Grids

Fast News for September 2, 2010

2010-09-02T12:00:00Z

SPD MEDIA MIX is our regular list of publication design, digital, and media news and updates. Please send your links and news items to SPD at mail@spd.org and we'll add them to the Mix.

>> Bon Appetit design director Matthew Lenning has left the magazine and is moving to Austin to start his own studio....

>> Katherine Van Itallie is the new art director at Redbook...

>> GQ art director Anton Ioukhnovets is leaving to freelance...

>> Kate Elazegui has left her position as design director of Money magazine to become creative director at SYPartners, a design/strategy/innovation firm....

>> Jennifer Miller is the new photography editor at New York magazine. She was previously photography director at Cosmopolitan...

>> Paste magazine, the indie music publication based in Georgia, announced on September 1 that it's ceasing publication...

>> Apple announced that iOS 4.2 will be released in November, finally bringing iOS 4.x support to the iPad. The free update will include multitasking, wireless printing as well as a new feature called AirPlay, which replaces AirTunes. AirPlay will offer streaming of video, music, and photos.

The First Mother Jones Cover, Illustrated by Dugald Stermer

2010-09-01T12:00:00Z

In a recent interview on the SPD site, Mother Jones creative director Tim J. Luddy referenced the first cover of the magazine, in 1976, as an influence on his current work. We asked Luddy for a copy of that cover, illustrated by Dugald Stermer, and he responded with that one and two more from Mother Jones's first year of publishing. Here's what Luddy has to say about them:

Tim J. Luddy: Dugald Stermer, who was listed as a consultant on the Mother Jones masthead through the August 1976 issue of the magazine, illustrated three of our covers that year. The February/march 1976 issue, our first, featured a racially-integrated version of the Archibald M. Willard painting, "Spirit of '76." He got all Renaissande on us for our "June MCMLXXVI" issue, for a story on "The New Conservatives." This cover was based on a portrait od Count Tommaso Inghirami by Raphael. And to illustrate our July 1976 story, which was critical of Jerry Brown's new politics, Stermer painted a portrait of Brown on canvas and slashed open its center, revealing a portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower behind it. The styles of these three covers, and even the signatures on each one, show a remarkable stylistic range. Regarding that, Stermer says, "Obviously I was still trying to find myself as an illustrator, after long careers as a graphic designer and magazine editor/art director." Mother Jones's art director at this time was Louise Kollenbaum.

Read 3 Questions with Tim J. Luddy of Mother Jones here.

Fast news for August 31, 2010

2010-08-31T19:00:00Z

SPD MEDIA MIX is our regular collection of publication design, digital, and media news updates. Please send your links and news items to SPD at mail@spd.org and we'll add them to the Mix.

>> Gourmet brand to return to print--as a series of special newsstand-only issues. Gourmet Quick Kitchen hits newsstands September 7...

>> Sarah Vinas has been promoted to art director at Glamour. She takes the place of Theresa Griggs, who moved over to become design director at Women's Health....

>> Time magazine's editor Rick Stengel is "the last man standing." How Time won the newsweekly wars....

>> R.I.P. British fashion photographer Corinne Day (via Magculture.com) ...

Essence 40th Anniversary Cover Mosaic

2010-08-31T16:00:00Z

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first issue of Essence magazine, which was published in May 1970. In honor of that first issue, Mosaic Legends has recreated that first cover, featuring model Barbara Cheeseborough, in mosaic form, using all 496 covers of Essence.

Dueling Covers on the iPad

2010-08-30T22:46:47Z

No matter how you tilt the iPad, as publication designers, the workload has increased. When it comes to covers, back in the old days (8 months ago) you "only" had to ship a newsstand and subscriber cover. Nowadays, add a portrait and landscape iPad cover to the mix.

A blessing or a curse? Looking at the August cover of WIRED, they took the opportunity to use an alternative photo of time traveling Will Ferrell. For the September issue, they took this one step further and used the ole "we love them both" approach: "The Web is dead." covers the print and portrait cover, while Joel McHale & "How to Watch TV" grace the landscape mode.

Wired Creative Director, Scott Dadich weighs in:

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September was a case of having two great cover options an not having to decide which was better, as we are so often forced to in print. We worked with Art Streiber to shoot Joel McHale for our TV package, and we shot both motion and still.

