Category

Pages

• Pages, Trend Spotting

  Tyrany of CMYK

  09.23.08 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  Back when I was a young magazine designer, folks used to talk about “builds” in between swiping at each other with their Xacto knives (all good fun of course). Now I know what you’re thinking, but there were no blocks or bricks involved—“build” is a color term. Say if you wanted a green, you’d build [...]

• Art Direction, Pages, Process

  When type won’t do

  09.15.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  SPD writes about this stunning Los Angeles cover on their blog. The piece is by illustrator/calligrapher Marian Bantjes—she inspired a lot of spectulation in my editorial design class last week, but for another one of her projects. The Vibe headline below, for a feature on Jay-Z  is just as eye-popping as an industrial LIghts and [...]

• Art Direction, Pages

  Corn Syrup

  04.22.08 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  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, [...]

• Pages, Process

  Esquire Cares, Part I

  02.19.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I wrote a while back that most magazines were not particularly concerned with that ambassador to the reader, the table of contents page. Still true—but Esquire is an exception to the rule. TOChinations at the magazine predate January’s redesign—the book has a history of putting collaged, structuralist, and sometimes even more whimsical arrangements on its [...]

• Pages

  Advertorial

  01.10.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  What is it about the sort of fake ads and advertorial sections you find nearly any week in the national Sunday newspaper magazines, commonly in B-to-B’s, and occasionally in newsstand glossies—particularly low-end women’s and health-oriented titles. On the one hand, they seem stridently unethical—designed to confuse the reader into thinking (at least long enough to [...]

• Pages, Process

  Tic TOC

  11.30.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  The book Designing Magazines has a table of contents, but it doesn’t have a chapter on tables of contents. I thought about including one, but ultimately decided against it—because, really, I’ve never met anyone who works for a magazine who cares about the lowly TOC. [Read More]

• Pages

  Post secret

  11.20.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Editorially, The Washington Post Magazine has long aspired to the journalistic excellence of Highlights for Children. This is seen in the front news section, which has more comics than news (including the superb Cul-De-Sac, by Richard Thompson—however, the paper already has two sections of Sunday funnies); features like “Date Lab” which follows Washington-area Goofuses and [...]

• Pages

  Semiotics

  11.14.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Since my health club closed, I’ve been climbing stairs for exercise. I mention this only to explain that I spend a lot of time in various stairwells, one of which belongs to a hospital. There’s not a lot to look at or think about while climbing an interior fire escape, but at the hospital I [...]

• Pages

  Fashion Minimalism

  10.23.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  The New York Times is shocked—shocked to learn that there’s a lot of nudity in women’s fashion magazines, and even more surprised to see that European glossies have even more bare flesh than U.S. books.

• Pages

  Satire

  07.07.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  I sat in the art director’s chair at Washington City Paper for eight years. It was a job I loved, and when I finally left I thought a lot about what I was leaving behind. I had good friends there, I knew I’d miss the fun and relentless schedule of a weekly publication, and the [...]

Designing Magazines

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Designing Magazines is a book and blog edited by Jandos Rothstein. The book is published by Allworth Press You’ll find contributor biographies and links here.

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