Category
Art Direction
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Art Direction, On the racks
In Praise of the 50 cent Cover
10.17.08 | Permalink | 7 CommentsSo you’ve hired a Cadillac of a photographer and there’s a celebrity or maybe some high-strung supermodel. A few photo assistants are futzing with (rented) lighting in a (rented) space. An art director and assistant have flown in for the shoot, There’s a hair stylist, a makeup stylist, a fashion stylist, maybe someone’s built a [...]
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Art Direction, Pages, Process
When type won’t do
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 [...]
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Art Direction
Fooled again
06.26.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI bought this magazine a few months ago at the B&N in Clarendon, Va., intending to write about the Australian business quarterly. Oh, I might have made one of my typical snotty comments—something along the lines of how fast can Fast be if it only publishes four times annually—but I generally thought the design was [...]
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Art Direction, Redesigns
Hollywood Noir
HL, or Hollywood Life is a hybrid celebrity/fashion magazine—two topics that leave me colder than a mafia hit man doing wet work in Anchorage—but it’s hard not to be seduced by HL’s stunning redesign, which premiered this month. What makes HL so spectacular is the photography, and what makes the photography so good, is lie [...]
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Art Direction, New Launches
A fleeting….
06.12.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsWhat is Glimpse? I’ve been trying to figure that out. At first, I thought it was the clearest evidence that Good had been certified big league—having spawned this knockoff from the deep-pocketed National Geographic Association. But, Glimpse is not quite Good (in more ways than one, actually). Nor is it quite a knock-off of Co-Op [...]
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Art Direction, In the Ether
Covers and Cash
I missed this when it originally ran but Far Out Brussel [sic] Sprout has a nice reported post on the rarefied and expensive world of national celebrity newsstand covers.
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Art Direction, Magazines of Mystery
Teaism
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 [...]
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Art Direction, Pages
Corn Syrup
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, [...]
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Art Direction, In the Ether
In this corner…
03.21.08 | Permalink | 10 CommentsMagazine Culture notes a recent Mark Newman piece in Folio about the art director/edi….er excuse me, I mean the editor/art director relationship. It seems the editor is always right. As you might expect, there’s a bit of foot stomping about the piece in art directorial circles—at least I think that’s what it is. As we [...]
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Art Direction
Times ten
01.29.08 | Permalink | 5 CommentsI’ve been reluctant to write about Janet Froelich for fear of coming off like a freshman painting student conceding some small admiration for the work of Picasso. Her art direction of the New York Times Magazine is legendary, as well as a continuous source of inspiration to the pub. design community. So, I won’t blubber [...]
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Art Direction
Text and Image
Understanding Comics is a book I had been aware of for some years, but I hadn’t given it much thought until one of my students shamed me into reading it, along with one of its two sequals (Making Comics) over the holiday break. I’m glad I did. I have no plans to chuck it all [...]
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Art Direction
Bland Rage
. Lots of buzz online about the termination of editor Dave Seanor over this cover, which refers to a thoughtlessly stupid remark by golf anchor Kelly Tighman. On the one hand, MediaBistro agrees that termination was justified. On the other, MediaBistro feels the firing was an over-reaction. It’s worth noting that the controversy over this [...]
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Art Direction, On the racks
Die Zeit
Die Zeit is one of the world’s most respected newspapers from both a journalistic and design standpoint (full disclosure: Mario Garcia who handled its redesign is interviewed in Designing Magazines) but I didn’t know that the weekly paper also publishes several magazines, including Zeit Wissen, which I came across at one of several DC newsstands [...]
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Art Direction
Shades of Meaning
I considered and then abandoned the idea of writing about the New Republic’s redesign. It seemed a difference without a distinction. If you put both versions of the magazine next to each other, you’d be hard pressed to know from looking which was new. What has changed at the New Republic—even before the typographical shift—is [...]
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.Order the book
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