And we had Chris And Michael Wolff writing for our Death of the Web package, which we felt really good about as a provocative Wired cover. So we took our August Will Ferrell issue--one step further and decided to have the best of both worlds. This is all so new, it's fun to do away with convention and experiment with new ways to engage with our readers. I'm hopeful that they appreciate the extra content we're putting into the digital edition.

WIRED, Summer 2010 featuring Will Ferrell;

Creative Director: Scott Dadich, photograph by Dan Winters.

WIRED, Summer 2010; Creative Director: Scott Dadich,

Joel McHale photograph by Art Streiber.

[Updated: 08.31.10]

See related stories:

Cool Nerds Go Negative

NY Mag's Eat Cheap 2010: Splitsville

Keith Campbell Sends a Postcard from Germany...

2010-08-29T14:00:00Z

One of our favorite art directors, Keith Campbell, recently wrote us an update on his activities in Hamburg, Germany, where's he's been living and working since June 2006. Keith has been immersed in the world of German tabloid magazines, designing a series of titles that are jammed with color, photos, and type--think Us, Star, People, All You, etc. on mega-design steroids, with lots of photos of Heidi Klum. The covers are crazy, noisy, and chaotic, but also brilliant in their execution. We love what he's doing, even if it does hurt our eyes!

Keith Campbell: One of the best emails I ever received went like this: "Meet me in Hamburg, Germany on Tuesday, April 4 at 1pm for lunch!" It read like some kind of cryptic cold war directive from a sexy Russian operative. Alas, it was an invite from Marc Werthmann, editor of the then-recently launched In Touch Germany. He was on the lookout for a new art director and had gotten my name from In Touch USA's creative director Audrey Razgaitis on one of their fact-finding missions to Bauer Publishing's Englewood Cliffs, NJ offices.
]]> In Touch USA for two and a half years, then moved to the art director gig at Inside TV. After Gemstar prematurely closed us down, I went freelance for a few months before getting the nod from IT Germany.

Over here, I immediately went to work redesigning the In Touch covers and re-working interior pages. I realized I needed to take the cover in a new direction after five minutes at a local newsstand, where I noticed the prevailing color combos of our competition--Bunte, Gala, In--were red, black, and white. To distance In Touch from that competition, we decided to take the cover palette in a childrens-candy-display direction: gorgeous violets and purples, cool greens, soft blues, popping yellows, sexy pinks. Photos were rarely used full-bleed, instead incorporating artifical backgrounds to make the title stand out on the newsstand.

In September 2008 I decided to go freelance. The first big gig I got was through my original In Touch editor, Marc Werthmann. He was tasked with launching a celebrity publication on newsprint for WAZ Gruppe, one of the big German houses. The title was Talk To Go (the logo concept was born out of the idea of "coffee to go," a novel term for Germans, who previously had some strange tradition of actually enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee. You now see "to go" everywhere, and not just associated with coffee.) We had three days to develop the design of Talk to Go, and opted for a look of controlled-chaos: busy, big, with every manner of frenetic, scratchy, poppy, and distressed graphic elements.

There were three planned test issues, which hit the stands in June 2009. Priced well below the glossy celeb pubs--In Touch, In, OK! and Life & Style--Talk to Go was designed to move on the newsstand with no subscriptions. Though the themes in Talk to Go were similar to other mags in the category, the publishers really wanted to stress the newspaper "hard news" aspect. Which explains the "Beach News" cover line for our first issue, a story on best and worst beach bodies. Unfortunately, the three test issues didn't meet sales expectations and Talk to Go went.

In the three years I had lived in Germany, I was vaguely aware of a row of magazines at every kiosk, which screamed in bright yellows and reds and featured people I had never heard of. I learned that the name for these publications was "The Yellows," that they were wildly popular--the category sells over five million copies per week--aimed at women a bit older than the In Touch crowd, that they featured largely German stars and European royalty, included recipes for schnitzel and spatzle, and that there were scores of them. A good percentrage of these publications use the word "Freizeit" in the title, which translates to "free time" in German.

