There are a few, remarkable people who show us that there’s another way.

They take the tools from our hands, and do amazing things with them that we could never have contemplated. Where we see unbreakable rules, they see uninteresting choices. The results leave some people so affected that they never again look at their tools in the same way.

These people generally fall into three categories. First, there are those who were so far ahead of society’s ability to comprehend their efforts that their work is only “discovered” and lauded after their deaths. Kafka was one. Van Gogh another.

Second are those who break established rules again and again to increasing acclaim, yet always stay ahead of their imitators simply because they don’t know of any other way to behave. Picasso, let’s say. Radiohead, perhaps.

And then there are those people who have a single flash of genius at the very moment that society’s mirrors are perfectly aligned to catch its light. Though the rest of their work may be perfectly competent, everyone clamors for the lightening to strike again and again. It’s not these people’s fault that they can’t replicate that moment.

Given the title of this piece, you can probably see where I’m going with this one.

David Carson’s editorial design career currently has three significant phases of its own. Firstly, there was Transworld Skateboarding, Surfer, and Beach Culture. A former professional surfer (ninth in the world at one point, apparently) Carson created a sprawling, gridbreaking design style for these publications, taking every element he was given for the page and treating them as visual objects to play with, often whimsically.

He essentially set himself up as an artist who had taken on the position of a graphic designer – text, typography, photography were all elements of equal weight, to be treated like free-floating pieces of a collage. This sensation continues to echo in his work.

Then came the extended flash of genius that was Ray Gun – a lightening strike that lasted three years. Under the almost-criminally overlooked editorship of founder Marvin Scott Jarrett (who went on to create Nylon), and working with art directors such as Chris Ashworth, Carson invented a sprawling, gridbreaking, unpredictable, and above all highly distinctive design language. It was strange, experimental, and often unpleasant. Yet it was rarely less than interesting, and its look and feel matched the nonconformist attitude of the grunge music that the magazine covered.

Graphic design is about content and message, and his designs only truly succeed when their message (usually attention-seeking confusion, chaos, nonconformity) match the story within the rest of the content. Some grunge tunes were barely more than unlistenable rage; some of Carson’s designs were unreadable messes. Purists and industry leaders hated both; at a time when computer-based DTP was encouraging typographic homogeneity, they were a perfect match.

The magazine’s aesthetic was widely copied by design students everywhere, and richly deserves its place in the unofficial hall of cult editorial fame.

And so Carson became a hero figure to many designers aged under 30. The phrase “The End of Print” was coined in reference to him, tongue in cheek, by another contemporary typographic enfant terrible, Neville Brody. Never one for deadlines or even necessarily turning up to his own events, Carson’s legend became as rebelliously romantic as it was untouchable.

Often passed over by those searching for a nonconformist idealism to match his visuals is the fact that he left Ray Gun in 1995, in order to focus the work of his studio on corporate projects and personal artwork, with the occasional editorial commission for old times’ sake.

Now, sixteen years since he left Ray Gun, we have Carson – a bimonthly magazine named after the man’s own legacy. It’s edited by Alex Storch, previously the editor-in-chief of a counter culture online magazine about Los Angeles, with creative direction by DavidCarsonDesignInc.

Here’s the first strange thing about Carson: Beach Culture appeared as part of an emerging surf culture, documenting what it meant to drop out and surf. Ray Gun was created as way of discussing and contributing to the rise of grunge, and everything it stood for. So what is the cultural driving force that led to the introduction of Carson?

Independent magazines. It feels like this magazine exists principally because of independent publishing. Even though magazines aren’t its theme, the often nonconformist energy in this ever-growing field is what has made it possible, and made it happen.

However, the first issue of Carson isn’t a reaction against all that the editorial establishment stands for. Instead, it’s a kind of mishmash of unconventional storytelling, self-aggrandizement and shameless promotion loosely connected to the magazine’s opening theme, Survival.

First, the positive:

The best piece by far in both design and content are Mike Doughty’s Ten Kinds of Survival. Its personal, engaging, bloglike style points to a possible direction for the whole concept: tight, sharp, witty, dark personal publishing, echoed by Carson’s slightly creepy, individual twist on the images and (literally) on the text.

The design forces the reader into a more active level of engagement with the words, questioning without obstructing. The piece is not easy reading, either literally or figurative. The design complements it well without becoming overbearing.

