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News from the Magosphere July 30th 2010

July 30, 2010 in Clever ideas, Death of print, Magazine covers, News round-up, technology, Trend | No comments

The story behind Time magazine’s striking front cover
They started to protect her before it hit the newsstand.

Foto8 has a great summer subscription offer
My favourite independent photojournalism mag has a neat offer on right now: buy a subscription as a gift, get one for yourself free.

A potential new direction for magazines and video
I’m not blown away by what is essentially a slow video, but I do feel that there’s something there… I just don’t know what yet.

How to successfully use Kickstarter to fund your project
Plenty of publications have been using Kickstarter to fund projects – I’ll write about that in more detail someday – but I’ve never seen as much research into it as Craig Mod has done. Essential reading for those considering crowdsourcing solutions (via Jean Snow)

In defence of Apple
Exact Editions’ Adam Hodgkin refutes some of the “Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions” stories.

Memo to prospective freelancers
Village Voice editor asks writers to grow a thicker skin (via FishbowlNY)

How to shoot a cover with an iPhone
Including some post production (via MagCulture)

Ready or not – part two

July 23, 2010 in Opinion, technology, Trend | 3 comments

Even if what I wrote over here is true, and Ready-Media is only aiming for the lowest end of the marketplace, what about the principle of the thing? What about the potential threat to designers’ jobs from the introduction of template-based print design? What if it’s a slippery slope?

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Ready or not, here it comes – part one

July 23, 2010 in Buzzwords, Opinion, technology, Trend | 7 comments


(Image by the Clippy Image Generator)

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.

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Send in the cloud

July 19, 2010 in Clever ideas, ipad, technology, Trend | 2 comments

Some interesting news from MagCloud, the HP-run service that offers print on demand for magazines. As of today, they’re offering a few new services:

Firstly, and long overdue: worldwide shipping. (UPDATE: only for single issues though. If you want to buy more than one mag, you have to pay separate shipping each time.) Not sure how cost-effective the rates are, but if it’s affordable, it makes the entire service far more attractive for publishers all over the world. Recommended purchases for those new to the party: Strange Light, Onè Respe, and the Life Woodstock reprint (sadly without the ads of the day). Even custom publishers are using it.

Secondly, perfect binding. For a flat rate of $1, on-demand publishers can now perfect bind any mag (only saddle-stitching has been allowed until now). I’ve not seen a sample yet to know how it holds, but it’s an important step towards making professional-feeling magazines. Publishers can upload their own spines, or let the MagCloud system generate it for them. Minimum page count is 20; it also increases the maximum size of a MagCloud mag to 384 pages, and means that magazines no longer have to have page counts in multiples of four.

Thirdly, and most left-fieldly, an iPad application. An opt-in for all publishers on MagCloud, readers can download the free MagCloud app, and then select the magazines they want to read, which are downloaded for offline reading within the app. They’ve created an interface that allows for portrait and landscape viewing, with a simple zoom function, and downloads are a fraction of the size of the print pdf. And if you want a printed copy, you simply hit the “Buy in Print” button at the top right, and an iFrame opens up to a shopping cart on the MagCloud website.

Though I haven’t played with it yet, the app sounds pretty basic. There are no functions to copy/paste text or to share pages with anyone, and you can’t transfer your downloads to read on any other device. There’s also no option to sell digital editions within the app – right now, all those who opt in have to offer their iPad editions for free, though I’m told that a pay-for option is in the works.

When it first launched, I mentioned that a tie-in with Issuu would make sense for MagCloud. Seems like they’re simply making their own competitor. If HP only made printers, I’d say that this was a curious move. However, as a huge company with so many fingers in so many technological pies, perhaps only a company like HP could offer such a joined-up selection of publishing possibilities.

By the time that the iPad app reaches its second or third iteration, and with a few tweaks to their print service, MagCloud could just be the best thing that ever happened to small magazine publishers, in whatever format they want to publish in. Right now, it’s certainly well on the way.

Ten things #2a: Press Start

July 12, 2010 in Archives, New launches, technology, Trend | 5 comments

Two talented teams of writers and designers have recently launched preview issues of interesting, independent videogame magazines. It’s about time.

First, a little genre history.

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Smells again

June 7, 2010 in Archives, technology, Trend | 4 comments

According to today’s The New York Times, the Magazine Publishers of America have never heard of a scratch n sniff cover before Sactown‘s latest offering.

Given that they have a vested interest in the story being big, they probably didn’t look too hard. To be fair, the precedents aren’t that easy to find, but they are there:

- Cult movie mag/zine Fright X (scroll down this link) had a scratch n sniff popcorn cover featuring John Walters

- The latest Mono.Kultur – see previous post – has a scratch n sniff cover, as well as insides.

- And, strangely, yesterday here in Bulgaria, someone introduced me to the scratch n sniff cover their magazine ran last year. The mag, Sign Cafe, is aimed at the international advertising market, and last year they carried a cover about a campaign called Mr Lime – it scratch and sniffed as lemon.

Bonus graphic design link: Scratch n sniff sticker designs from the 80s.

UPDATE: Newmanology points to this other example, from a little-known magazine called “Wired“. During its Viz phase, it seems.

Now wash your hands

June 3, 2010 in technology, Trend | 3 comments

(Image borrowed from Motto)

Mono.kultur is one of my favourite small magazines – it’s interesting, it’s tightly focussed, it changes its format to reflect its subject matter, it doesn’t overstretch its content, and it’s affordable.

Its latest issue, which has already been spoken of in other quarters, is about the smell scientist Sissel Tolaas, and instead of images to illustrate the text, it presents blank pages embedded with replications of some odours that she’s been collecting recently, which are the smells of different men in a state of anxiety.

The result is intriguing and interactive, though also creates a combined odour that this particular correspondent doesn’t enjoy having in his nasal passages. It also lingers on your fingertips, meaning that you might suffer unexpected sensory flashbacks if you don’t wash your hands carefully after reading.

However, it’s not the first time that smell has been used in print, beyond the perfumed scent strips inside fashion magazines. Sixteen years ago, Sam Adams beer placed hoppy scents inside American magazines, while an ad for the TV show Weeds did the same with the smell of marijuana, causing parental problems in teenage bedrooms across the nation. A couple of years ago, Romanian Esquire placed an actual plastic perfume bottle inside the magazine, while in 2003, Visionaire reflected on scent in its own, luxurious manner. Recently photographers have also been using smell as a way of making their promos stand out, and there may be more applications to come: David P Sada has a patent for a novelty scent strip that combines scent with pheromones to influence our behaviour.

Smell, along with heft, touch and organically generated sound, is one of the sensual distinctions between print and digital, whether deliberately manipulated or not. There’s nothing quite like that new ink smell – which by the way is apparently harmless – when you flick through a freshly printed matt publication.

Perhaps the closest to Mono.Kultur‘s smellustrations of different men was People magazine’s “sexiest man alive scratch n’ sniff section”. As unpleasant as that seems, it certainly isn’t the most undesirable-sounding use of the technology.

*Shudders*

Visitors to Sofia Design Week will be able to sniff the latest Mono.Kultur for themselves in my exhibition ‘Objects as Magazines’ at the Sofia Art Gallery, 1 June – 20 June.

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