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I mentioned before that I’ve been partaking of a little three-dimensional storytelling in Providence, RI. We emptied out the window this morning, but not before we took the information gathered and turned two blocks of a downtown street into a museum about itself.
Here’s what happened.
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
The third in my roundup of MyMags, RatMag is a little different from AOKI and Hey Olivia!
This is the second MyMag review. The first is here.
Hey Olivia! is the curated selection of Olivia Munn, an American model and presenter of Attack Of The Show, a sort of gadget show with comedy sketches on cable channel G4. She’s the only woman in the initial MyMag selection, but her magazine’s intended audience seems firmly rooted towards a testosterone-heavy demographic. As with the other magazines, the cover contains a list of the publications inside, in this case handwritten by Olivia herself.
Over the next three few days, I’m going to do something a little different.
Three unusual new publications were recently released simultaneously, under the banner of MyMag, all promising to reinvigorate interest in print magazines.
Each MyMag has a different guest editor, each invited to create “a personalized magazine devoted to their passions, interests and diversions.” The magazines contain a mixture of unique content, and spreads reproduced from other magazines’ archives – sort of like an individually curated Distill.
Few people will buy all three MyMags. You can’t even buy a MyMag subscription. Instead, each magazine aims to capitalize on the individual fan bases of each guest ‘tastemaker’ – so spreading the risk between them.
The first three MyMags are called AOKI (for LA-based DJ Steve Aoki, aka Kid Millionaire), Hey Olivia! (model/cable TV presenter Olivia Munn) and RatMag (Hollywood director Brett Ratner). I’m going to review each of them, one a day. Then over the weekend, I’ll post a Magtastic exclusive interview with the man behind the whole thing, former luxury magazine publisher Magnus Greaves.
So let’s get on with it.
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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.
Ink and paper fanatics will get much glee from the latest issue of Print, celebrating 70 years of the mag, and also containing a few nods to other classic magazines too.
Of particular geek note is Perrin Drumm’s piece, “Eight years that changed magazine design history”, devoting a page to each. The years, for the record, are 1936, 1951, 1968, 1971, 1981, 1987, 1993 and 2001. Most of the usual suspects are name checked, with a few unexpected others, such as Arkzin – though for such a wide-reaching design roundup, it definitely could have done with more space devoting to it, either here or online.
The issue also contains a couple of different roundups of Print’s own history, and an appreciation of Flair (of which more soon).
Lovely cover too. The subscriber version (which is not as good) can be seen here. The mag is reportedly having a few difficulties, but this issue is one of their strongest for a while.
This website focuses on developments
in the magazine industry around
the world.
It is written by
Andrew Losowsky,
a writer and editor based in the USA. He has so far edited two books about magazines, and
has ideas for
many more.
He writes about magazines for The Wall Street Journal and others, and
is co-curator of
the Colophon international magazine biennale. He also runs
Stack America.
The rest of the time, he creates experiences.
