Out now: ’Sup Magazine 22
More music: ’Sup returns, including pieces on Hot Chip, Pulled Apart By Horses, Beach House, Yeasayer, Robin Guthrie, Comanechi, These New Puritans, and, umm, Megadeth among others.
Pick up your copy from one of these stockists.
Overmatter
The Daily Mail identifies iPad owners as a problem elite.
Front cover shot using an iPhone 4 (via Subtraction).
Congratulations to Stack‘s Steven Watson for his inclusion in the Hospital Club 100.
Ex-Time art director Arthur Hochstein defends Roger Black’s Ready-Media project.
‘Condé Nast has evolved from a publishing company into a media company,’ according to new president Robert Sauerberg.
Music + design + magazines
The link between music and design continues to fascinate. On a personal level I find it hard to work without a music background, and my route into publishing was via my interest in music and hence NME and Sounds, and later my own music zine. The Guardian’s Dugald Baird shares a similar background, as he describes in this piece about the ambitious quest to find the ‘best-ever magazine articles’ from the past 50 years. His identification of an obscure piece about The Smiths in Melody Maker as his most important article comes at the subject from a very different, more personal angle than the pieces highlighted in the US.
As a US-based project, it inevitably has a bias towards that country’s magazines, selecting some great, historically important pieces. In doing so it draws attention to the current dominance of The New Yorker and Wired in publishing writing that lasts beyond its supposed sell-by date.
Meanwhile in the UK, the latest issue of Eye is a music special, with plenty about sleeve design (Fred Deakin’s look back at single sleeves provides plenty of nostalgia for the form) and the interaction between design and music. Of particular interest here is Andrew’s personal history of music magazines. No surprises but a good overview of the genre.
Carr Magazine
I’m not a car obsessive but I like this magazine, made by a group of Austrians who are.
Overmatter
Roger Black responds to criticism of his Ready-Media template project, ‘I’m hoping that art directors can spend more time being art directors, and less time pushing around pieces of a layout that nobody will notice.’ Pah! Design – who needs it?
State of Independents is a new site about independent magazines.
The Wallpaper* DIY front cover project as seen by the paper supplier.
Katachi magazine aims to be the first iPad-only magazine launch alter this year…
…but will face competition from elsewhere, including Virgin’s Maverick.
Meanwhile younger readers in France are enjoying their newspapers.
Bananas
A little piece of London magazine history for you today. Bananas was a short-lived literary magazine published in London by the Redstone Press in the late seventies (that’s the same Redstone Press that’s published an ongoing series of beautifully packaged and highly recognisable art books and diaries).
Monocle Mediterraneo
Monocle’s one-off newspaper Monocle Mediterraneo is published later this week. Earlier today I had the chance to talk to founder/editor-in-chief (or ‘Admiral of the Fleet’ as the tongue-in-cheek credits have it) Tyler Brulé and find out a bit more about the project.
Field Trip
Field Trip is a new magazine from Café Royal that celebrates analogue photography. This first issue carries 52 pages of the blurred, overexposed and double-exposed images that digital cameras would let us delete or retake. It’s a simple thing but fascinating, a random set of images from across the wrold of amateur photography: landscapes, daytrips to London, holidays, christmas etc.
Art of McSweeney’s
The collected work of McSweeney’s over the last decade has, in a way, been leading up to this single mega-tome. Recently published by Tate, ‘Art of McSweeney’s’ is more than a picture book, it’s the illustrated history of the San Francisco-based publishing house set up by Dave EggarsEggers (one-time publisher of the late Might magazine) at the start of the noughties.
Flipboard vs Ready-Media
Two major pieces of publishing news have been doing the rounds online today, one demonstrating the future and one a last-gasp grab for the past. Both were briefly featured in posts here earlier today, but the coincidence of their arrival deserves further comment here.
First the good news. Flipboard is the first iPad app to really excite me. Like so much out there at the moment it is not perfect, has flaws (not least a lack of server back-up resulting in several outages today), but unlike other apps it points to a future where the raw material of social media content can be presented in an editorial environment. Until now, Instapaper has provided the best version of this type of aggregation (different content, similarly random material), but that app satisfies with its relative simplicity compared to other digital enviroments. It removes the clutter and presents text clearly and simply.
