The Hall of Femmes is an important idea, realised immaculately in their first publication. Neat title, too.
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I just received an email from the Society of News Design (Spain and Portugal division) to say that numbers are unexpectedly low for next week’s annual conference in Valencia – which is a shame because it has a great line up.
I spoke at their conference a year ago, and it was a terrific event (with simultaneous translation into English).
This year’s line up includes:
Alain Blaise, art director of Libération
Nicholas Felton of the Feltron Report
Walter Mariotti and Francesco Franchi, director and art director of Il Sole 24 Ore (one of the best European magazine supplements out there)
Jaime Serra, one of the best infographers in the world
Alfredo Triviño, director of New Projects at News International
That’s just the ones I’ve heard of. And, even better, it’s taking place inside the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, genuinely one of the most architecturally magical places in the world. Seriously, it’s up there with Brazilia.
If you’re thinking about going, do. If you weren’t before, but are now, do. Valencia is a lovely city, and some of the most exciting developments in newspaper design are coming from Iberia right now.
Start looking up cheap flights – you won’t regret it.
Fewer updates this week as I’m out of town giving a talk here. However, one of the great things about European layovers in unexpected locations is the ability to kill time in a nearby Relay.
As I flew Lufthansa, I got a stop in Frankfurt. There were three Relays within about 500 feet of each other, all of which had a remarkable selection of magazines. It was good to see independents such as Kaiserin and S(nsfw) sitting alongside the usual fare. Here’s what else I spotted, and snapped with my iPhone:
Business magazine Brand Eins continues to stand out for its beautiful simplicity.
Sleek is doing something lovely with the page edges in their latest issue, themed ‘Food’. You can download it for free if you register here.
Swiss design mag idPure is always worth looking at. They’ve had a redesign of their cover since I last saw it. I like it a lot.
The first issue of Business Punk, the new G+J magazine that tries to meld economics and ladmags, was there. Lots of bright colours and shouty design about the most unexpected topics inside. However, I wasn’t able to find its stablemate, leaving me asking ‘Where’s the Beef?’
At least two charities have their own newsstand titles, both cleanly designed and filled with more content than just money-raising fayre.
And finally, a piece of honest explanation for the store’s top shelf. It was 6am, I was surrounded by wide-eyed people who, like me, had taken overnight flights, and yet I was in a happy place. Yes, I am a cheap date.
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.
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.
The aforementioned new issue of McSweeney’s is beginning to cause a stir in the American newspaper world, as the advance spreads seem to be getting people interested anew in the possibilities of newsprint.
“Ah,” say the skeptics. “Easy for them – they’ve had months to work on it. You couldn’t do that kind of thing with a daily.” Except you can. I spent much of last week in the company of the team from i, a tabloid-sized Portuguese daily newspaper with a design team of five (including two infographers), and this is some of their work:
I’m going to be speaking next month in Lisbon at the annual conference of the Society for News Design – Spanish Chapter, called ñh6 (full program here, PDF), talking about choosing stories to fit your format (and vice versa). Anyone playing Conference Bingo should mark their cards with the word “magazine” right now.
Also on the rather stellar bill: Luke Hayman, Kris Viesselman, Fernando Gutierrez, Manuel Lima and the team behind the revolutionary new Portuguese newspaper i, as well as various big hitters from the Spanish and Portuguese newspaper, photojournalism and typography scenes. I’m rather looking forward to it. Come along, do.
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