I came across The Bold Italic yesterday while reading a great article entitled An Expansive Definition of Design by the Society for News Design.
The Bold Italic is a San Francisco website which asks for contributions from the community that they’re in. However, unlike many websites asking for similar things, they’re also asking for really creative ways of telling stories.
You should definitely check this out.
Bad news: Your great aunt Cynthia died at her home this morning.
Good news: She died peacefully surrounded by generations of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren…. and she also left you millions of pounds worth of paintings by the master of painting and sculpture.
After all the funeral arrangements have been made and her grave is dug, you’re going to have to decide what to do with the incredible legacy she left to you. She loved those paintings and would often open up her palatial house open to members of the public so that they could all see these great works.
You’re not as fortunate in terms of real estate and there’s barely room to swing a cat inside your house.
Imagine then, the great look of disappointment on great aunt Cynthia’s face if she knew that you had decided to put them all into storage until you could afford to open up to the public.
***
A magazine is a great treasure chest of content and reportage. A palace of great reporting, edgy editorial and brilliant design.
But without making it as easy and accessible to the public as possible, it’s just a warehouse for the masters of journalism – getting dustier and more irrelevant by the day, eventually to be forgotten.
Make sure that when you build your magazine brand, the readership is its heart.
According to a statement on their website, publishers (“DesignFlux, a division of Pyramyd are the publishers. Woodbridge & Rees supplied the editorial content and direction.” pointed out @Bojkowski – he’s in the know. My bad.) of Grafik Magazine Woodbridge and Rees will stop producing the magazine soon.
The editorial team of Grafik is sad to announce that Grafik magazine is to stop being published. For the last year we have been creating the editorial for Grafik, working with publisher Design Flux, which prints and distributes the magazine. However, Design Flux has made the decision to cease publication of Grafik after the current issue, G193. If you are a subscriber you should have received a letter from Design Flux regarding your subscription, which it manages. The Grafik editorial team will be taking a short break, but keep your eyes peeled for more from us all in the New Year. We’ll be back with something new and exciting in 2012. Meanwhile, we would like to say a massive thank you to all our readers, subscribers and contributors over the years. We have had an amazing ride with Grafik over the last decade and look forward to new adventures next year…
A very sad day for publishing indeed!
Magazine apps for iPad have been getting a fair amount of bad press recently. Reasons have been many and ultimately, all the reasons given are fine. A magazine is fundamentally about making it easy and pleasant for the reader to ingest information.
Except, with iPad magazine apps, this isn’t happening.
There are a few things that need to happen before the magazines find their groove in a post-internet, tablet-oriented world.
Magazines are having an existential crisis.
Publishers have had a little bit under 150 years to perfect the bound magazine printed onto paper and yet magazines are regularly pushing the boundaries on this traditional form.
Now we’ve moved to digital magazines too.
Is the tablet magazine a whole new product? Is it even a magazine? The fact that we’re calling them magazine apps is probably quite a telling sign that something is not quite right yet. Do we want an app? Do we want to read the content easily?
Navigation is not a straight road.
The beauty of having a paper, printed magazine in the hand is that it has a clear start and end: front cover/back cover. At any point, you can open a magazine and see anything without having to scroll to find it. You can write on it, you can cut it up, you can fold pages, place bookmarks in it.
Navigation is not so easy on a tablet device. Although it should be easy to find things quicker, no magazine has come up with an effective solution to the loss of flow in tablet apps.
Swiping isn’t that different to turning the pages, right? Wrong. It feels completely different, as if a page layout is a picture rather than a thing which you have a tactile response to (a la print magazine)
The traditional issue: touch.
One of the first comments people make about magazines that aren’t printed on paper is usually something to do with the loss of the feeling a lovely product in their hands.
As much as it’s a boring argument, it’s true.
You can’t put an iPad magazine app onto a shelf with all of the other issues you’ve collected, enjoyed and devoured over the years.
It just doesn’t feel the same.
A problem for publishers is a problem for readers.
Possibly the root of the problem, though, is that magazine publishing on tablet devices is not yet open.
All of the systems for publishing magazines on the iPad have been expensive and closed off to the kid in his bedroom who makes awesome print products and wants to move into digital publishing.
Despite his being able to turn out an incredible magazine for almost zero cost and still manage to sell it, or set up a domain and run an awesome blog/website, the tablet magazine market is closed because he doesn’t have 200+ euro/month to pay for a publishing system.
Even though he/she may be able to resolve some of the issues that I’ve just mentioned, until someone offers a cheap way to load magazines onto the iPad, or whichever tablet, he won’t be able to innovate.
Ultimately it’s early days.
