Tea comes with a lot of visual associations, but from the Japanese tea ceremony to the silver tea set and tinkling of china cups, the common link is ceremony and elegance.
Little of that expected aesthetic is to be found in the current iteration of Tea: A Magazine, which uses typefaces, colors and grid erratically in its haphazard effort to honor the world’s favorite beverage. I often marvel at the magazines that focus in on single flavors: Cigar Aficionado, for example—maybe you like cigars, maybe you even love them, but do you really want to commit to receiving 1500 oversized pages about them in the mail every year? I don’t think my hot beverage of choice is worth reading about (Black Coffee: Just Drip, No Flavors Added Monthly just doesn’t seem like it it would garner any readers, but others, like Chile Pepper, which I had thought had folded is still going strong. It works as single-flavor glossy because it’s really more about how the chocolate pudding tastes with peppers, than the peppers themselves, and tea seem a topic equally lilkely to inspire content. CP looks, if not beautiful, then at least like what you’d expect it would: a menu for TGI Fridays. T:AM seems to cover tea’s various constituencies in its editorial mix, but the design is studied ugliness: goopy, clashing, pastel colors, out-of-the-box Quark Scotch rules, intersecting frames, and an excess of drop shadows and other type effects. There seems to be a smell of mothballs about the design—not Jasmine.
Sure, there are lots of glossies out there that are just out of sync with content as this one, but most of those have problems that go deeper than design. T:AM may not be editorially brilliant but it is finding a variety of stories around its narrow focus. It is a magazine you can look at and say that this could be a real honey.
Ok, it’s settled. There is no appropriate use for Papyrus.
Rescued from the remainder bin at Borders on L: 2006’s National Lampoon Magazine Rack, a compendium of the Humor Magazine’s satires of various publication over the years. I’ve made no secret of my fondness for magazine satire, but these leave me cold. The cover promises sophomoric humor for men, which I’m all for, but the book delivers neither, unless you consider “sophomoric” a code word for misogynistic.
Most of the inclusions are from National Lampoon’s “glory days” in the early 70s, making some of the choices quite dated. I thought that would be fun—a warped look at our industry as it was. The book might have achieved that, at least to some measure, if the volume was differently organized. Chapters are arranged by theme rather than date of original publication, blunting the historical voice of the offerings.
The biggest disappointment though is in what’s not included—the brilliant work of illustrator/writer Bruce McCall, whose pitch-perfect send-ups of publishing between 1900 and 1960 from NatLamp is found in Zany Afternoons (available used for as much as 200.00 on Amazon). My guess is he didn’t want to be included, and considering what else is here, who can blame him? Playdead seems an excuse to show naked women in submissive poses. Famine Circle tries to make starvation in Africa funny, and Negligent Mother, NatLamp’s satire of Working Mother seems so out-of-touch with the mainstream today, one marvels at the obliviousness that led to its inclusion.
Graphically, at least the earlier magazines show a attention to detail and editorial branding that later offerings lack. A cover of an Al-Jazeera TV Guide bumbles type in a way the real TV Guide would never do—Clunky boxes on the cover, artificially condensed typefaces and error laden text. Can you make fun of something if you’re obviously nowhere near as competent as the object of your ridicule? John Belushi answered that in the first National Lampoon Movie: “Don’t fuck with eagles unless you know how to fly.”
I missed it the first time around, but Design Observer is reprising Steven Heller’s essay on Monocle, which includes a slide show of covers and pages from the remarkable 1960s publication.
The Institute for E-Readership and Counter-Factual Journalism Research at Poynter is at it again.
For those unfamiliar with their work, the Institute looks at how society, reading, and journalism might be affected under various speculative scenarios. They are probably best know for the 2002 study which showed that had Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent had the blogging and site updating responsibilities of a modern reporter, Lex Luther would have succeeded in destroying the earth at least six; and possibly as many as 148 times between 1952 and 1978. The vagueness in the figure is due, apparently, to when one calculates that the Daily Planet would have switched to DSL from Dial-up—and the impact that would have had on “Kent’s” upload times. “I’d have liked to hit the number with more certainty. But, blowed up six times or 600, we’re all still meat” said Director Ronald Kaplanavich at the time of the study’s release.
