in the future, when it’s had some time to bed in. As has been widely reported, there’s a lot of money behind The Daily, and Uncles Rupert M and Steve J have put the considerable weight of their names behind it, so they definitely won’t want it to fail.

But right now, it feels like it’s trying so hard to be all things to all men and women, frothy yet serious, fashionable and sporty – without having enough of any of the above to satisfy anyone. And most damning of all – its weakest section by far is the news.

POST claims to be “the world’s first independently published magazine exclusively for the iPad”. Presumably other than Sideways, Project, Letter to Jane, TRVL, and any others – feel free to mention yours in the comments.

Such silliness aside, it’s a high-end fashion magazine with its own interface that contains plenty of embedded video. It’s been created by some fairly big names in the independent fashion mag world, and has some original navigation ideas, some clever video integration and a number of bespoke ads.

But is it any good?

One-line pitch
An iPad-only independent magazine focused on “art, film, fashion and photography in a post-physical world,” it’s about “what’s exciting today and tomorrow.”

Made by
Former Dazed and Confused art director Remy Paringaux, former Tank senior editor Xerxes Cook, Manzine‘s (formerly Tank and Arena‘s) Peter Lyle, and editor of the always-excellent super/collider Chris Hatherhill. The publisher is Meri Media, founded by Paringaux (the company name is a transposing of the syllables in Remy).

Made for
Trendsetters, arty fashionistas, people who read Dazed, advertisers/publishers who want to hire Meri to make interactive digital content.

Navigation
• It’s horizontal only, using the traditional side-swipe to move on, up and down to read/see more.
• The auto-loading of the videos each time makes the sideswiping a little choppy at times.
• There’s an innovation in the text nav – you slide individual columns up and down to read, rather than splitting text across screens. It kind of works, with pull quotes sliding neatly up with each column, but it doesn’t keep your place if you accidentally swipe off it, and quickly gets annoying.
• Small images that accompany one of the articles can’t be tapped big as you might expect them to be, and they’re too small to see clearly.
• A single tap brings up the bottom nav bar and the top bar containing Browse function (see above) and credits.
• The iPad processor seems to struggle a little with so much video, but a few nav niggles aside, the principles are pretty sound.

Advertising
Four ads, all bespoke and created by Meri: an Alexander McQueen video, a refreshingly brightly coloured (given the grey/black nature of the rest of the magazine) Stella McCartney animated logo that leads to her app, which was also made by Meri, and a four-part ad feature on Edun’s project with Kenyan schoolchildren including a swipeable gallery, a link to the website (which loads out of app) and a one-minute documentary. Plus an ad for the next issue.

The first three are only marked as ads under “Browse”, not as you swipe through.

What’s inside
The theme of this issue is Matter, though it’s approached in a somewhat arch manner, with some features more clearly on-theme than others.

The first thing you notice, after you’ve swiped away the striking cover of a slow-mo man on fire, is what’s not in it – there’s no print-style contents page, for instance. (There’s actually a “Browse” function that does the same thing, but it’s hidden at the top, and you’ll probably only tap it last, just to see what it does, and then wish you’d known about it earlier.)

There are numerous elements to POST that feel distinctly, gloriously digital: the opening pages to features are often hypnotically animated; some features have their own slightly creepy new-age soundtrack, all the elements of which – it turns out – are approximations of the noises made by the Large Hadron Collider with which you can play at the end; two ethereal fashion shoots are perhaps the strongest elements of all, shot as artistic short films; director Gaspar Noe is filmed – with professional film production values – answering a Q+A, in which you can select the order of the questions; there’s a very neat spoof of early iPad book The Elements with The Periodic Table of Accessories (the first iPad-only parody?); there are text interviews with an interesting artist and a groundbreaking architect, followed by barely-moving subtle video of their work.

