Category

Process

• 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 [...]

• 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 [...]

• Process

  It’s poetry in numbers

  12.19.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Great infographics make dry but illuminating data compellingly and viscerally visual—even The Economist knows that.

• Process

  MacPhotoEdit

  12.13.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  I’m not an early adopter by nature—I always figured let them discover the lead paint and little magnets that stick to each other in your digestive tract on someone else’s deadline—but the latest version of Large Ferocious Cat came with my new iMac last month so I took the plunge. The new system’s biggest benefit [...]

• 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]

• Process

  Does nobody car?

  11.28.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Caring Today is a publication aimed at people who take helping infirm members of their family very seriously. Like many small, tightly-focused consumer mags, it takes the form of—even if it doesn’t always follow the structural logic of larger magazines. This can be seen on the cover. The largest headline—and therefore the presumed cover story [...]

• Process

  We Deliver….

  10.28.07 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  There’s been a bit of chatter lately about U.S. Post Office rule changes coming down the pike, which would, among other things peg mail rates to inflation. All to the good—at least our business manager is happy about that—but what has magazine designers spooked is the proposed change in mailing label placement, which would “likely [...]

• Process

  Practicums

  08.07.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  It used to bother me when I saw a student magazine or journal put out by non-designers—the design, and particularly the text handling is often more competent than what design students do at comparable levels. J- and humanities students aren’t great natural designers, but they do get away with handling the visual side on their [...]

• Process

  Illustration on the cover

  07.11.07 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  I spoke at Folio last year on ways to improve a magazine without going through a full-blown redesign. You can read a webified version of my presentation here. One of my suggestions—which were aimed at designers of smaller and controlled-circulation magazines—was to use more illustration, particularly on the cover. Illustration is more compositionally controllable than [...]

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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