Though I’m not entirely clear why it was applied, I really like this typographic bar code, too. I felt very positive about what was to come.

The inverted pyramids on this piece also made for an unexpected reading experience.

However, that’s about where my warmth ends regarding this issue of Carson. Some of the content, as I mentioned early, reads as thin PR-led copy by people pushing furniture/books/themselves on the reader in self-important terms. Writers’ biographies often stretch to two paragraphs (and are styled like body text, which doesn’t help, as they read like the end of the article.) There’s a lot of vapid writing, without much evidence of a tight, unconventional editorial remit. Potentially the best piece of the lot, by Neil Strauss, collapses due to poor editing on the second page.

Many of the designs are unusual, but without a strong editorial concept behind their strangeness, they just seem willfully hard to read. Paragraphs without indents or separations might look pretty, for instance, but they’re hell on the reading eye. That’s never Carson’s main concern, of course – his designs only ever referenced a text’s content in passing, if at all.

But if you’re going to hire him to design a magazine, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, then you have to provide content that is not only enhanced by his stylings (some of which feel quite fresh, most of which feel like they could have been taken straight from 1994), but also reward the inevitable strain of trying to read most of the words. Almost nothing in Carson did.

Ultimately, however, the biggest problem of the magazine doesn’t come from its big-name designer, but its overall concept. I just don’t understand what it’s about, who it’s for, or why it exists.

The very best titles justify themselves through everything they do, because without them we wouldn’t adequately follow, understand, analyze, enjoy, learn about, react to whatever corner of the world we inhabit. They force readers to subscribe because the idea of missing an issue actually feels painful. They convey the passion of an editor for whom every word is a result of a painstaking decision process.

But far too many pieces in this first issue of Carson felt rushed, undramatic, and left me thinking, “So?”

This is only the first issue, and I will watch to see how it improves. It has a long way to go. Right now, it feels like Carson exists because a) his name means something, and b) now is a time for independent publishing. It’s not enough.

A few months ago, when a volcano erupted and I was stuck in Dublin, I said this:

This is an open call to designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, art directors and anyone else who is stranded by the ash cloud, and would like something to do.

If there’s one thing my ol’ ma taught me, it’s that when life gives you volcanoes, make magazines. And so we shall.

I’m nothing if not a man of my word, thus Stranded magazine is now on sale. The concept, commissioning and editing are all me; the design is all Matt McArthur, who was stranded in New York. We’ve yet to meet or even speak on the phone, but we worked together marvellously thanks to the wonders of modern gin communication.

As for the words and images.. they’re courtesy of more than fifty fantastically talented people I’ve never met, all of whom were similarly stuck and mercifully, I presume, as bored as I was in trying not to spend any money while stuck somewhere unexpected. They fulfilled commissions, they answered surveys, they ordered cocktails and they took photographs of their temporary beds. In a few cases, they caught their flights before they could complete their briefs – and I’ve included some of those too.

What we’ve made of it all is an 88-page souvenir of a moment in time when a non-life-threatening crisis hit the world, one for which nobody was to blame, and nobody knew how long it would last. People scrambled to find alternative routes home, any way, any how, or tried to make the best of wherever fate had placed them. It was a moment of unplanned disruption, never to be repeated in quite the same way.

The perfect subject for a magazine, in fact.

The print edition is on sale now, and ships worldwide. It costs $18.95+shipping – which is the base price charged by MagCloud (including a discount for being a charity mag and including their ad on the back page – much appreciated guys) plus $5 on top, all of which goes directly to the PayPal account of the International Rescue Committee, to help those more permanently stranded around the world. A digital edition is in the works, though it’s primarily been designed for paper and ink.

We’re inordinately proud of the whole thing, so why not pick up a copy or two? (Twenty or more gets a 25% discount, you know)

And please help us spread the word. We want to raise as much money as we can for the IRC – and hey, it’s a great magazine too. Everyone should own a copy, in case of eruptions.

Questions? Ask me here.

Der Wedding is an annual magazine about an everyday Berlin suburb. It’s also a conscious antidote to the trendy, hipster side of the city.

Just as Karen is “made out of the ordinary”, Der Wedding is, according to German magazine gurus GuteSeiten, “dedicated to the topics, events, items of everyday life and small stories that can be found right on the doorstep.”