Most of these are at least mildly diverting. There’s nothing completely gripping in there, and there are certainly a few missteps in its small offering: it ends on a painfully pretentious piece about “the importance of POST magazine” related to McLuhan theory; the accessories in that spoof Periodic Table are hideous; a Front of Book-style page Currents feels too scattered, and features an irritating and repetitious navigation method that highlights how little content there is; the Miltos Manetas short films are outrageously self-indulgent, with little prior context to compel the user to watch, and are far too long for this format.

In all, there are 15 features, including the four multimedia ads – not much, and you can swipe through it all in no time – but that can be explained by the high production values, and to be fair to it, there’s quite a lot of reading/watching to be had if you feel inclined to go through it all.

There’s also a complete absence of social media integration, which actually feels kind of refreshing – and probably right for this kind of publication, which seeks to create its own world, not push you to talk out of it.

Summary
Sold as “POST-print”, this certainly doesn’t feel like a PDF with benefits. The strongest thing to say about it is that it has a clear, haunting filmic atmosphere to the entire piece that lingers afterwards, and it also employs some interesting design choices that are worth looking at if you’re in the industry. I also give it more than a few bonus points for its high production values and complete confidence in its ability to present unashamedly obtuse content, all within a very murky colour scheme.

It does, however, suffer more than a little from aching coolness, lack of wit, and occasional coldness.

Next time, I’d hope for more content, a slightly more varied feel (the constant soundtrack was a neat idea but it didn’t help suggest variation in tone), and a few more things to read, perhaps with a Letter To Jane-style ability to pull out the text alone if I want to, as those scrolling columns quickly got on my nerves.

But I will buy it next time, when the theme is apparently “Gravity”, especially if the price remains the same. POST doesn’t prove that print is over – but it does have some interesting ideas for what could come next. And as a showcase for Meri’s production abilities, it does the job very nicely indeed.

Buy POST Matter ($2.99 / £1.79):
iTunes US store | iTunes UK store

Bracket is a themed, news-print publication created by Anonymous (no, not that one), who are based in Singapore.

Not the first interesting publication from that small territory to be showcased this week, Bracket is as straightforward as it is enjoyable: a 15-question survey was sent out to a collection of creatives, broadly themed “Craft”. Following an introduction by Duane King, the responses are all printed unedited.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some craft in putting this together – the six-column grid is faintly printed in the opening and closing pages, and the 16 handwritten responses from creatives based around the world, originally compiled as a supplement to Anonymous’ Crafty2010 event, are arranged well.

There’s more than a few big names in there, including Ian Anderson of Designers Republic, KarlssonWinkler, Jessica Hirsche and Geoff Mcfetridge. They’ve also included chocolate makers, musicians and a film director in the mix.

I’m not really clear who did the illustrations in the centre pages, but they fit the theme well.

Some choose to use photography to answer the questions, others barely readable typography. The handwriting of each person gives each set of replies a truly personal feel.

I particularly sympathize with this response from Geoff Mcfetridge.

And then it’s over. Simple, uncomplicated, entertaining, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. They’ve declared that there will eight Brackets in all; the second issue is themed “Hunger”, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

————

I wrote about an edition of Centrefold previously. Unlike that edition, this one has been produced by Andrew Hobbs and Daniel Baer. The first thing to say is that it’s huge, and its foil-embossed card cover gatefolds out into something even bigger – 87cmx42cm, or nearly 3 ft by nearly 1.5ft.

It’s well printed on 150gsm heavy, metallic stock by GF Smith, bound loosely with a black elastic thread, and contains a series of fashion photographs.

To be honest, most of these leave me pretty cold, but I’m not a fashion type, so I’m not really target audience.

I do like the angles on the shot of these models though.

Overall, its scale forces you to look at the images, but the photos, though beautifully shot, make this little more than a lovely paper sample for me. It’s a genuine shame – I really liked the drama of the previous edition. Hopefully they’ll be back on form in the next edition.

————

I Want You is also a quarterly, visual-only publication, a simple 16-page free magazine based in Seattle. They sent me four issues, and its images, in contrast to the majority of Centrefold, are almost all extremely arresting. The juxtapositions are never explained or justified, but they add to the sense of unease. The artist credits are in the top corner of each page, always displayed as a simple link to the website, where more images – many of them exclusive – can be seen.