This time, the Institute looks at BoingBoing.net, a site that has ranked in the top ten for most of the last decade, imagining how BB might have looked had it started out as a magazine rather than a web venture. The results are stunning, particularly for magazine designers, because they include pages generated with PageMonkey—a Page Maker 2.0 emulator backed up with nearly 8 million dollars worth of artificial intelligence and main frame computing power, which was used to devolve the web site’s design into the crude printed zine you see here…..
Oh, I just can’t keep this up any longer, as fun as it is—lie upon lie upon lie when—will it stop? These are, of course pages from the real Boing Boing, dating from the mid-’90s. Like many period zine/mag hybrids—publications that tottered on the line between commercialism and funky idealism, BB showcases a lot of those awful things we did back then that make our skin crawl today—type squeezed beyond recognition, and often inconsistently; ghastly text wraps, goofy display fonts (Oh I know Pignuts, er, excuse Peignot has its fans but they’re wrong) and too many screens and ghosted images (because they didn’t require a $6.00 printer’s charge for a double-burn).
On the other hand, this issue boasts the cool shirt illustration/infographic above, and an early cover drawing by Dirty Danny Hellman. It also remains the only publication to put images of Allen Ginsberg and Alfred E. Neuman on the same page.
Below: the reason I bought this issue didn’t have anything to do with the editorial portions of the magazine. The ad on the inside front cover, was a delightful stroll down the garden path which led to a new subscription or certain death. I didn’t subscribe, but between you and me, I haven’t slept well since.
The back cover sported this satire of Mondo2000, then enjoying a meteoric success before crashing and burning a few years later.
reMarriage is the magazine for “Before, During, and Happily Ever After.”
I suppose that “before, during and after” remarrying is not as broad a topic as “before, during and after the bris,” nor as weird as “before during and after the funeral,” but the cover lines, “Bride’s Dress Dilemma: Pouf or Posh?” “Today’s Mix and Match Families,” “Losing Friends in the Divorce,” and “Stepping into Teenage Angst,” do suggest a freewheeling attitude towards content that most magazines, and nearly all bridal magazines, eschew.
reM doesn’t just tell us that not all marriages work out, they demonstrate it on every page with the unhappy union of Bodoni and Avant Garde, the quarterly’s two signature fonts. While both faces were indeed iconoclasts in their day, I worry that that’s not enough to overcome the substantial generational difference. Has Ms. Garde really thought about what it will be like living with a face 170 years her senior? Will life still be good when his pairs no longer kern?
Both fonts are used in the magazine’s flag, which does not merely rely on the oil and vinegar type combo to undermine the unity of the mark, but also mixes colors, runs part of the name bottom-to-top, and interweaves two letters in the otherwise loosely tracked logo.
Inside, the colors run to the murky, the grid use runs sporadic, and the use of rules runs generous. The muddy colors I would guess, reflect the editorial attitude—a thin patina of hopefulness over the rough terrain of a cynicism richly earned as youth faded in unhappy matrimony. “It may take years” for the shouting to subside in a new marriage warns the editors on page 9. On 11, the stepmom’s “Bill of Rights” urges small kindnesses that would seem modest by Gulag standards.
The articles are not awful, though most would benefit from tighter editing, and a bit less self-promotion on the part of the writers, many of whom are clearly trying to drum up business writing for a regionally-distributed magazine. And the design shows, if not exactly flair, a small spark, on occasion, though one that is often doused by a heavy handed approach. An article on merging established households has attractive imagery combined in an engaging way with call-outs for specific decorating problems and solutions. Too bad overlapping 20pt frames overwhelm the photographs, and the headline is given a gimmicky graduated screen that adds little interest to the design, and only dubiously connects to the topic.