It’s also rather lovingly designed too – images here borrowed from GuteSeiten, who have more on their site, as do Slanted.

Though I don’t speak German, it looks like a keeper.

UPDATE: GuteSeiten just gave Der Wedding their inaugural ‘mag of the year’ award at a pop-up magazine event in Berlin.

New Scandiwegian architecture/urbanism magazine Conditions looks rather lovely – a graphical cross between icon and Frame, perhaps – no bad thing. (Bonus link: icon this month features a grumpy cover by a graphic design hero – first Brody, now Jasper Morrison; old people today, no respect for print, I tells ya.)

Looks like there are some interesting infographics in there, too. Conditions does have a good name, and I’m looking forward to seeing a copy – but its launch cover reminds me more than a little of Loops. Space helmets are clearly in right now.

While we wait for the inevitable Novum piece by Horst Moser, this cover from Brazilian newsweekly Época is for me the only Jackson-themed cover that almost captures what’s gone.
(Via)

Horst Moser has many alter-egos – owner of the world’s biggest magazine collection, author of essential-purchase Surprise Me!, founder of the studio Independent Medien Design – and he will be presenting his new publications cut and Schrift. He’s also known for his monthly one-page magazine cover compilations in Novum, made up of themed selections from his collection. I particularly liked this recent offering, featuring the one publicity shot of Madonna her people made available (scroll down).

As Jeremy has noted, there’ll be a new Karen there.

Acido Surtido is looking for new contributors. Its founder, Lucas, will be blogging the event in Spanish over at Visualmente.

And, like many magazines, Good has reduced its frequency, from bimonthly to quarterly in their case, to cope with the fall in ad revenue. Unlike other magazines, they announced their move in a special, very cute mini-sized, subscriber-only Recession Issue (cover line: “Now at least 80% less!”), which introduces their own special “Recession Alert” coding system, and opens with the words “Hello dearest.”

Much more to come…

A strange format can focus the mind wonderfully. Kilimanjaro has to be designed around its unusual size, as does iLove. Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is regularly rethought depending on the demands of each issue’s format, as is the Colophon-selected La Más Bella. In fact, regular readers will know that I curated an entire exhibition about such object lessons in strange formats, so it’s hardly surprising that I’m looking forward to spinning a copy of Freestyle, the forthcoming design / lifestyle magazine designed to fit inside a frisbee. Y’know, for grown-up kids.

The New York Times magazine – on a good week, one of my favourite newspaper supplements – today published a deliberate echo of Rolling Stone‘s American bicentennial issue The Family from 1976, that featured 76 ‘Portraits of Power’ shot by Richard Avedon. (Not entirely coincidentally, Avedon’s photos are currently on display in a gallery in Washington DC.)

Where Avedon mixed politicians with models and counter-cultural icons, The NYT has gone just for members of the new Washington arrivals, under the heading of ‘Obama’s People’. And the images are reproduced in carefully corrected colour rather than black and white exactitude.

They’ve stuck to the formula in most other ways though – 52 simple portraits, short captions stating name and job title only, and they’ve also echoed Elizabeth Paul’s elegant, thin black typography as well.

Kandar is an interesting choice, both a big name and a photographer with his own style: bright fashion lighting, few smiles, often making his subjects seem alone and uncomfortable. They don’t so often engage with the camera as with something off to one side, an affectation that makes both the subject and the viewer feel uncomfortable. When they do look straight at you, it sometimes feels like a reluctant compromise.

He also has the portraitist’s eye for careful detail. So the press secretary is clutching briefing notes, the personal aide all manner of devices, the international lawyer is dressed up and ready to go…

As with the Rolling Stone original, the photos have been chosen as pairs, rather than in order of rank. Sometimes it’s a colour in common, other times it’s a visual contrast. Great photo editing from The NYT‘s Kathy Ryan.

Occasionally, inevitably, adverts intrude – which makes those single photos without a soulmate seem awfully lonely, however much they smile.

My favourite portrait is of this pencil. Sorry Denis McDonough, Senior Foreign Policy Aide, but its missile-like quality and colour, echoing your laser-like gaze, is the star of the photo.

At the back are slightly extended biogs.

Lovely piece of work. The NYT site has its own slideshows if you want to see the images one by one. And as usual, that douche A Photo Editor has the real inside story.

