August 2007

The Archives

• Art Direction

  Shades of Meaning

  08.31.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  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 [...]

• Custom Publishing

  Alumni Calling

  08.29.07 | Permalink | Comments Off

  There are some excellent Alumni magazines, but the question I want to examine is, why aren’t they all good—they should be. On the face, alumni publications offer a lot of potential for interesting reportage. Even a medium-sized school can be plumbed for ranging topics based on the diverse research interests of the faculty—stuff that makes [...]

• Misc.

  Punk Praxis

  08.27.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Punk has been remarkably enduring as a musical style and visual vocabulary, but it’s important to remember that what has become the punk look is, in many ways made of a mannerist vocabulary. The pre-distressed typefaces found on any shareware site and computer-generated smut that’s easily pumped out of Photoshop has much the same sort [...]

• Misc.

  Hiatus

  08.17.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Designing Magazines is on break until August 28.

• The Stacks

  Designing for the Sexes

  08.14.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  I’ve been out of town on a research project, and haven’t had a chance to write so I thought I’d post this out-of-date but still uproariously amusing piece from a few years ago. Written on spec, several editors told me that it was really quite clever but inappropriate for [insert publication name] because it [reason]. [...]

• Classics

  In the /Life

  08.09.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  A week or so ago, I made an oblique reference to Art/Life magazine. Yesterday, my only copy of it, from November, 1989, emerged from my Siberia-like bookshelf after an absence of a decade or more. Kismet! Art/Life was a limited edition magazine that was hand assembled from original artworks, prints and assembledges submitted to the [...]

• Off the racks

  Not Your Mother’s Architectural Digest

  08.08.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Architectural Digest has been it’s same stodgy self since 1854 or thereabouts. Among the dwindling collection of magazines that don’t update their looks every 18 months, it is doubtlessly one of the more prominent. Back when AD was a regular visitor in my house, I noticed that it occasionally put out a supplement, but one [...]

• 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 [...]

• Misc.

  Video

  08.04.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Two people sent me this link for the original design gangsta video within a half-hour, so it must be worth posting. My justification for putting it on a magazine design site? cameos by both Fred Woodward and Paul Davis. I tried to put the U-tube screen right on the blog like all the cool kids [...]

• New Launches

  Premier Blues

  08.03.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Starting with The American, the American Enterprise Institute’s latest attempt to find a post-Clinton reason for publishing a magazine, and on to Portfolio, the last year has been busy for business magazine launches. The latest is Premier Business, which despite its title, seems to be mostly about personal finance rather than corporate strategy. The editor [...]

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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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