Skip to main content

Iconoclastic Magazines

Sunday, day of rest. relaxing, reading copies of the New Yorker.

At the moment one of my projects is to design a magazine. I'm working with the the publishers Auckland University of Technology Press to create a magazine that will serve people who 'think for a living'.

My research into magazine design has left me in something of a daze. The range is stupefying. On Tuesday evening I went to Borders Books - my favourite bookstore in Auckland - and grabbed a random pile of titles, took them to the cafe in the store (I don't like the coffee but it's comfortable and I can take books and magazines there without having to buy them - very bohemian).

I realised how similar the magazines are. Most follow standard approaches - depending on the category they are in. Design magazines look like design magazines, fashion like fashion etc. It is the quality of the content that sets them apart. The book really is a stage on which the articles and features perform.

Which brings me back to The New Yorker. I would have to rate it as a One & Only™ brand. The design is unselfconscious but aware of itself. The writing is to a dauntingly high standard, with contributions from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and John Updike. The cartoons are justly famous and, while words play the pivotal role, pictures make an entrance when they have something to add. A feature of Richard Avedon's frank images of Americans at the time of the presidential elections began with a slightly cock-eyed portrait of a young woman in a silly hat - then went on to portray with basic dignity of a range of subjects - many of whom seemed to have a penchant for silly hats (God Bless America).

But, for all of its high brow content, it is the knowing whismy of the New Yorker that I enjoy. Tucked away in an obscure corner, like the footnote to the article that surrounded it (Murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh and the testing of Dutch tolerance) was this piece :

CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER
From the Wellesly (Mass.) Townsman.
On Feb. 13 at 5.35, an employee of Andrews Pharmacy on Weston Road called police to report he had just gotten a weird feeling from a customer.

A typographic cartoon?

Perhaps.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St
Post a Comment
Read more and leave a comment

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse
1 comment
Read more and leave a comment

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer
9 comments
Read more and leave a comment