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This is about magazines

The following email exchange about magazines took place during September between Jeremy Leslie and Mike Koedinger (co-curators of Colophon2007) and Andrew Losowsky (editor of the Colophon2007 book, We Love Magazines) and is published in the latest – and, in it’s current form, final – edition of Luxembourg’s Nico magazine.

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On 20/09/2006 at 23:50 Mike Koedinger wrote:

Jeremy, Andrew, hi,
I’m just having a break: I’m in the middle of preparing my magazine collection so as to move it from my apartment to a specially dedicated archives room in my office. Just finished packing the first 30 boxes! I must say I got a little bit nostalgic browsing through the old WIRED, from the time co-founder Louis Rosetto was still on board, browsing through THE FACE –I’ve even found a collector supplement “best of 1980-2003”-, the German WIENER and ECONY, etc. Finally I found a quite recent VOGUE HOMMES, from 2005 when Michel Mallard was still “directeur de création”, with its beautiful cover with the boy and the tarantula on his face. Wonderful choice! Do you remember?

Mike

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On 21/09/2006 at 12:47 Andrew LosowskyAndrew Losowsky wrote:

Hi Mike, Jeremy,
I envy you! My magazine collection (such as it is) is currently spread across three locations in two different countries – and there’s no system to it at all, beyond the order that things were added to the pile.

My advice: be careful in organising that archive room – make sure you have a space to put magazines out, cover-side up, for people to browse and flick through for inspiration. If the spines are all that’s visible, firstly you run the risk of people creasing the covers as they slide them back in, and secondly casual visitors will miss out on what is – for many of us at least – what makes magazines special: browsing through whatever catches your eye, flicking through pages, feeling the weight of them in your hand. And spines are the one area of the magazines that don’t date them so much!

And add a humidifier to the room! I don’t know how damp it gets in Luxembourg, but just in case…

I do remember that Vogue Hommes cover. What was most shocking about it, as I recall, wasn’t the tarantula but the expression on the model’s face. One of the reasons I find most fashion shoots dull is that the models aren’t actually reacting in them, no matter what situation the photographer has dreamed up. If this is supposed to be dress up role play, why aren’t the models actually playing? It seems to me that there are three typical model facial expressions – blank, shocked (in a whoops, Benny Hill kind of way) and angry (snarl like Grace Jones, please) – none of which are ever believable. This month’s VOGUE ITALIA ‘Homeland Security’ shoot is a good example of such a feature – an interesting idea with no depth or belief whatsoever. It’s not surprising that it’s received so much flak (no pun intended). It has nothing to say for itself, and the people in it don’t really care about the storyline. At least the VOGUE HOMMES boy looks like he knows there’s a tarantula on his face. If he’d been cool and ‘fashion model’ about the whole thing, the image wouldn’t have had nearly as much impact.

But of course I’m a words person, so it’s not surprising that fashion shoots leave me cold. Do you ever look back into your respective collections for verbal stimulus as well as visual?

As ever,

A.

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On 22/09/06 at 23:20 Jeremy Leslie wrote:

Andrew, Mike,
Looking after magazines is a problem. They are temporary items that a few fanatics like us insist on keeping beyond their intended ‘Use By’ date. When you pull an issue off a shelf it’s impossible to re-insert it without the cover buckling up. If stapled, the cover section falls off.

My collection is inconveniently squeezed into the spare room upstairs, piled in vertical columns. They are safe and secure but almost impossible to search through. I’m in the process of planning a proper storage space and I can’t figure quite what that space should be. I am coming to the conclusion that shelves full of those open document storage files are probably the best option, although they will half-obscure the magazine spines.

The irony of this is that the very attribute that I love about magazines, that they are tangible, physical items, also makes them difficult to store and retrieve. Meanwhile websites, those under-designed templated content holders, are easily bookmarked and available at the click of a dialogue box.

When I do search through my magazines for a particular title, I get easily distracted and find myself flicking and reading randomly. There’s always something to rediscover, a magazine you’ve forgotten about or thought was lost.

As a designer, I am biased toward visual stimuli but when searching through my magazines they can catch me on any one of several levels. It may be the style of the image, the content of the image, the words, the fonts… Or combinations – another key attribute of magazines.

Do you find that the language of the written content dates itself in the same way the photography, illustration and typography do?

Jeremy

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On 24/09/2006 at 14:10 Mike Koedinger wrote:

Jeremy, Andrew,
I’ve been through so many magazines in the last few days, my collection goes from the mid-eighties to now, and, to make a long story short, written and visual both get old fashioned once a magazine has tried to get too close to the zeitgeist of any given period, but on the other hand, well designed and well written magazines are really timeless, some do still have the same art direction, photography, paper, etc. I think of French annual EGOISTE. But definitely when it comes to fashion and haircuts, you can tell which period it was.

I’m curious how we will feel in a few years’ time about all the new independent magazines that are published as a special project (and not as the main job) by art directors or graphic designers. Many of them have been created will a lot of attention to design, choice of paper, the editorial choices are less marketing- or advertisement driven – one could imagine that these magazines will be less quickly “outfashioned”, or is this just what every generation of publishers thinks?