The iPad has been out less than a year now. It’s in it’s first incarnation and all of the magazines made unrealistic predictions for the growth of this market. They were so excited by the prospect of an awesome new tool for publishing their awesome magazines that they neglected the experience which makes the awesome awesome.
If even some of these issues are addressed somehow, the future will certainly be a lot brighter for magazines on tablet devices.
Capitalism is both a wonderful and awful thing. Unfortunately, a society based on class equality won’t work – but it’s a lovely ideal and something to aspire to. One of the less savoury consequences of capitalism is the ability of rich entrepreneurs to make magazines… Richard Branson, I’m looking at you.
Jeff Bridges features in a special 'Tron' animated cover
Launching today, November 30 2010, Richard Branson’s ‘Project’ magazine, previously known as ‘Maverick’, enters into a new market: iPad magazines.
So far, the standard of iPad magazines has been fairly low but greatly varying in the low category – Esquire has been the only notably fantastic exception, with animated covers, interactive pages, clever content management and doubleplusgood page furniture.
Branson’s ‘Project’ takes a note out of Esquire’s beautiful book. The front cover of the first edition is, like Esquire’s, an animated video of the cover star – in this case Jeff Bridges. It’s a pretty sweet cover in keeping with the story: the remake of Tron.
Branson's vanity publishing project
It’s the first page of editorial that really spoils the magazine for me. It’s incredibly pretentious – introducing Richard Branson as a person instead of the magazine. Sure, the editorial is a comment on the continuity of Branson’s career in magazine publishing, but it gives the feeling that what follows in the next 60-80 swipes of the tablet is nothing but the world of Richard Branson.
That said, there are some cool features which aren’t present in other magazines. For example, here the reader is supposed to rub the ground in order to reveal the headline. It’s a really simple thing, but believe it or not, it adds a lot to the magazine.
So Virgin’s magazine, Project, is not the best iPad magazine around, but it is pretty good. The design is fairly nice, if a little bit amateurish in places, and the important thing to note is that this is the first iPad only magazine – there will be no print edition.
This being the case, there’s some serious questions about the philosophy of iPad magazines to be asked. Why is it designed to be just like a print magazine with some extra features added on to the panels for good measure? Should this be an entirely different concept?
Most importantly: Is this really a magazine or not? And if not, what is it?
I’ve just seen over on Creative Review that Glasgow Print and Kerr Justin have produced a series of beautiful letterpress cards.
The six pack of cards come in a cassette box which also looks gorgeous. The box opens up to reveal six music themed letterpress cards. They don’t seem to be actual business cards but they might well be.
Either way, if you’re a designer and send these out, you’re going to get some calls back from a lot of new clients. Sweet.
Picture: Creative Review
My mother (Catherine) and father were confounded recently. Onto the doormat of my childhood home fell something completely unexpected. It read: Johnnie loves Catherine. My dad’s name isn’t Johnnie.
It wasn’t a shocking revelation of some other secret life or a stranger’s obsession with my mother, instead it’s the Boden UK catalogue for Winter 2010.
Johnnie Loves Catherine - Boden Winter 2010 Catalogue
Boden is a mail-order clothing company started by a middle-aged man named Johnnie Boden. Known for their excellent print ideas and creativity in marketing, they have really outdone themselves on the Winter 2010 catalogue.
Each client’s name is dropped into a template at various points telling a story of love between Johnnie Boden and the subscriber/customer (I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves whether this is a magazine or a catalogue).
With the beautiful mixture of neat, thin Madawaska Book SC (if I’m wrong on this, please correct me,) and a similarly beautiful heavy, sans typeface, Johnnie Boden get his ‘magalogue’ off to a great start.
Shortly followed by this little treasure. A typography heavy gatefold (sort of – it’s actually a gatefold with a little .5 tagged on to the end) further recounts the love story between Johnnie and my mother.
Typography Heavy Double Gate
Inside, the magazine doesn’t live up to the first few pages, but relative to other similar clothing brochures, Boden is in a different playing field. It’s got things spreads like this in it…
The 'Cosy Retreat' spread looks more like a magazine than a catalogue.
One of the most interesting things about the Boden catalogue is the questions it raises about mail order and the philosophy of the ‘shopping experience.’ Boden only has two UK shops. As a business, most of their sales are done through their catalogue or online. This means two things.
Whereas you normally receive a welcome when entering a shop, whether it’s a ‘shop cop’ or a salesperson, you often here: “Hey, welcome to GAP” or “Thanks for shopping at Topshop.” This is not a luxury afforded to the mail order shopper – Boden have worked around this problem with their personalised catalogues.
Secondly, there’s the issue of the aesthetics of the store. Boden don’t have a window front display on every high street in the country. They can’t entice people in with a Christmas themed Bon Marche-esque diorama. Instead, Boden make do with a beautifully crafted postal identity.