It doesn’t take long to go through each large-format issue, but certain images stay with you for much longer than that.

Not sure if it’s worth the $15 cost of back issues on its website, but definitely worth paying postage for the latest issue that’s available to order for free online, and/or picking one up if you are near one of their global distribution points.

————

Headmaster is a new queer magazine very much in the tradition of Butt. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but doesn’t pass up the chance for some eye candy either.

I don’t know the queer arts scene at all, but the Headmaster crew assure me that they were particularly delighted with the names they got to contribute.

The conceit is a cute one – the Headmaster (a distinctly British word – they’re Principals over here) sets homework assignments for credit. The contributors – including Sholem Krishtalka, manager of the world’s oldest continually operating gay bookshop, whose painting is above – have to respond as best they can.

It’s mostly visual, with a clean, simple design, and three articles spread throughout the issue. The one by Connor Habib about making a gay porn video is well-written and unexpectedly tender. The other two are good, but could do with an edit.

I really enjoyed this cheeky (ahem) series of Wallpaper*-esque revering of furniture design in miniature, the chairs nestled among a forest of close-up body hair.

And the photo recipe for fried bread is just silly.

The homework assignments are all printed at the back – I’d have preferred them next to each article, so I could immediately grade the results for myself.

Like so many new publications, it was over-funded at the start thanks to Kickstarter (check out the amusing assignments for each donation level), and this first issue is available in a limited run of 1000. They plan to make it quarterly twice a year. At $20, it’s a little pricey, but for such a visually strong magazine, that doesn’t seem too outrageous. Good stuff.

————

Ampersand is an Australian literary magazine of the kind that’s becoming fairly popular – that is, fiction alongside photography alongside short interviews and non-fiction. By far the strongest elements are its paperback format and design. The cover (above) cleverly apes Penguin Classics, while introducing the issue’s (fairly broadly interpreted) theme.

Inside, the Penguin Classics theme prevails, with plenty of Gill Sans abound.

It’s truly a lovely format, the size and shape of a paperback book, bound on the top edge rather than the side. Very easy on the eye and the hand, and its narrow shape never appears to be a problem, though I imagine it’s a real issue for Mikie Inglis, the designer.

Monochrome pencil illustration is the overwhelming aesthetic, but it’s not the only one. Colour photography is sparse and well used, including this selection taken from the seventh edition of KesselsKramer‘s In Almost Every Picture.

Some articles and images are read “top to bottom”, but not too many to become irritating.

The text itself is a real mixed bag, varying from the enjoyable to the over-long and self-congratulatory. The non-fiction pieces are a shade better than the fiction, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. My favourite pieces were Jazz Andrews’ Adventure, Chritos Tsialkos’ eulogy to Jack Charles, and the interview with the whipcracker. Did you know the crack of a whip occurs when the loop of string on its tip breaks the speed of sound? My fact of the day, that.

I also really liked its index, a rare sight in a magazine, combined here with that of another publication, to add an extra frisson of unpredictability. In this issue, the guest index is from The Bog People by PV Glob (1969).

Anyway, Ampersand is a really good-looking magazine, and not a terrible read. Which is as good a place as any from which to get even better.

Read anything good yourself lately?

My first review of this year is a somewhat unusual one in that it’s of two issues of a magazine that aren’t actually available to buy, as they had already sold out when I received them.

It’s also the first time that I’ve been sent a magazine in a home-made envelope, the reverse side of which contained the face of its creator on an old gig poster. So it was that Wayne Alan Brenner recently sent me the first two issues of his virtuoso creation, Minerva’s Wreck. And they’re tremendous.

MW is a low-budget, high-value proposition with a card cover, broadly about WAB’s hometown of Austin, Texas, and featuring interviews, true stories, fiction, poetry, graphic-novel-style tales, and anything else they could fit inside.