My entry to that world came when a friend recommended me to Sven-Christian Guethlein, who had been an editor at Bauer Verlag here in Hamburg. He had left to set up his own shop and has since launched numerous pubs in the Yellow genre, a big chunk of which are food special issues. He's carved out a nice niche in the market with SCG Verlag, selling 150,000 copies on average for each of his publications. He called and offered me a new magazine launch. The deal: brand new magazine in two weeks, designed cover to cover by me. Though that seemed like a lot of work, I was mostly wary of my ability to throw 50 colors and 300 words on a cover!

My first issue of Endlich Freizeit ("Finally Freetime") was rough. I tried to bring a little too much order to the cover. After being told "Es muss krachen!" ("This thing has to explode!") I learned that the way to go was to fill absolutely every millimeter of space with photo or type or color or other graphic.

Frau und Freizeit (Woman and Freetime) and Freizeit Kurier (Freetime Courier) were two other titles I art directed. The target audience was the same as for Endlich Freizeit. The look had to match the other Yellows on the newsstand shelf while somehow still "kraching!"

With Revue fur die Frau, the objective was a bit different. While sticking to the Yellow genre, it aimed to skew a bit more elegant than the others. Although we had to keep the multitude of cover lines, I ditched the colored boxes and played more with type styles. Of course you won't find a millimeter of free, uncluttered space on these, but we tried to open it up a bit by using silos and fewer colors.

This spring I was brought on by Boris Haechler to design a new celeb-mag-on-newsprint called Chatter for Hubert Burda Verlag, one of the biggest publication houses in Germany. The directive was to skew very newspaper, but with clear magazine design elements. And there's also a fashion insert. The big sell with Chatter, besides cool stories and eye-grabbing covers, is the price, just 50 Euro cents. The newspaper section design is a very straight, very fast, very easy to understand presentation. The style insert is more free, with somewhat funkier design, lots of silos, and softer, prettier colors. We've now closed five issues and are waiting on newsstand numbers to determine the future of the magazine. Meanwhile, I'm just hoping that the Germans can start using the English phrase "beauty makeover" on the cover, because Schoenheitsverwandlungen is just too long to fit!

Contact Keith Campbell at: keith.maclean@gmail.com.

See a Facebook gallery of Keith Campbell's Yellow and celebrity tabloid covers here.

ASME announces best magazine cover contest finalists!

2010-08-26T17:55:20Z

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has announced the finalists for the annual 2010 Best Magazine Cover contest. There are six finalists in 12 categories. Winners will be selected by voters on Amazon.com; voting begins September 1, so be sure to vote for your favorites! Congratulations to all the finalists.

Pictured above are four groups of finalists. Row 1: Sexiest; Row 2: Entertainment and Celebrity; Row 3: Fashion and Beauty; Row 4: House and Home.

Fast news for August 26, 2010

2010-08-26T16:00:00Z

SPD MEDIA MIX is our regular list of publication design, digital, and media news and updates. Please send your links and news items to SPD at mail@spd.org and we'll add them to the Mix.

>> The new Newsweek owner talks about his plans for the magazine, says he wants it to shout at readers when they pick it up, "Hey man, you're in for the time of your life"...

>> Theresa Griggs has been named the new design director at Women's Health, replacing Andrea Dunham, who moved to People. Griggs was the art director at Glamour....

>> Anita Sarsidi is the new design director at Elle Decor...

>> The New York Times asked 13 young photographers to document the lives of 20-somethings with iPhone cameras. See the results here....

>> Lady Gaga on the cover of the new Vogue Homme Japan: black and white and very butch....

>> Black magazines of the 90s--where are they now? Emerge, Savoy, Honey, a slideshow and update....

>> How Entertainment Weekly embraces the digital age, with iPad app, Youtube channel, and more...