Other articles, though, are a hodge-podge of stock art, tiresome tropes (the Bill of Rights is surprinted on a picture of a scroll) and novelty fonts. An article on the politics of merging families never settles on a column width, and is bafflingly illustrated entirely with pictures of cardboard boxes and scraps of floorplan.
All in all, the magazine isn’t pretty, but I do intend to leave it on the coffee table for the benefit of my father in law, who once introduced me as his daughter’s first husband.
I was attracted to this issue of Hi Fructose because it had the best (or possibly the only) use of chiaruscuro that I’ve seen recently on the cover of a newsstand magazine. Hi Fructose covers the naive-by-choice school of art making along with publications that include gallery- or illustration- focused books like Juxtapoz, Beautiful Decay, and, to some extent, the grafitti mags.
No question, HiFruc has a cool collection of imagery—ranging from work by people I’d want to hire as illustrators, people I would have wanted to hire if I still worked for a free alt weekly, and a few I’d be scared to be in the same room with. However, it also suffers from many of the excesses of the PunkArtMag genera—sometimes using artwork like backgrounds for type, or cropping painting in ways that damage the effectiveness of the imagery.
It is, of course, a delicate line between the button-down gallery-in-a-book approach of establishment art journals like Art in America and the free-for-all skater mag attitude that pubs like HiFruc ape. In the magazine’s defense, it goes native less frequently than some. The Kimidz(?) spread above, and Kukula (below) seem reasonably responsible blends of design and art elements. But not all HFruc pages are so easy to parse—it would be easy to miss the editorial page on the bottom spread because it visually blends into the ads next door.
Below: Brian Dettmer’s obsessively carved books would hold their own at the American Visionary Museum.
Below: The magazine could do a better job juggling the chaotic ads and art elements it publishes. Stricter advertising standards and more white space would both help.
The editors of Canteen use the intro page of the second issue to bash some low hanging fruit—author Stephen King—based on his contention that the short story is currently moribund. Alas, the magazine does little to prove him wrong in the pages that follow. Nevertheless, I was quite taken with the elegant design of the new LitMag—starting with the Trade Gothic Extended flag and gritty cover art. While many “small” magazines have grown increasingly visual in the past few years Canteen goes above and beyond-with its bodacious square shape, provocative imagery and minimalist typography. Not everything works—the publication runs formulaic full-spread article openers—provocative but usually ineffective, neither illustrating the story nor serving the image, thanks to a penchant for a putting the subjects of its splashy two-page openers in the crease of the spread.
Above: the elegantly spare masthead and table of contents. Below: is she sad because her parents aren’t at her birthday or because she’s been cut in half?
Below, the magazine sticks to B&W illustration, a refreshing counter-balance to the often surreal photography.
For another visual literary magazine, take a trip down memory lane to read about Zoetrope.
Ok, I got 30 out of a possible 34, enough for the hall of fame sure, but not nearly good enough considering all those Saturday nights I spent sitting around trying to figure out what some goddam font was while the cool kids were out having fun. To add insult to injury, the one that really killed me, was that Saturday I spent hours upon hours with the catalogs trying to i.d. Usherwood. What was I thinking? I’m never going to use Usherwood. Anyway, I played again and got 33. I feel vindicated. Still, I’ll never have my youth back.
Play the Rather Difficult Font Game, it’s fun.
I wasn’t there at the eureka moment that spawned Missbehave [er, sic, maybe], but I imagine it went something like this:
Editor: “We need something different….something like a magazine, but not like a magazine… something bold, yet decisive…..wild, frilly and feminine, yet sturdy and down to earth with machismo and swagger….a design that speaks Indo-European with an outrageous fake French accent….[art director begins to look uncomfortable, time passes]….something sweet, yet sharp….soft, yet dangerous…crunchy, but with a hot molten center…..[more time passes, art director begins flipping absently through a copy of the Village Voice]….something grassy, with good legs, yet impudent and saucy….[more time passes]….something….oh, I don’t know, WSY?”
