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News from the Magosphere Feb 12th ‘10

February 12, 2010 in Clever ideas, New launches, News round-up, Trend, USA | 1 comment

Grafik has a new cover concept
Some nice possibilities with this one

Renting an apartment for your Playboy collection
Confessions of a female centerfold obsessive

Jeremy redesigns FHM UK
Gives it a much more clearly delineated structure. He also kindly gives Magtastic Blogsplosion a shout out here, where he says that most of his links come from Twitter these days. Should I start tweeting?

Gute Seiten has a lovely round up of small, new magazines
Palimpsest in particular sounds intriguing

How W art director matches headlines to photography
I think Klaus/Haus is my favourite. It’s not much more than you could get from just looking at the magazine, but a useful primer for graphic design students. Nicely shot, too

Unusual guidebook/magazine hybrid launches
Looks intriguing, though am not sure who its audience will be

Melbourne e-magazine Three Thousand opens up a store
Includes rare zines and magazines

Becky Smith’s top five mags of all time
Classics are thus for a reason

In-jokes in magazine design part 351
What’s important is that it still has relevance and power, whether you get the reference or not. Don’t think Paste passes that test

New online design magazine launches issue zero
Editorial method includes open monthly meetings in NYC to determine content. Disclosure: I’m an advisor on the project. Many are the plans and improvements to come

iPad overexcitement roundup

Google may be working on a bigger tablet
Or might just be employing animators to get a cheap headline. Slightly confused by the line “Several other consumer electronics companies, including HP, are thought to be working on their own tablet-style computers.” The article is dated 2nd Feb – nearly a month after the same newspaper already reported on the HP Slate

Interview the latest to unveil prototype iPad video
It looks quite nice, though doesn’t explain how the user knows when something is part of a spread or a single page

iPad UI conventions
How Apple seems to think we might design for it

Fictional architecture

January 29, 2010 in Clever ideas, Trend | 1 comment

icon is often overlooked in favour of the bigger boys like Blueprint (my mistake, thanks for the correction Will), but it’s consistently one of the most interesting and creative design/architecture magazines on the newsstand, such as when they got architects and designers to take a lie detector test for their Detectives issue. Their latest issue is a reminder of how their thoughtful angle doesn’t just review what’s out there, but also can push ideas and practice forward. It’s The Fiction Issue.

Imaginative thinking in the field is employed by a host of good names, including Will Self, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and China Miéville. The magazine’s review section this issue fits the theme too, with critiques of the MOMA/Tim Burton exhibition and an iPhone app about New York buildings that were never built.

They’ve also produced a limited-edition hardback version, to give it a chance at a longer lifespan. (A part of me wishes they’d also redesigned the pages to make it hardback size, but you can’t have everything.)

As ever, the subscriber-only cover (the blue one above, centre) looks much nicer than the coverlined one (the red one, right). Lovely image, too, though I’m not sure if the mouse needed to be labelled “fiction”, and I’m also not a huge fan of Fuel’s mangling of it with tree branches on that hardback edition (the red one on the left). But in a field where almost every cover right now shows that pointy building in Dubai, it’s a refreshing point of departure.

It’ll take more than a while for it to arrive on a newsstand over here, so I can’t comment on how it actually turned out, but I was sold on “this month, icon abandons journalism”. Definitely worth a look.

Hi,Pad

January 27, 2010 in Buzzwords, Clever ideas, New launches, Trend, technology | 5 comments

Crunch time

(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.

News from the Magosphere, 25th January ‘10

January 25, 2010 in Clever ideas, Death of print, Magazine covers, New launches, News round-up, Trend, technology | No comments

Spin starts licensing their archive content
The lesson for magazines here is never, ever throw anything away. Meanwhile…

Conde Nast suddenly realises that brands have value beyond print
“Guys! I’ve got a brilliant idea!”

