I wrote a while back about Fashion Rocks the Condé annual that’s packed up with every magazine the company ships in September. What is FR? Mostly it’s a long advertisement for a television special of the same name—but judging from the ads and all the product placement it probably makes a few bucks too. I’m glad it came with my Wired, a guy just can’t read too much about schmatas when the weather starts to turn.

You wouldn’t expect a magazine like this to innovate, and for the most part FR doesn’t—except in one area—it has no folios, but it does have a table of contents—a list of everything in the magazine in order but without any reference as to where.

The reasoning behind the inclusion of a TOC that is completely (instead of just mostly) useless (as is the case for most over-stuffed fashion books) isn’t hard to figure out—it provides a low-cost far-forward advertising position, just as that page does in most other magazines. But then, why not justify the inclusion to readers of the page by making it usable? It’s not as if FR’s design is austere or avant garde. There’s no “edgy” justification for the elimination of folios. A simple unobtrusive number would hardly have over-burdened pages that are otherwise competent, but will not be sweeping next year’s SPDs.

A guide that offers no guidance seems an overt exercise in contempt for the reader.

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 it out of cyan and yellow, maybe also throwing a little black or magenta in there to tone it down a bit. In this way, nearly any color could be simulated on the page, and magazines could develop “individual color schemes” that would help, along with “type” and “grid,” to “brand” a magazine. Lately CMYK (or the slightly tweaked CMYK look) has become so hot that it’s become hard to pick up a major newsstand magazine without seeing the printer’s primaries used unannealed on the page.

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I would like to chalk the trend all up to Adobe’s difficult-to-use tools for defining colors, leaving inexperienced designer relying on program defaults, but the trend has afflicted the best, oldest and least compromising of magazine professionals. Top: Pentagram’s redesign of Radar, above: Fred Woodward’s GQ, immediately bellow: Janet Froelich’s T. The look certainly is vibrant and refreshing—but now so overused that it seems likely to burn itself out in the next couple of days.

And why this trend now? Maybe it’s the easy access to transparency effects (which Woodward in particular has made hay with) available in every program which has allowed anyone with the Creative Suite to channel Bradbury Thompson (below).

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 Magic film—and no one in class could figure out just how she did it. I thought the piece had been drawn in Elmer’s and then sprinkled with glitter, but no, apparently the little golden flakes are just sitting there. One sneeze and….

More of Bantjes’ projects can be found here.

Detail:

As a magazine designer, I take no small comfort in the decisions I don’t have to make—the signage that stays the same issue to issue, the consistent margins, the grid that remains my stalwart companion through the months and the pages. Anyone who’s taken paint to canvas knows that it’s the first few strokes that can be the hardest. When you design a publication those first strokes are already made—and that’s a good thing.

I therefore find it a disturbing–nay–a terrifying trend that the folio, that tiny little workhorse of unobtrusive function is now, apparently, in some circles regarded as a “design opportunity.” While I disapprove, I also feel covetous. I now look shamefully on my pathetic unformatted plane-Jane page numbers as indicative of my personal failings and limitations as a visual journalist. Above, Wired’s Star Wars edition folio from the September issue. Below, some of GQ’s September folios and more from Wired. Damn them, damn them all.

GQ folios

Wired Folios

So, did you hear the one where Maxim and Yoga Journal have a baby.

Punchline:

My brother wrote that he predicted another Esquire-related post on my blog. I took this as a great complement—he clearly believed that there would be another post on my blog. Unlike me, he isn’t as painfully aware of the lack of posts lately due to two huge projects in mundane life (as members of SFCA, (of which I am not) call it) coming due at once.

Apparently, Esquire is to have an electronically blinking cover, the article confidently predicts that, thanks to something called E-Ink, all newsstand covers will blink in the next few years. Oh sure, everyone is just fullllllll of predictions. Here’s mine: people will complain about their covers blinking on their bedside tables at night, a bunch of magazines will toy with it, just as the did with little talking inserts in the 80s, and like with those little talking inserts, the technology will, for the most part, be relegated to the greeting card industry where nonsense like this belongs.

I have never been visited by a teenager intent on selling me a magazine subscription (chocolate bars, yes) and I thought the practice was largely of historical interest only. But apparently it continues, it’s an even bigger racket than you’d think it is, and it has consequences that are sometimes tragic. The Houston Press tells the story in an excellent investigative piece. Thanks to my brother for passing this on to me.

Joining the blog roll today: Cool Infographics, a nice site about visualizing data. The perspective is not editorial, but I think that’s a good thing. There’s a lot inspiring work that takes forms other than what’s tried and true on magazine and newspaper pages.

I meant to write about this a few months ago, but as a wonderful resource for magazine designers, it’s still worth a post. Magazines and War 1936-1936 was an exhibit at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Safia. Featuring pages published contemporaneously with the Spanish Civil War, the socialist, and socialism-inflected designs are, surprisingly, a visual delight, considering what what most radical magazines did and do look like. I’ve only grabbed pages from Economia, but there are lots more. The online gallery gives readers the unusual opportunity to see every spread from most of the books in the exhibit.