Art Director [By now feeling hostile, yet caught off guard, never imagining that editor would ever stop talking. AD stares at the random Voice page in front of her hoping for something—anything—to say. She points to a club ad—one of those single column jobs, in which every band name is as big as possible (in the case of a one-col, about 24 pt) set in a different wacky display font and set off with a smattering of rules and booger-sized pub shots]: “See this? see this?” she says, “let’s take this ad and extend the concept to an entire magazine!”
The crazy thing is, it all kinda works. The type is such a delicate and sophisticated balance of the preposterous—a mash up of multiple eras and tastes pulled off with aplomb. More than that, the mix seems appropriate for this relatively new magazine. It would be misleading to call Missbehave a gender-bender, nevertheless the grrl-power title walks the line between Maxim’s swagger and Cosmo’s sexual sincerity a little more convincingly than most gender-focused magazines.
Missbehave’s models are less kempt, more ordinary, and more overtly sexual than the models that grace the pages of most women’s titles. Cover model Amber Heard’s hair is mussed, and her clothing is more revealing than flattering. On the inside, she poses, legs splayed on a beach ball. Generally, the magazine exhibits a disarming comfort with nooky that’s anything but Ken-and-Barbiesque. References include a fashion spread with furries (see Dan Savage if you don’t get the reference); and hook ups and extra-marital dalliances seem assumed rather than pondered. Yes, women’s magazines have plenty of bedroom advice and a bit of blue fiction, but it’s hard to imagine Cosmo running something like “DILF hunter.” Lede Graf: “Hugh Laurie, you’re 48 and you have needs. You live in L.A. your kids and wife do not. I don’t need a dry erase board, a bajillion years of medical school, and the Socratic method to suss out what you, my Dr House DILF (Dad I’d Like to Fuck) are afflicted with.”
In Missbehave, the editorial posturing can occasionally get to be a bit much—a quality it shares with men’s titles. Under the headline “How to be a Trophy Wife” is a stream-of-conciousness that begins: “Don’t pick at it! The scabs only last for four days, unless you pick at it. Stop. And even if the Restlyane bruise looks like you got a beer can heel-kicked into your nasolabials, you should never put Dermablend on your face. Unless you’re a local newscaster. Can I tell you something? Get your fingers out of my Cobb salad! No, really, ever since I swam with dolphins off of Lompoc, I find my twins—Valeska and Bentley—to be suppressive persons. They’re 8 now and it’s obvious they’re not so spiritual. We sent them to Outward Bound. We hope they catch autism. They’d be good at science.”
You know, I was hoping there’d be something I could use there. I’d actually like to be a trophy wife, but not if it means having to slog through this blather.
But some of the other writing, at least when you get through the off-putting ledes, is quite a bit better. There isn’t the editorial assumption that the reader is seeking self-improvement (or the appearance thereof). which seems to drive many women’s magazines, and that makes Missbehave both surprising and unusual. If there’s bluster there’s also a tone of self-confidence that the titles that orbit around fashion (people better dressed than you) beauty (people better looking than you) and celebrity (people richer and more talented than you) by necessity lack. Not that there’s none of that stuff here, it’s just kept to a tasteless minimum. It’ll be interesting to see how this title evolves.
Welcome to Fattyland A feature celebrates indulgence, although apparently the most indulgent thing they can think of is Taco Bell:
Eight Furies and the Woman first spread of long fashion layout:
I’ve occasionally recommended books on this site and now they’re all (or at least most) in one place: Introducing Designing Magazines: The Store. Mainly a convenient place to archive referenced books, all titles in the main frame have come up on the blog, and are related specifically to editorial design and art direction. The current collection is a little spare, but will increase as my excruciatingly slow reading speed allows.
I did not join the chorus of designers calling for
While I find too much reverence for the ghosts of design past a little hard to take, nevertheless, Kimberly Crofts over at Publication Design makes a few good points about the current Esquire cover, which riffs off of a George Lois original. She describes the new version, which is one of several this year meant to celebrate the magazine’s past as tasteless. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as that, but it is a sad if unintentional comment on the state of the contemporary newsstand cover. What had been, in Lois’s hands a wry visual take on contemporary culture is reduced to satire, cheesecake and affectation.
