November 2007

The Archives

• 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 [...]

• Classics, In the Ether

  Aspen

  11.27.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Most magazine designers have come across references to the legendary Aspen—a “magazine in a box” published between 1965 and 1971—though few have actually seen a copy. In addition to articles, Aspen included phonograph records and several issues came with Super-8’s. (For our younger readers, Super-8 was kind of an early QuickTime.) Well, the folks at [...]

• Classics

  GD Mags

  11.26.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Kimberly Crofts at Publication Design—a teaching blog for students of graphic design at Billy Blue in Australia has found some design-related Flikr sets—including this collection of old Graphis magazine covers and pages. In Designing Magazines the Book (DMTB—as opposed to Designing Magazines the Blog, DMTB) Editor Joyce Rutter Kaye writes about the evolving design of [...]

• Off the racks

  Pudding Heads

  11.23.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  The New York Times Magazine’s “Consumed” column about Print Gocco a few weeks ago sent me on a trip down memory lane that started on Google and ended with Pudding—the only magazine printed on a Gocco. For those who never came across the device, Goccos were small silk-screen printers, cleverly engineered for the needs of [...]

• 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 [...]

• New Launches

  Mergers and acquisitions

  11.19.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  Introducing Man About Town, the graphic lovechild of McSweeney’s, GQ—and possibly ABA style—when I opened the spread above, I was briefly afraid I had been served. MAT, a new British biannual, mixes color fashion plates in with its gray, uncoated, and devilishly difficult-to-photograph text-driven pages. (In other words, sorry about image quality with this post.) [...]

• Shameless self-promotion

  In stores now

  11.15.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  It’s still a few days before the official release date, but Designing Magazines is now shipping from

• 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 [...]

• In the Ether

  16

  11.14.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  MagCulture, has had some great posts lately, including a piece on teen angst as publishing exercise which forms a nice counterpoint to my post on student magazines and a link to an archive of classic 16 covers. I remember looking at those as a kid and thinking how stupid they were—anyone could see the Beatles [...]

• On the racks

  Brass Tacky

  11.10.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  NPR’s Marketplace did an intriguing piece on Brass magazine a few days ago. Their report made the magazine sound like a sophisticated and sincere version of Young Money, which I wrote about a while back. (I had used the example of YM to look at how fuzzy editorial goals can result in a design that’s [...]

• Classics

  Stars of the Past

  11.08.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  I recently came across an old, crumbling copy of Screen Album, one of many miscellaneous published extensions to the Hollywood publicity machine of the early 1940s. Best to photograph it, I thought—both because it was turning to dust before my eyes and because it provides an interesting snapshot of mid-century low-end photo-driven magazine design. (Say [...]

• Redesigns

  Typographical Issues

  11.05.07 | Permalink | Comment?

  @issue, new   I’ve long felt that non-profit organizations and private industry should work together more diligently to produce decent swag for graphic designers. A template for successful products that might emerge from such public/private partnerships is @issue: The Journal of Business and Design, which is written and designed by The Corporate Design Foundation and [...]

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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