While the spread above speaks clearly of its time, the pages below could almost be modern. Even cult-of-inkist Edward Tufte would likely approve of the spare but attractive infographics below—uh except maybe for that bar chart, which could be expressed using quite a bit less of the gooey stuff.

In this, the 75th anniversary year, Esquire remains intent on proving they aren’t as good as they used to me. Frankly, I wouldn’t hold it against them if they didn’t insist on rubbing in our faces. For part one of this series look here. George must be rolling in his spacious, well-appointed Manhattan apartment….

Designing Magazines is on break until July 6.

I 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 pretty strong. Then I noticed that this actual issue dates from nearly a year before I bought it, making it a bit musty to write about. I hadn’t credited the persistent rumors than Australia dumps its out-of-date publications on the U.S. market, now I have no doubt.

The cover is still worth a post, though because it falls into a small but venerable tradition in publishing—the Trompe-l’œili cover. This cover is meant to look as if it’s being ripped from a plain brown wrapper—the inside reveals nothing nearly racy enough to justify one (in fact the copy is rather stultifying) but the image is simple and effective.

Do Trompe-l’œili covers actually fool anyone—or are they just examples of designers walking the fine line between clever and stupid? I think my own humble addition to the genera from a jillion years ago was effective because the free weekly newspaper I worked for often looked as beat up as my phony (at least the topmost copies) by the time it was delivered. (Ok, at least I saw one woman at Olsson’s flipping through them trying to find a good one.) But, tricky or not, these 2D covers often offer a graphic impact that distinguishes them from neighboring publications on the rack. I’ll post any other examples in a later post that anyone cares to send in.

I was surprised to find the book of the SubGenius still in print. My excuse for including it on a magazine design site? First, it’s highly cool. Second, many of the pages, and all of the art was originally created for the SubGenius Zine back in the 80s. Like the church of the flying spaghetti monster, the church of JR “Bob” Dobbs is a gag religion. SG is founded around the charismatic “Bob” an idealized 1950s father-figure who’s image miraculously appears in ad after ad from that era. Subgenius is weirder, cooler, spookier than FSM, and much more entertaining. The Ohio-based group spawned several books before fading back into the obscurity from which it emerged. They still have a semi-active web presence.

SubGenius managed to catch the grungy look of period street tracts in all its IBM Compositor/Linotype Headliner glory. Like many cults, they preached a world view that warped life into something with enough real-world evidence to be almost-kinda-sorta plausible, as they seeked a universal substance called Slack, warned that Jehovah is really a space alien who still threatens the Earth, and cautioned that if you think the church is a joke, you sure as hell won’t get the punchline.

The big unanswered question about the church: Did the organization’s excellent illustrator “Puzzling Evidence” influence the rather similarly styled movie sequence for the Talking Heads song of the same name?

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 upon lie upon lie. Most images are shot in a lush black and white, the lighting is self-consciously film noir, the fashion is distinctly classic, and the hair styles and makeup are vintage Ingrid Bergman—making HL feel like an artifact from the 30s or 40s.

Now, some would feel that a modern magazine should trade in the vocabulary of its own era—that a look back is an attempt to paint pages with an unearned authority, and anyway, isn’t the whole retro thing played? HL deserves to be excused from all such quibbles. This baby is so well done, and the pages are so beautiful I found myself just looked moon-eyed at spectacular spread after spread.

While there are some color pages, I love that the rich vocabulary of black and white is explored so thoroughly and its use is so intrinsic to the publication’s voice. I love that the tawdry celebrity culture ala the Sun, Star, and Us that we expect from anything with a whiff of fame is vanquished in favor of not just retro style but with the whole 40s studio-system attitude. It’s hard to believe these photos weren’t shot under the supervision of image-cops, as they once would have been.

I also love the large two-color newsprint section, in which the magazine runs meaty articles, and that the art director can pull off pages that are a bit more contemporary too. A jittery comic strip runs for several pages but would never have seen print back in the day. It still seems part of the HL whole.

The typography breaks one of my tenants—don’t set italics all caps. Italics were originally designed when capitols and meniscuses were not used together, and the original italic fonts did not include an upper case. Italic majuscules have always been a retrofitted and somewhat awkward addition to modern italic typefaces. Strained in design, most are just obliqued versions of Roman forms even when the l.c. letters themselves are quite cursive. And, there is no historical president for setting Italics that way. Now, I admit that insisting that you can’t use a typeface a certain way because people didn’t used to use it that was is a bit like insisting that flammable is not a word (which, by the way, it isn’t). Times change and usage and style change along with it, but that doesn’t make it right. Not in my book, anyway.

Nevertheless, I can’t hate HL’s Typography, even though there’s lots of Ital. all-cap, and too much all-cap, period. Instead the design comes off as artfully artless, both elegant and naïve, as if McSweeney’s typography was superimposed on a fashion book. Except for the reliance on caps, the type is quite understated. There are few designed headlines and none that aren’t either black or reversed. HL could have been set in lead.

HL has never met an opportunity for product placement it didn’t like, which may be necessary to fund the imagery for this relatively low-circulation glossy. For example, if you read the caption for the photo below, you learn that Christina Ricci is wearing a Givenchy black and taupe cotton jersey and silk top. Looks nice, where can I get some of those?