I am a fan of the current Esquire design, but editorially, their past is quite a bit better regarded than their present is likely to become. They would have done better to “tribute” Lois by producing a cover of substance rather than sex and celebrity.
George Lois, who is quite a bit less charitable about the state of the newsstand come-on than I am, talks about cover design in Designing Magazines, the book.
Lois’s original from 1965
The current cover, May 08
I’ve written before about the propensity for satire at my old alt-weekly. But one ill-fated attempt at mirth at someone else’s expense was a year-in-the-[not]-making spoof of the Washingtonian, a city magazine that, in my 11 years in DC, has cycled through the same yearly schedule of lowest-common-denominator content over and over (and over) again. My old editor (whose name I won’t mention) summed up the problem: “how do you satirize a magazine that satirizes itself every month?”
His words came back to haunt me as I tried to think of something to say about Baby Couture (the magazine that “puts the ‘coo’ in Couture”) funnier than anything that appears in the first issue. At least I assume it’s the first issue, there is no volume or issue number to be found. That, in itself, is proof of inexperience. They have not yet suffered the wrath of a thousand librarians, who summon up the hostility accumulated during a life enduring the twin frustrations of customer service and government bureaucracy for just such oversights. No one does poison-pen like a librarian, and little raises their dander like the omission of essential cataloging information. They don’t ask for much, they ARE JUST TRYING TO DO THEIR JOB!
So, I’ll try to review BC with a minimum of snarkiness.
The cover hits two of the William Randolph Hearst trifecta, pairing babe Christine Costner with baby Cayden. Cayden? Now there’s a name not chosen with those painful grade school years in mind, or come to think of it, maybe it was:
Bully: “Hey GAYden, guess you’re parents named you GAYden ’cause you’re GAY huh?”
Cayden: “my dad is Kevin Costner, and he’d have you, your parents, and your fat sister rubbed out with just one word from me.”
Bully: “Just fooling, wanna come to my birthday party next month? You can keep the gift….”
Apart for the photogenic models, the image is not particularly suited for cover use. It has too much background detail forcing the designer to drop teasers into little nooks and crannies here and there in defiance of a logical hierarchy. Despite the typographical gerrymandering, much of the text is hard to read, thanks to both the picture and the achromatic pallet. The goofy type choices don’t help—who thought kiddie handwriting would work with that ghastly wedding script? The awkward competition between cute and sophisticated remains unresolved on the inside as well.
Sensitivity to typographical conventions—from SIC-able smart-quote-driven errors in headlines such as “Flip ‘n Flop” which appears on page 14, right after “Wash ‘n Wear” on 13—does not burden the staff of of BC. They do have the whole product placement thing down though—Christina gets a 32 pt pull quote to wax poetic about her favorite brands. “Knuckleheads” is the winner for her little darlings, but she also likes “Diesel Kids and Baby Gap.”
The fashion plates are the usual pictures of children–though most are not babies. The oldest models, who are probably seven or eight, follow kiddie pic convention of imitating the jaunty poses of adult models, which sells, I suppose, the fantasy that if you dress your kids like little adults, they will quit acting so goddamn childish. In truth, it can go down like that—but only after the sort of parental behavior that can cast a pall over an entire 200,000 sq. foot suburban shopping mall, and possibly spark intervention from child protective services—potentially embarrassing for parents who shops at PradaKids.
I recognize that there are parents willing to invest 300.00 in ensemble outfits that will look great until the kid grows out of it in 6 months, or throws up on himself, whichever comes first. (Though in the case of my daughter Emily at that age, the smart money was on reflux.) But are there enough of them who aren’t already reading the Times’ SundayStyle section to support a magazine? And aren’t most of those Times readers there for yuks, not shopping advice? I guess time will, tell. Lets hope this title lasts until its Carters wear out….
Joining the blog roll today (via RexBlog): A Photo Editor, a really nice site about the challenges and rewards of assigning imagery for a magazine. Exiting: The Magazineer—fallow since mid-February after a promising dozen posts.
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