Aside from the three-colour centre pages, and a couple of two-colour ones, the majority of issue one’s 68 oversized pages are monochrome – with colour placed in by hand. Which means photographs and illustrations pasted carefully into place, and rubber stamps placed on pages.

The magazine is filled with clever details. I really like how the missing cut out of Texas in one image quietly appears later, when the person featured in the first illustration has her own article. A lovely, subtle link.

And if you’re already placing things inside, why stop at colour images? Issue one also contains Post-it notes…

a genuine strip of celluloid from an archive B-movie, courtesy of the Alamo Drafthouse

a small bag of nori seaweed

an envelope containing a poem stuck inside the back cover

and a variety of engaging inserts. It’s like La Mas Bella with staples.

Not surprisingly, the second issue was somewhat less ambitious as an object, restricting its imagination to an unusual thin format, a handful of colour photographs, a few stamps – and a slightly improved design, featuring plenty of wit.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that Cafe Armageddon made a second issue at all, given the effort that the first one must have been.

MW is certainly a fantastic, all-round imaginative object. However, its strongest quality is actually the writing, which is zine-y in the very best way: underground, in the know, accessible, funny, creative.

There are a few missteps – poetry is very hard to pull off in any context, particularly one that makes much out of being knowingly self-indulgent, and some of the graphic stories are better than others – but other creative risks, such as WAB’s own tale of arriving in Austin, spread throughout the first issue, succeed wonderfully. He has a very engaging writing style, as readers of the Austin Chronicle can already testify.

I’ve never been to Austin, but I suspect this is the closest you can get to it in print: quirky, creative, unique, enormously pleasurable. And almost impossible to make any money from.

But that’s not a concern for Minerva’s Wreck, which is a niche zine that’s clearly a printed labour of love. And one of the very best I’ve seen.

Look out for issue three some time this year.

#3: Bloomberg Businessweek

For a long time, Businessweek had some strong content, but framed within a magazine that tried to be a populist version of The Economist one week, and a simplified Popular Science the next. And then, when you tried to read it, you realised that half of the articles were actually aimed at those people who knew the difference between a bear market and a bond rush.

Following its buyout and renaming by the Mayor of New York, it radically changed its look and feel, without sacrificing its knowledge or economic authority. The magazine’s numbers soon turned around, and it is now one of the most interesting mainstream titles out there, with a witty design and strong imagery to match its content.

Though The Economist still has the edge in its global and political resources and commentary, Bloomberg Businessweek is better at drawing out broader life lessons from engaging tales of competition and management, and, crucially, using photography and design to show as well as tell. This is a magazine not just about ideas and movements, but about the people behind them, and it uses all the weapons at its disposal (including a decent commissioning budget) to make a compelling package.

It’s not without its missteps – the one-line summaries of already-short news items are often too truncated to be meaningful, while some company-focused articles can come across as a little lacking in critical analysis. It has also been criticized for dropping in mentions of the $18,000pa Bloomberg terminals that are the source of the company’s wealth. It would certainly be interesting to see how the title would report on a Bloomberg run for the presidency. Some illustrations could be accused of being a little over-frivolous. And, as a non-business/economics type, I have to admit to flicking past as many articles as I read in each issue.

However, what really elevates the publication to Magtastic Top Three status is the work of its talented design team, led by Richard Turley. This is the only newsstand magazine that repeatedly takes risks in its commissions, using illustration, photography, witty flowcharts, infographics and typography to play with the elements of each story. Nothing, not even the logo, is safe from its intelligent playfulness. Not everything works, but for a weekly magazine, its success rate is remarkable. Pretty much every issue contains an image or feature whose design is among the best things I’ve seen that month, easily besting those with four times as much lead time for their articles.

In the past eight months, what was a flagging niche title has become relevant and engaging. Whether or not you follow business, if you are interested in the witty, intelligent, clear design of complex stories, you need to follow Bloomberg Businessweek.

Click here for an excellent analysis of the magazine’s year.

For more covers and spreads, click here.