FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page
The 10 Dumbest Things I've Heard All Year
JC SuaresWhen you deal with a lot of people in a lot of places and have a lot of conversations, along with the brilliant stuff comes very dumb stuff as well.
Inexperienced voices should be forgiven but when the big and powerful make appalling statements you have to ask yourself how they ever got their jobs in the first place.
Here are some of the ones that have left me most incredulous.
10. CRYPTIC HEADLINES DRIVE SALES.
This very respected intellectual quarterly just couldn't manage more sales in bookstores and it was clear that using a single vague cover line consisting of either one word or two (including the usual gerund) was the culprit. The editor was presented with a re-worked cover consisting of a longer main More...
Grading the Tina Brown Newsweek
JC Suares
For all the fuss that Newsweek is chaperoning a new era in journalism with the print and online versions soldered together, Newsweek, in fact, is a throwback to another century.
This is because everything that appears in the magazine is dictated by one person's tastes. The big question is this: can Tina Brown's world be of constant interest to a couple of million people?
On one hand, I admire her extreme confidence; but on the other, I worry that she's sometimes off the mark.
Take this week's cover with Kate (Kate the Great) Middleton. Is there anything that Newsweek can bring to that royal party that Pe More...
Cover Critique: Glamour Makes ‘Em Feel Good
JC Suares
There are no stars in Glamour, this year’s winner of ASME's Magazine of the Year category. There are mostly average-looking women in their early 20s looking thrilled to be there.
Glamour positions itself as the Champion of the Average. It’s accessible, empowering, useful and happy. It’s the anti-chic, anti-supermodel, anti-bitch bible of the majority, even though sometimes the magazine confuses its readers with the average zombie.
“Glamour never ceases to make me feel like a million bucks”, writes reader Alison Wilhelm of Southbridge, Massachusetts, “thank you for recognizi More...
Summer Covers: What’s Hot and What’s Not
JC Suares
With its July issue, GQ writes the rules for creating a cool cover. They’re not complicated rules and they should be of help to just about anybody worried about lagging behind in perception by newsstand buyers. Esquire’s June/July cover gets caught with a potential loser in Knight and Day star Tom Cruise, trips up on its own cover lines and design, but wins points for its service orientation.
Rule One: Pick a cover subject under 20. Taylor Lautner can hardly act but he’s hit the jackpot by playing a werewolf in the Twilight movies. And, most of all, he was born in 1992.
Rule Two: Write 100 words’ wort More...
Battle of the Magazine Covers: The Atlantic vs. Harper's
JC Suares
One would think that at least one of two magazines that have been competing for attention on the newsstands for a combined 200 years would be a bit savvier about what they put on their covers. It seems as if neither the Atlantic (founded in 1857) nor Harper's (founded in 1850) have learned many lessons about newsstand culture over the past 100 years or so, let alone the past five or six.
God knows both magazines have lived through many a crisis. They've managed to survive near-bankruptcy and sudden changes of editors (Harper's) as well as new owners, new editors and having to abandon their native city after 150 years (The Atlantic) and ye More...
Battle of the Magazine Covers: Vogue vs. Harper’s Bazaar
JC Suares
Buy the most recent issues of both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and you'll have a total of 1,000 pages of fabulous spring fashion previews, including the most beautiful photography on the planet and the most lavish ads anywhere.
It's hard to tell which magazine is better than the other because they're both equally savvy, colorful, upbeat, gossipy and fun. But does their expertise in fashion journalism extend to their sense of self-promotion? Do their covers really tell you what's inside? The truth is that, in both cases, the inside is better than the outside.
God knows that they both try hard to have an impact on the newsstand, but More...
FOLIO: PRIME SPONSORS
State of the Art of the Newsstand
JC Suares Design and Production - 11/15/2011-10:28 AMIf you're in the business of creating, recreating, designing or, God forbid, rescuing magazines on life support, you need to know what the state of the art is at this point.
You don't have to look very far. The dozen or so titles that define the latest details in packaging are on your newsstand.
Some sell well and some very well. And some very well for the past few decades. Examining them amounts to a master's degree in magazine crafts from how to construct a great cover to what's sexy with fashion photography and trendy typography thrown in.
1. Typography
If you want to l More...