New magazine launches for mega-rich athletes
As long as Jamie Redknapp isn’t on the editorial board

Girls Like Us is back!
Brilliantly named, trendy Euro-lesbian mag returns with a smart new look

Paste survives with unusual content-sharing deal
We might start to see a lot more of this kind of thing. (Previously)

Esquire’s moving cover
It’s a simple trick, but it still kinda freaks me out

Creative Review offers subscribers free tomatoes and a planter
Includes prize for the best tomatoes (see comments). Part of their rather fabulous series experimenting with biodegradable packaging

PDF magazine gets David Foster Wallace exclusive
Requires free subscription, but it’s well worth the hassle – and it’s a lovely mag anyway. Also still the only PDF mag I know that’s designed to be printed out on normal printer paper before reading

Limited-edition Emigre prints for sale
Really pretty combinations of previous front pages. Shame they’re so expensive

New Feltron Report prepares to launch
Every year, Nicholas Felton releases his limited edition, infographically gorgeous Annual Report. This year’s is twice the price of last year’s – and is a 16-page, four-colour extravaganza. Almost guaranteed to be worth it

A must-buy

January 19, 2010 in Clever ideas, New launches, Trend, technology | 1 comment

Perhaps my favourite magazine of last year was Strange Light. It was a beautiful, elegiac magazine made up of images from Sydney’s dust cloud storm. Most remarkable, however, is how, and how fast it was put together.

It was created in the USA by Derek Powacek, founder of JPEG magazine, from photos he found on Flickr – he identified the owners, got their permission, and had a lovely little magazine on sale via print-on-demand service MagCloud, less than 48 hours after the storm hit.

More of the service’s potential is on view with Onè Respe, a magazine made of archive photojournalism from Haiti, showing its vibrant population pre-earthquake. A group of photojournalists donated some incredible images to the mag, all proceeds from which go to the American Red Cross International Response Fund for Haiti relief. The magazine contains a couple of articles as well as some fantastic full-bleed double spreads.

Its title is Haitian creole for “Honour and Respect”. You can see a preview and buy the thing here. It costs $16, $12 of which goes straight to the fund. $12 – I assume the price change means that all monies go straight to the fund (well done, HP). UPDATE: yep.

The idea for the magazine was photographer Lane Hartwell’s, and it was designed by Powacek. It looks like it’s been really well put together, and fast. There’s a Q+A with Lane here. Now go and buy it.

What happened to I.D.

January 13, 2010 in Death of print, Trend, USA | 1 comment

Not sure who made this pic but I like it

Print’s stablemate I.D.’s demise was a sad tale to be sure, especially as told on Design Observer by former editor-in-chief Julie Lasky. Her piece also contains some lovely reflections on/mixed metaphors for the continual evolution of magazines.

Magazines are organic. They take on shapes and personalities that are independent of those who make them, and in this margin of self-sufficiency is something eerily close to life. Magazines are mammalian: warm-blooded, twitchy and dynamic…

And of course magazines are historical. The internet is a bottomless archive, but it spits information back to us in fragments, and we’re never sure which pieces might disappear forever. A magazine archive unspools to allow us to see aesthetic movements wildly imitated before they’re just as passionately revoked and to watch the youth of our industries mature and grow old and give way to new talents. Would anyone be able to make sense of so unruly a profession as design, with its vague and shifting borders, if it weren’t bound into our journals?

Amen.

Panomania

January 12, 2010 in Clever ideas, Death of print, Trend | 5 comments

I have my hands on a first edition of the San Francisco Panorama (aka the one-off, broadsheet newspaper edition McSweeney’s issue 33). I will be reviewing it in some detail, but not quite yet, cos there’s a lot of it: 120 pages of broadsheet, plus two magazines (112 pages and 96 pages), and two broadsheet double-sided posters.

There’s also a four-page insert discussing the experiment, which mainly seems to have been designed to remind newspapers how to engage with an audience. The insert also features a detailed breakdown of their printing and staff costs on the edition, coupled with a few ideas about how to make daily newspapers profitable (which basically involves not going into it with expectations of 12 percent profits, or paying yourself huge wages).

First impressions: this is something deeply wonderful. I may be some time.

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