Colophon Redux, Part Four

More reportage from Colophon2007 [colophon2007.com], the International Magazine Symposium, held at Casino Luxembourg in early March.

Sunday, Day Three

Magazines that break boundaries
Curator, Jeremy Leslie gave a lush presentation to kick off the last day of talks at Colophon2007 that simply presented a personal selection of inspirational magazine design and editorial through the decades, and I’m not just gushing about it cause I was writing from his blog, honest. Some of the magazines in this presentation included The Face [wikipedia] and Speak [speakmag.com].

Advertising (ahem)
Boz Temple-Morris, forever to be known as the inventor of Death cigarettes [wikipedia/death_cigarette], played devil’s advocate today in presenting a round table discussion on advertising and how drawing advertisers fits in (or in many cases doesn’t) with producing an independent magazine. The main problem with introducing advertising into independent magazines seems to be that it automatically compromises the editorial of said magazine. There were many solutions to this dilemma breached including setting up an umbrella agency to feed carefully selected advertising to independent magazines or creating promotional opportunities that brands could tie themselves in with (Tokion [tokion.com] are particularly adept at this technique) or just ignoring advertisers all together and use other resources to fund your magazine.

Paper murderers and print junkies
No discussion of magazines and magazine design would be complete without some sort of homage to typography. Lars Harmsen [bastard-project.com] and Flo Gaertner [slanted.de] presentation provided this, also giving us an idea of creative trends spreading out from Germany and Europe as an added bonus, all set to a distinctive musical soundtrack. More a mini typeface appreciation society than topical discussion, this was a great follow on from Jeremy’s presentation earlier today. Some of the magazines included in this presentation included brand eins [brandeins.de], Spex [spex.de], Mono Kultur [mono-kultur.com] and Mark magazine [mark-magazine.com].

Colophon Redux Ends. A warm, round of applause goes to Mike Koedinger [mikekoedinger.com] and his team for greasing the wheels that made Colophon2007 run so smoothly and made it so much fun. Thanks!