Mike

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On 25/09/2006 at 17:10 Andrew Losowsky wrote:

Mike, Jeremy,
On the contrary, I find that very little text or design is ever ‘timeless’. For me, any cultural artefact, whether a book or a play or a song or a magazine, speaks volumes about the landscape in which it was produced – either through being influenced by its surroundings, or by being completely different in its reaction to it. Only the wildest, most impenetrable photography / art / writing from previous times hasn’t been absorbed by popular culture, or left behind since. I wonder which, if any magazines from another era could ever be placed on the newsstand today, and would still sell? That would be an interesting exercise for an adventurous printer/magazine house.

The current wave of independent magazines has emerged from the explosion of affordable desktop publishing, approachable offset printers and adventurous ‘youth’ brands with advertising dollars to spend – as well as the rise in both the popularity of design and the disposable income of 20-40 somethings (who else is going to pay €12 for a fancy magazine with little directly applicable information inside?). How will we regard these magazines in a few years’ time? I suspect not so much as we do such generation-defining publications as early nineties Face or eighties Sunday Times magazines, but instead as we view those journals that emerged much earlier, with modernism, futurism and situationism, or the fanzines from the seventies and eighties – interesting experiments that showcased art and articles that agreed with an alternative world view from the mainstream.

There’s a modern (and modernist) quality to much of the current wave of independent publications. Each has its own subtly distinct, yet similar manifesto about trends, the modern world and people. Increasingly they look either inward or witheringly at popular culture, in order to determine what is interesting or worthwhile. The personalities of these publications are firmly moulded in the shape of their creators, often with little thought given to what the reader might want or deserve. Sometimes that leads to magazines touched by individual genius (for example, CARL’S CARS, RELAX and 032C); other times not so much. The intentions of many independent magazines seem to be to entertain and to be aspiringly cool in equal measure; the target market, if there is one, is defined less by social groups as by the brands they wear – Vans, Diesel, Adidas, and so on.

Perhaps this sounds like I’m a little depressed about the current state of independent magazines – actually, far from it. With the scarcity of newsstand philanthropists and the risk-averse nature of big publishing houses, it is in their independently minded, energised pages that we search for true, gorgeously designed rebelliousness, and a freshness of message of which Marshall McLuhan would be proud. Unfortunately, few if any of these publications have wide readerships – and that only encourages their navel telescopy. If the wider world isn’t listening, why bother talking to it? I suspect (and hope) that what we’ll see in the next decade is some of these independent producers finally getting their chance on big newsstand titles or newspaper supplements – and then we’ll see how good they really are.

I for one can’t wait. Which begs the question: using your fantasy crystal balls, which current designers/photographers/editors/writers would you like to see let loose on a mainstream publication in the future – and why? Let me begin with a suggestion: why not let the ADD!CT lab loose on WALLPAPER*?

As ever,

A.

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On 26/09/2006 at 23:53 Jeremy Leslie wrote:

Hi Andrew, Mike,
Every area of magazine publishing has its innovators and its followers. Whether mass-market mainstream or small-scale niche, the titles that interest me are the ones that question what a magazine can be, that push the boundaries in some way.

The increase in numbers of mainstream magazines reflects the general success of the medium, but sadly causes repetition and stagnation. There is too much to lose when spending £10-15m launching a new magazine, so we see little real innovation there. Exceptions exist – here in the UK, GRAZIA is a recent example of a title that has not only created a successful new genre in this country (the upmarket weekly women’s mag) but has done so with the help of innovative design.

Away from the hard-sell mainstream there is much more innovation – in independent publishing, newspaper publishing and customer publishing. All have potentially far freer creative parameters within which to work, but that doesn’t mean every example is radically innovative. There are plenty of look-a-likes here too. How many more independently published portfolios of fashion images mixed with raw doodles do we need?

Nonetheless, at their best, these areas are where the most questions about what a magazine can be are asked. You cite several examples of independent titles, to which I would add RE-, YUMMY, KAREN and DOT DOT DOT. Newspapers such as THE GUARDIAN have added magazine-like supplements to their daily offering, while using magazine techniques to develop the main newspaper. The Swiss weekly DIE WELTWOCHE newspaper reinvented itself completely as a weekly news magazine. And I think I can be permitted to list some of the work of the company I work for, John Brown, as examples of how customer publishing can drive the medium forward. Projects such as CARLOS and M-REAL have attracted much attention for their experiments with what a magazine can look like.

Will these projects live on to be recalled in years to come? Impossible to tell, but what is certain is that as our whole culture gets faster and more self-referring these smaller titles will increase their influence on mainstream magazines. Historically, the mainstream has always relied on the independent to provide ideas and people, both as inspiration and as staff, and this can only increase. (In a curious inversion of this exchange, the magazine 032c you mention has recently appointed Ashley Heath, ex-THE FACE and ARENA, as its editor).