graphic design

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You can expect at least some of these to return in my top ten of 2011.

This is a jobs supplement from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, aimed at school-leavers. Kati Krause translates it thusly:

Crossed-out text: “How are you going to live. How do you make the right decisions? Will your relationship survive leaving school? You don’t have an idea what you want to be either? Are you too much of a coward to get started in your dream job? How do you tie a tie? Is it ok to be Facebook friends with one’s teacher? What do you have to know to live in a shared flat?”

Circled text: “You decide what you want. Start with joy.”

I like this very much. Their fashion-literate readership will instantly recognise the mouth (just in case you don’t), and there’s a good, feature-led reason to draw attention to it. Add in the bright, unusual colours, and you have a lovely Rocky Horror/Samuel Beckett tribute cover.

Colourful geometric pattern made personal.

Just the right sense of urban recklessness for Vice‘s readership.

Little White Lies continues to experiment while remaining true to their basic, successful cover aesthetic. I hope they never lead with a photograph.

Most if not all have come via either Cover Junkie, Nas Capas, Newmanology or Magculture – all of which are highly recommended.

Finally, two image-led bonus links:

The above photo by Richard Avedon was the first full-page picture ever to appear in the New Yorker, in 1992. I learned this while reading about how the New Yorker is saying goodbye to its talented Visuals Editor Elisabeth Biondi with tributes by some of their contributors/staff. (She’s not dead, just moving on.) There’s also a great interview with her here about her history and philosophy.

This is the greatest magazine rejection letter I’ve seen. (Source; thanks Kate.)

I previously mentioned Wallpaper*’s ‘Design Your Own Cover’ concept, created in conjunction with their forthcoming ‘Handmade’ issue – and today, the interface to create your own cover went online, for a limited time only.

I was somewhat skeptical about how much freedom they’d truly allow. So how does it play?
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Every new year since 2006 has meant one thing for fans of infography: a new Feltron Report is on its way.
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Oh, you do graphic design? So does my iPhone.

Next up: the InDesign plugin that turns photos and text into layout, and the Word macro that writes SEO-friendly punning headlines. And then in ten years’ time, people will be taken out of the equation altogether, and it’ll just be iPhones quietly talking to each other.

Emigre’s back

For reasons to be revealed soon, I’ve been looking over a wide breadth of American independent magazines lately, and one thing is clear: the graphic design world is poorer for the death of Emigre a few years ago.

Except it’s back! Kind of. Using 25 years since issue 1 as a flimsy excuse to flex his DTP muscles again, Rudy VanderLans has come up with a weighty book-length tome published with Gingko Press to create Number 70: The One Filled With Content From All The Others, to be published next month. How much is new and how much rehash has yet to be determined – it seems we mostly get footnotes and a mini “letters to the editor” insert at the end in lieu of much completely new content. Still – even if it’s nothing more than a tribute and a compilation, it’ll still be an essential purchase for those of us without a complete set of back issues.

More info and a mailing list for launch news here, images and other publisher info here.

Hurray for desktop publishing. A special spoof edition of the New York Times was distributed free on the streets of the Big Apple yesterday, dated “July 4th 2009″, filled with “all the news we hope to print”. The Iraq War is over, national health care has been introduced and all petrol cars have been recalled.

And apparently, the activists behind the spoof paper printed 1.2 million of the things.

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