Tar is one of the most thoughtful, well-designed new magazines I’ve seen in a while. And yet something doesn’t feel right.

The magazine is the creation of Evanly Schindler, one of the founders of Black Book, and Diesel’s former director of advertising and communications, Maurizio Marchiori, as part of a bigger agency creating books, films, websites and brand communication.

The magazine states its intentions clearly from the beginning, in Schindler’s opening letter. “Tar magazine is about art and aesthetics with a social awareness… As a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture, tar mag is about the process as much as the result, the ride more than the destination. And the ride is about living a meaningful life through an artful existence.”

The rallying call, repeated twice in bold caps in the opening letter, is “LET THE WORK SPEAK!”

So what does it say?

The first thing it says is that this is an ambitious, thoughtful, creative and well-designed magazine.

On the cover, the distinctive, ghostly photo plays a supporting role to the white splurging masthead and then the handwritten cover line.

The masthead itself is reproduced in a delightfully 3D varnish, with all of the ridges of the white paint represented beautifully.

Inside, the magazine opens with the usual long line of ads (Barney’s gets the first pages, and they also devoted window space on Madison Avenue to the mag), and then, before even the contents page, a surprise: a series of hyper-glossy pages, containing photos that look like ads but carry no brand names.

This is, it turns out, an installation piece within the magazine by David Sherry, called “Advertisements for myself”. It’s the first of a series of pieces that play on the magazine-ness of Tar, and demonstrate a bold and intelligent awareness about the nature of their creation, ads and all.

The design team, led by Neville Wakefield and Evanly Schindler, have created a confident and clear structure (Features / Communications / Projects), and a neat delineation of editorial and advertisements through a border that contains a splash of tar overlaid on top of the vertical folios. From editor’s letter onwards, it’s clear and consistent, the epitome of good repetitive design.

And then at one glorious moment, for the Del Toro / Che Guevara article, it becomes physical without warning, the “tar” glued onto the page and gritty to the touch (perhaps this is the way they delineate the cover story?). Again without warning, it drops back into 2-dimensionality at the next piece. Lovely.

It’s one thing to have a big budget, but quite another to spend it wisely. What we have here is a number of different papers (I count five including the cover and subscriber card), and they’re used intelligently. The start of each section has a semi-translucent opening with a splash of that tar across it; translucent also makes an unexpected appearance during a discussion about television news, and most successfully, in a self-promotional feature where the photos are printed on the special paper, the captions underneath underlaying each image.

If only every society party page were done this way.

Scattered throughout are fake business cards for artists, some of whose work is featured elsewhere in the magazine. It’s another art installation, recurring throughout the magazine right up to the inside back page, and one that makes you smile. Next up: business cards for other kinds of well-known people?

In the vast majority of articles, pre-existing art is used to illustrate features, rather than commissioning photos / illustration. It’s a bold idea, but for me doesn’t work often enough. I’m accustomed to images drawing me into the article, and somehow enhancing it – this just feels like two parallel reflections on a theme, and they don’t always coincide enough.

Far stronger are the opening spreads to many of the articles, bold and graphic in their own way.

Also great is an unexpected double gatefold Andreas Gursky image used as the opening for a piece on overpopulation, for me the best designed feature in the magazine.

There’s also a reprint of material that they admire and has dropped out of print, in this issue being an essay from Joan Didion’s book The White Album, designed in the dimensions of a book, with white printed on white to form a shiny background for the “book” on the page.

In the back section, monochrome Ryan McGinly photoshoot of adolescents is counterpointed with a bright series of photos called (with a slightly colonial tone) “Fashion Anthropology”, of African woolen ritual costumes.

And the back page is used as a mini gallery again, where Nate Lowman has created his own, childlike take on a Warhol classic.

So, some clever ideas, a clear and coherent structure, intelligence without being too clever, and some good-looking graphic design and physical playfulness that could only work in the format of a magazine. It’s well worth picking up for these reasons alone, and I’m very interested in seeing what other work will emerge from the agency.

Some of the features make great reading too, including Matthew Barney and David Cronenberg discussing opera and film design, the story of Labeisha the Diva, and the entertainingly silly Third Dates with World Leaders.