The New York Times Hits a Grand Slam with Flex

2010-08-26T11:00:00Z

The U.S. Open, the final grand slam tennis tournament of the year -- and the largest sporting event in tennis -- begins on Monday, August 30. To mark the occasion, Kathy Ryan, director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, commissioned the photographer Dewey Nicks to shoot some of the top players in women's tennis with the new Phantom Flex camera. When it goes on sale next week, the Flex will be the fastest high-definition camera on the market. The Magazine is the first to use the Flex for an editorial assignment. Miki Meek, the magazine's web producer, and Stacey Baker, deputy photo editor, helped produce the amazing imagery. See more after the jump... ]]> ABOVE TOP, Nicks' photo of Elena Dementieva; ABOVE, Nicks' photo of Samantha Stosur

Nicks and his crew photographed seven players in Cincinnati and Los Angeles using both 35mm film for the print magazine and the Flex for these online videos. Because the Flex shoots up to 1,455 frames per second at 4-megapixel resolution, it enables viewers to see as no spectator can how Samantha Stosur's muscles move as she hits a volley and what goes into one of Kim Clijsters's sliding splits as she reaches for a wide forehand.

Check out these amazing videos on The New York Times site here.

Three Questions with Tim J Luddy, CD, Mother Jones

2010-08-25T11:00:00Z

Mother Jones makes great use of illustration within its pages. Is this an artistic choice on your end, or the by-product of working with a tight budget?

TJL: We decide on whether to use illustration, photography, or a combination of the two on the basis of which medium will present each story's message most effectively. We appreciate the way that editorial illustration can present and shape ideas, and we have a tradition of strength in that area, going back to

]]> Dugald Stermer's work on our very first cover. We also work hard to give photojournalism a good deal of presence in the magazine, with a mix of commissioned work, pre-existing projects, and good-quality agency work.

We are a nonprofit trying to get the most out of every dollar we spend. So we think long and hard before flying a photographer and crew to a shoot, or having them spend days or weeks on location. And while conceptual photography can really bring an idea to life, it can also involve significant concept development, studio time, styling, models, and props; you can easily spend more than my cover budget on a shoot like that. When either of those options is still the best way to go, our photo editor, Mark Murrmann, is great at working smart on a shoot. For our May/June cover story on population, Mark located photographer Michael Rubenstein, who was already in India, and who created a great essay on the empowerment of women in that country. And Bryce Duffy did an amazing conceptual portrait of Republican consultant turned gay marriage hero Fred Karger for the March/April issue. We did have a stylist on that one; when you shoot someone in his underwear, you've got to do it right!

A good number of our print stories contain commentary or analysis of events that have already broken as news, and often this type of story is best served by illustration, where you can use devices like satire, metaphor, or hyperbole. It would be hard to imagine how you could do better at dramatizing the hopelessness of people caught up in human trafficking than Anita Kunz did, working with our art director Carolyn Perot, in her conceptual illustration for our May/June issue. We also tend to use illustration on our covers, not least because of how we can fine-tune the ideas and how they're presented.

Putting it in perspective, I think that your question is based on current practice in editorial art direction, which with some notable exceptions favors photography over illustration by a pretty wide margin. I'd say that Mother Jones is probably split about 50/50, more or less.
You also have the website to deal with, and spend your days working between print and online. What is it like trying to control the look and feel of two products whose audiences often have different needs and whose platforms require different content strategies... frustrating or rewarding?

I'd describe my role at motherjones.com as an influencer. Mother Jones has had an Internet presence since 1993, but we've never had a dedicated art person for our website. Early in my tenure here, we went through a major redesign and revamping of the site, including open-source programming, greatly enhanced user interaction, and a much more pervasive use of graphics. I was one of over a dozen people who participated in the design reviews at that time, working with a great outside designer, Steve Lyons. That redesign launched in early 2009. Since then I've restructured the duties within the art department to include things like the optimization of the magazine images for print, creation of graphic identity for special web-only packages, management of photo subscription services which are used by both art and editorial people, blogging, the creation and staging of online photo essays, and even the odd podcast interview. But there are still 3 weeks every two months where we're mostly a print-only operation. And for a daily news outlet online, that's obviously a challenge. The process of my team and I being integrated into the online editorial process is still ongoing.

Our Washington, DC bureau reports and writes a lot of news stories which we break on the website; usually the photos for those stories are selected, processed, and posted by reporters or web producers before I see them. I'm trying to provide guidelines for how this should work, while acknowledging that they're often going to be doing the work when I'm not available. We've set up subscriptions with a couple of photo agencies, and that's usually where the art for website-only stories comes from; most of the illustration on the site is work that was commissioned for the print publication.

