Reading List: March 2008

There’s a few mags I’ve been pretty excited about lately and had planned to publish separate posts about but by the time I’d written ‘em, bought a scanner, scanned loads of lush pages in… well, they’d be a bit old really (not that that usually counts for anything… one magazine on this reading list dates back 39 years). So without further ado here’s the Boicozine current reading list for March 2008…

Purple Fashion [purple.fr/fashion]
Purple Fashion is this season’s penultimate fashion magazine :). It’s totally on it in terms of content and imagery and no wonder… former Paris Vogue [vogue.fr] and now Arena Homme+ designers MM Paris [mmparis.com] have been working their magic backstage at the publication for the last few issues to great success. This edition of the weighty tome (442 pages, count em) includes a collection of female fashionable movers and shakers (including fashion directors from Self Service [selfservicemagazine.com] and Paris Vogue) photographed by Terry Richardson, a painted Kelly Osbourne and Karl Lagerfeld’s private pics of Versailles and loads more. It’s pack jammed.

Grafik [grafikmagazine.co.uk]
Okay, so I may have said some unkind things about Grafik in the past. But it’s only because I care. The world would be a greyer place without it. They’ve been churning through the inhouse designers lately too so it’s interesting to try and work out where the mag is heading in terms of it’s design. Looks like Avant Garde is here to stay for a while too. :( I get a mention this month too in the typography section along with the amazing Miss Annie Collinge [anniecollinge.com] with many thanks to Mr Alex Bec [alexbec.com]. Dead chuffed, me.

Creative Review [creativereview.co.uk]
Worth mentioning for it’s long overdue redesign… although, I have to admit, I became more fascinated by the ‘handover issues’ and trying to spot where one designer left and another took over. You could give a bunch of designers the most rigid of briefs and it’s a safe bet there would be subtle differences in each result. So ‘handover issues’ become kind of interesting in this respect. That and I don’t really want to cover the redesign because you can already read all about it in a suitable succinct and intelligent manner on the CR blog [creativereview.co.uk/crblog] and over at MagCulture [magculture.com/blog].

Good Magazine [goodmagazine.com]
When Good magazine issued forth it’s US-centric list of the “best magazines ever” [goodmagazine.com/features], they went from being an interesting new US title to the mortal enemy of non-US maglophiles around the globe. As far as I could tell you couldn’t get the magazine outside of the states anyway so their big mistake was to forget (or wilfully ignore) the fact that when you post on the interweb you are talking to a global audience. Anyway, I’m here to let bygones be bygones because I found my first copy in a London newsagent and it’s fab. It’s the food issue and features information graphics produced by students from the information graphics course at CalArts [calarts.edu]. Smart.

Wired [wired.com]
If contemporary magazine design can be spilt into camps that prescribe to the idea of ‘The New Ugly’ [sad-blog.com] or ‘the Unspectacular’ [boicozine/331], then I’d like to humbly suggest we create a new term for the recent re-invention of Wired magazine. I’m going to call it ‘Maximalism’… I think… does that sound alright? It’s the only way I can describe the carefully plotted, robust, multi layered design they are currently employing. It’s messy yet precise and totally decadent in the use of special colours and the creation of new layouts to different articles. In essence, this is American magazine design at it’s most delirious and showy. It’s bubble gum for your eyes and all the better for it. The last issue bought up the topic of why American magazines have some many annoying subscription notices inside. This latest issue gives you a graph showing the various fluorescent inks Wired have used over the years. Ace.

Vintage House & Garden [houseandgarden.co.uk]
Greenwich ain’t what it used to be. Like Camden, the various quirky little second-hand shops have been edged out by generic high street stores and misguided, developer led ‘improvement schemes’. The Flying Duck [flying-duck.com] closed a couple of weeks ago but not before I could do a sweep and grab a couple of vintage mags including this copy of House & Garden from 1969. I’ll try to post some pics from this mag and a recently aquired copy of Habitat’s catalogue fom 1975, at a later date.

Smoke [smokelondon.co.uk]
More fanzine than magazine, Smoke sets itself apart for the usual ‘full colour cover, black and white inside, typeset by the author’ type publication with the length and breadth of it’s subject matter, ie London in all it’s many shades. Favourite Bus Routes is a highlight… seriously.