Some of the articles, however, feel more than a little out of place. On the face of it, this isn’t Tar’s fault per se. Fashion + art + social conscience have always sat uneasily together. Long before Benetton tried to Unite the Colors, fashion and art have tried and mostly failed to get a conscience by addressing the most basic human needs, while completely ignoring them in the process.

What we have in Tar is a story about a Lebanese Arab-focused news service, an anti-establishment piece about the fall of journalism by John Pilger, a short admiring discussion with CNN’s Christine Amanpour and a squabble about Israel/Palestine and the use of women as sexual torturers in Abu Graib by Naomi Wolf and Coco Fusco. On their own, they feel a little unfocussed, a scatter-gun approach to global issues via big names. Rather than a conscience, the magazine has guilt, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. So far, so New York, you might say. In the context of the whole magazine, however, these articles are somewhat more troubling.

Schindler states at the beginning of the magazine that Tar is “a chronicle of the collective conscience of global culture”, with collective conscience meaning “moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society”.

But this is not a magazine that acts as a uniting force – quite the opposite. It retails at $20. The first pages you see when you open it are ads for Barney’s, Prada, Armani. It contains expensive contemporary art for its own sake, glorious as some of it is. Though I haven’t seen Schindler talk anywhere about the intended readership, Barney’s creative director has described the magazine as the perfect fit for them to advertise in, as “we have tons of art world glitterati shopping at Barney’s.”

The magazine is aimed squarely, and accurately, towards the worlds of high fashion and art. Like Black Book before it, it feels like an essential accessory for the designer coffee tables of the New York partygoing set, and when world issues are brought up, it is done so in a context in which these people can feel safe. For all of its social pretensions, this is an elite fashion / art magazine, like so many others.

Which would be fine, if its content had remained firmly within that realm. I don’t have a problem per se with a magazine being elitist (well, not until the revolution comes), but where things jar is when the magazine claims simultaneously to be on the barricades and in the galleries. I suppose the key point is this: if many of the social conversations Tar includes in its pages were taken to their logical conclusions, then the magazine wouldn’t exist.

Though I’m not fan of everything it does, Monocle at least tries to deal with the world’s problems by focusing on social change through innovation and politics, which fit neatly with its designer aesthetics. Tar, however, seems to want change to come from the streets. I’m sure Team Tar do want their readers to think about more serious issues with a social conscience – but in this context, the issues are in danger of appearing as little more than cause celebres, bleeding hearts as accessories. The way it stands, many of the causes they’re leaning towards simply are not compatible with the world Tar inhabits.

Despite being such a clear, thought out and intelligent magazine, and one of the most gloriously magazine-y magazines around, this inherent contradiction at its heart makes Tar‘s mission feel highly problematic. It wants to be both expensive art and social conscience, which is all well and good on the face of things, but hosting a banquet in the name of world hunger feels somehow more offensive than just serving the food for the sake of it.

Mediabistro reports that Sotheby’s will soon be auctioning the first 53 editions of Visionaire, the extravagant, silly limited-edition objet d’art/magazine from the publishers of V and V Man. The expected sale price is £15,000-20,000, which isn’t bad for a magazine that often retails for several thousand dollars a copy, especially considering some fool apparently paid $65,000 for the same editions in December. Whether it’s worth it or not all depends on your view of art.

I caught up with some of the Visionaire crew at the recent NY Art Book Fair, where they very kindly showed me the printer’s dummy of their new edition, Surprise (sponsored by a well-known champagne brand, retailing at an unusually cheap $250). It’s rather a lovely box of pop-up art volumes created by the usual mix of artists/photographers, with a particularly lovely fanning credits page. Pictures here and here. I also got to stroke some of the issues I had only read about previously, including the flick books by Spike Jonze, Mario Testino and others.



For those who are considering a bid on the Sotheby’s lot, you might instead want to hold off and save your pennies for their limited-edition Goyard trunk, recently unveiled at Maison Goyard in Paris. The first ten come with issues 1-50 of Visionaire inside. The price? For you, $150,000. Like I said, silly.

I actually own a couple of copies of the magazine in question, but I didn’t pay full price, no siree. Here’s my secret: I bought my copies unopened from this particular eBayer who may or may not be connected to the magazine. They’re still not cheap, but $76 is a darned improvement on the several hundred dollar RRP.

UPDATE: The Sotheby’s lot failed to sell.