I'm currently working on a design overhaul of parts of the site; this will be an adjustment of our original vision, working with the visual vocabulary Lyons developed.
What's it like? I'm guessing I feel like a circus performer with each foot on a different galloping horse: I'm pretty nervous, and I'm amazed when I don't fall off.

Business 2.0, BusinessWeek and PCWorld are all titles you have art directed and you have now been at MJ for almost four years... how have you seen the industry change from when you started out back in the late 80's... is it more exciting these days, the same, do you feel something is missing these days?

PCWorld is a technology magazine that hasn't been afraid to critique new products and trends when it feels that they aren't working; and Business 2.0, especially in its early days, would gleefully poke fun at Internet business practices and cultures. So I've developed a healthy amount of skepticism about any new technology or business practice. That said, in my first job as a magazine art director, I was creating layouts on bristol board with paper and wax, and I oversaw that magazine's conversion to a digital workflow. The things that I can do now in minutes could literally take weeks to do back then, and I feel only the most fleeting nostalgia for it. I think that in general we're producing a much richer experience for the reader now, even in print, than we were 25 years ago. The danger is that we can get lost in the richness of that experience, and end up losing focus and just producing Short Attention Span Theatre. The best editorial design in any medium is organizing and channeling everything it presents, so that all those cumulative experiences add up to a message that has specificity, subtlety, and impact.

Portrait of Tim J Luddy taken by Glenn Glasser.

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Got more questions for Tim? Leave a question in the comment field and you just may get an answer!
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Check out past Three Question Interviews
Mathew Bates, Design Director at Backpacker
George McCalman, Art Director at AFAR
Joshua Gorchov, Principal at the Loud Cloud

Cool Nerds Go Negative

2010-08-25T04:50:11Z

Wired and Scientific American must have called each other up before class this month!

I thought this was too random to pass up. I realize many genres of magazine verticals share similar cover strategies however these two popular titles, while they do share some DNA do not generally have anything close to the same cover idea dropping on the same month.
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* extra credit * Stop by your local newsstand and check out the Wired cover in person, there is a deliciously subtle deterioration/pixelization effecting the type that has to be seen to be appreciated.

Check out this other random newstand pairing from last year featuring Wired and Wallpaper. Includes a bonus mash up with NYMag!

If that's not enough here is another featuring PC World vs. Macworld.

A New Look at Parenting

2010-08-24T17:00:00Z

Creative Director Michael Goesele tells us,

For the redesign of Parenting, the overall goal of the creative team was to design a clean and easy-to-navigate magazine for today's busy parents.

Get a closer look after the jump...
]]> Above, top: August 2010; above, left: September 2010; above right: October 2010

Since early 2010, the evolutionary process has resulted in covers focusing in on the simple beauty of the parent-child bond complimented by vibrant and bold cover lines.

Above: revamped departments from the new Parenting

Inside, departments and features have been reinvented with font and architectural changes as well as the addition of fun and eye-catching illustrations.

Above: redesigned feature well stories

From architecture and font changes to the introduction of illustration, the overall design goal was to create a clean and easy-to-navigate magazine. Both visually and editorially, the book brims with information alongside an aesthetic design, custom-made for the active parent.

The Parenting creative team includes:
Creative Director: Michael Goesele
Art Director: Patrick Greenish
Designer: Shannon Mendis
Photo Editor: Andrea Ferronato
Associate Photo Editor: Diane Rice

More REDESIGN goodness here:
Q&A: Deb Bishop and Geraldine Hessler Talk New Gigs and Redesigns
New Look for Fortune
Bloomberg Business Week Redesign
The ABCs of XYZ
First Look: Travel + Leisure Redesign

NSFW Typography

2010-08-24T11:00:00Z

Hot off the press. This is a new single from Cee-Lo's upcoming album, Lady Killer, called "Fuck You". The song is amazing, but what really got me was the video, all set in type and type only! Kudos to the designer, not sure who did this one but I thought it deserved some designer love.

(You might want to keep your volume low at first. Hard to resist taking it to 11, but... -- Ed.)