And it’s classy.
Finally, there’s the back cover. Where there’d usually just be an address label and an order form, Boden have included recommendations for each customer based, it appears, on clothes that they have bought before. I can’t confirm this, but the picture below certainly seems to give this impression.
Personal Recommendations from Boden?
I am so impressed with the personalisation of each copy of the catalogue and would be really interested to see how they had coped with this approach logistically. Perhaps the SEO on this blog will bring an answer?
The title of the magazine Crack provides more entertainment than the magazine itself. For example, you bump into a friend on the street and offer him to see your ‘Crack.’ Almost endless are the possibilities.
All jokes aside, Crack is a really stylish magazine from Bristol. They have just finished their first year of publishing and to celebrate they’ve done a first anniversary issue.
Crack Magazine first anniversary front cover
The first thing to note is that it’s free. There’s good and bad things about free magazines for me. On the one hand, I don’t have to spend anything to get one *no brainer* but on the other hand it highlights the need to conquer my own fear of selling advertising as an alternative revenue for my own ventures. Crack doesn’t have too many adverts in it, which is always nice.
One of the interesting things for me about Crack, is that it’s lottery funded. Just what they justified this as I’m not entirely sure, although I intend to try to speak to the good people at Crack in the next month or two.
Crack Magazine is funded (at least in part) by the National Lottery
Leaving behind the increasingly pertinent questions of ‘How can we pay for magazines?’ and ‘Can we justify giving our work away for free?’, let’s move on to the actual sexiness of the magazine itself.
One of the first things that leaps in the eyes is that Crack is a clean-cut, whitespace heavy magazine. Take a look at the spread below where the lead article is around 1,700 words long but takes up a whole spread.
Crack really likes clean-cut, whitespace heavy design.
This is further demonstrated by their handling of typographic elements and page furniture. With a fairly generous letter-spacing and line-spacing, crack still manages to make the text seem compact. Perhaps it’s a kind of optical illusion as the use of large margins around the page furniture and small gutters makes for a strange use of the space itself: wide in the centre, tight on the borders. Take a look at that pull-quote down there:
Crack uses optical trickery in a clever use of whitespace
Then there’s the content of the magazine itself. Many of the pages are dedicated not to articles but to visual profiles of artists. There are some questions batted back and forth between the magazine and interviewees, but largely, the content of these ‘art profiles’ is prints of the artists work. This one is with Victoria Topping and I’m not sure whether the right page is an advert or a print of her work.
Victoria Topping Profile in Crack - but is that an advert or her work?
So, that’s Crack Issue 7. I’ve just been handed Issue 8 as Cardiff has only just cottoned on to the previous issue… life in the MagWorld is fast-paced… too fast maybe?
To close out this post, I thought I’d leave you with a lovely centre fold of Stanley Donwood’s ‘Over Normal’ and then a video of the song it inspired… or was it inspired by the song?
Stanley Donwood's 'Over Normal' in Crack Magazine (Issue 7)
I’ve been meaning to get round to writing about Huck for a little while. I first saw a copy when my wife’s uncle left it on a coffee table in their house in Wembley. He’s a visual artist and the fact that he reads it is already quite a tribute to the quality of the publication.
Unlike other publications of the same genre, Huck has successfully placed itself into a class of its own when it comes to editorial content as well as design.
The most recent issue, the Counterculture Issue has heaps and heaps of interesting profiles on cultural figures which the editorial staff deem to be ‘antiheroes.’ Articles include biographies of characters as diverse as The Lizard King, a kind of freewheelin’ surfin’ hippy and William Burroughs right up to the present day with Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame.
The Counterculture Issue front cover of Huck
As well as featuring a very decent argument in favour of the antiheroic attributes of each character, each profile is accompanied by a beautiful illustration by a professional illustrator such as this one of William Burroughs by Genevieve Simms.
William Burroughs by Genevieve Simmons
One of my main criticisms of Huck is their standardised drop caps and article layouts which almost give the feeling that you are reading a book all the way through instead of a magazine filled with interesting articles. However, throughout this issue, Huck demonstrate their fantastic grasp of typography. This time round, Huck have taken some of their standard article layouts and spruced them up a bit with a bit of classy type. The picture below really suits the theme of the issue well and looks like it might be very much inspired by those lovely old ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ posters.
Some really nice typography. Sort of looks like an old 'wanted' poster
Finally, I was instantly taken by their beautifully illustrated, well organised and overall comprehensive infogram of how the post-World War 2 child turned into today’s internet adolescent. This must belong on Information is Beautiful … surely.
Huck Magazine contends for a space on Information if Beautiful