Fast news for August 23, 2010

2010-08-23T17:00:00Z

Welcome to our new quick news update feature, SPD MEDIA MIX. This will be a regular occurring list of publication design and digital updates. Please send your links and news items to SPD at mail@spd.org and we'll add them to the Mix.

>> People magazine has launched its iPad app, with a video introduction by Katy Perry...

>> The new issue of Complex has a cover and photo feature starring Lindsay Lohan, with photography by Marcus Klinko and Indrina, and artwork by noted graffiti artist KAWS...

>> Essence has hired a new fashion director, and it's stirred up some controversy....

>> Shelter magazines: Good Folio article on "The Good, the Bad, and the Survivors"....

>> Drama at Everyday with Rachael Ray? Top editor and creative director leave the mag....

>> New editor announced at Elle Decor.....

Websites for Visual Inspiration

2010-08-23T11:00:00Z

If you're looking for instant graphic inspiration, great visual ideas, or just want to see some cool images, check out these visual blogs and websites: Words & Eggs, Stephen Kroninger on Drawger, A Journey Round My Skull, Ethan Persoff, and All My Eyes. These five sites are all strong in illustration and publication design, as well as book covers, comics, posters, and much more. I look at all five of these every day, and am filled with respect and admiration for their dedication, love, and overall smartness towards graphic design and visuals of all kinds.

(Above: The Masses, November 1916, illustration by Hugo Gellert, from Words & Eggs.)

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Words & Eggs is the brainchild of Lesley Yoder, and is a brilliantly curated site that focuses on vintage graphic design, with an emphasis on magazines, books, and posters. There's a Words & Eggs image of the day, and French Friday, which features a weekly dose of Francophile design. Recent posts include a massive collection of covers from early 20th Century American socialist magazine The Masses, covers and inside pages from 50s-60s German graphic design magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, and covers from French film magazine Positif. You can also follow Words & Eggs on Twitter.

(Above: The Masses, September 1917. Illustration by Carlo Leonetti.)

Illustrator Stephen Kroninger sets up his blog shop on the Drawger site, the online illustrator collective. His most recent entry features extensive info and links to the work of Japanese poster designer Tadanori Yokoo, who is currently having a retrospective show in Osaka. Other recent posts by Kroninger include a visual remembrance of former Fug Tuli Kupferberg, and a preview (and trailer link) of the new Tomi Ungerer film, Far Out Isn't Far Enough. Kroninger also posts a regular feature called A Box of Magazines that is a brilliantly themed selection of magazine, newspaper, and book covers from his extensive collection.

A Journey Round My Skull is a cool collection of illustration and graphic design with a serious literary bent. Their most recent post is called Literary Pets, and is a collection of photos of writers and their pets, including Ernest Hemingway (cat), William Burroughs (cat), and Flannery O'Connor (above, peacocks). Sometimes there's extensive writing and research, but usually Journey just piles on lots of visual goodies. Recent posts include beautiful woodcut illustrations by Hermann-Paul from a 1930s Dutch edition of Don Quixote, Cuban film posters by Eduardo Munoz Bachs, and a collection of Dutch detective book covers from the 1930s-60s. There's a strong international flavor, and there are lots of great links to even more visuals.

Ethan Persoff's website is rich in 1960s underground publishing. Most spectacular is the Comics With Problems section of his site, which features archival comic books from the 1950-2000s covering a variety of real life topics, including drug abuse, alcoholism, communism, and surviving a nuclear attack. Persoff received a lot of media attention over the past couple months for his posting of the U.S. military's official Don't Ask, Don't Tell comic book, and for his discovery of the crude, bizarro, racist Tea Party Comix. He's also been archiving the complete publication run of legendary 60s underground magazine The Realist. Persoff's site is deep, well-scanned and researched, and completely unique.

(Above: Tea Party Comix, issues #1 and #2.)

We featured Linda Eckstein's visual blog, All My Eyes, earlier this year on the SPD site, but its continued high-quality and smart curation merits another mention. Recent posts include a look at the Life magazine dog covers of illustrator Will Rannells, a collection of objects from the Lost TV show, and a powerful batch of contemporary covers from The Economist. The images are combined with elegant, informative writing, and are relentlessly sourced and linked.

(Above: Life, September 3, 1925. Illustration by Will Rannells.)