FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Tea comes with a lot of visual associations, but from the Japanese tea ceremony to the silver tea set and tinkling of china cups, the common link is ceremony and elegance.

Little of that expected aesthetic is to be found in the current iteration of Tea: A Magazine, which uses typefaces, colors and grid erratically in its haphazard effort to honor the wo More...

reMarriage is the magazine for “Before, During, and Happily Ever After.”

I suppose that “before, during and after” remarrying is not as broad a topic as “before, during and after the bris,” nor as weird as “before during and after the funeral,” but the cover lines, “Bride’s Dress Dilemma: Pouf or Posh?” “Today’s Mix and Match Families,” “Losing Friends in the Divorce,” and “Stepping into Teenage Angst,” do sug More...

I was attracted to this issue of Hi Fructose because it had the best (or possibly the only) use of chiaruscuro that I’ve seen recently on the cover of a newsstand magazine. Hi Fructose covers the naive-by-choice school of art-making along with publications that include gallery or illustration-focused books like Juxtapoz, Beautifu More...

I wasn’t there at the eureka moment that spawned Missbehave, but I imagine it went something like this:

Editor: “We need something different ... something like a magazine, but not like a magazine ... something bold, yet decisive ... wild, frilly and feminine, yet sturdy and down to earth with machismo and swagger ... a design that speaks Indo-European with an outrageous fake French accent ... [art director begins to look uncomfortable, time passes] ... something sweet, yet sharp….soft, yet dangerous…crunchy, but with a hot molten center…..[more time passes, art director begins flipping absently through a c More...

I've written before about the propensity for satire at my old alt-weekly. But one ill-fated attempt at mirth at someone else's expense was a year-in-the-[not]-making spoof of the Washingtonian, a city magazine that, in my 11 years in D.C., has cycled through the same yearly schedule of lowest-common-denominator content over and over (and over) again. My old editor (whose name I won't mention) summed up the problem: "How do you satirize a m More...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Buy Jandos' new book!]

Photoshop Disasters writes with humor about digital flim-flam, including the current cover of Blender, which brings us the head of Britney Spears.

Still, you have to admire the tasteless audacity of the coverline: “Britney Spears Has Lost Her Kids, Her Fans, Her Underwear…and Her Mind HOW WILL IT END?”

In a puddl More...

A word on the recent Mark Newman blog post about the art director/edi... er, excuse me, I mean the editor/art director relationship. It seems the editor is always right.

As you might expect, there's a bit of foot stomping about the piece in art directorial circles—at least I think that's what it is. As we are just art directors, we can't express ourselves very clearly with words—so I'm hearing complaints but I'm not really sure what they're about. People think we art directors speak a secret language, sorta like porpoises, but no, we make no more sense to each other than we do to anyone else. More...

Acido Surtido is a remarkable and lovely poster/magazine published in Argentina by a small editorial team with support from the Ministry of Culture. Printing only 2000 copies, I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to review a nearly complete run of the stunning mag. In some ways, AS is similar to Lumpen in that both publications are free, both are lovely because of, and not despite of low production values, and both are the product of a cheerful but competitive collaboration among artists. Contributors at AS, I gather, work separatel More...

Left to right: Details, Esquire, Gourmet, body + soul

I first noticed it in Details a year or so ago—the first page of their newsbrief section ("Know + Tell")—traditionally the home of the most newsworthy, best or meatiest short item—had been torn down and replaced with something else: a page of bite-sized tidbits.

I don’t know if Details pioneered this approach (does anyone?) but it has very decidedly become a trend—several magazines are doing variations on this collage-like way of opening the section, in essence starting with an amuse-bouche (or seven) before the appetizers to come.

Details’ overstuffed page is More...

As a guy who has made his career at the sort at publications that spend at least part of their time putting out articles on the arcane workings of government, I always take more of an interest than some would when wonks get jiggy with it. Politics, the rechristened Campaigns & Elections is on the stands this month. The magazine was, at one time, a data-driven publication—visually defined by stats and tables. But in the last few years C&E had moved in a more magazine-y direction. Unfortunately, the design—and especially the art dire More...

Those of us who have kicked around publications for a while know that the letters page ain’t what it used to be.

And, I’m not just talking about what appears in the magazine—though most glossies are printing fewer inches of reader reaction than in years past. Readers (and more importantly readers who write) no longer have the same notion of what a letters page is in the first place.

In the old days, a mail page was one of a very few accessible forums. If you were the gatekeeper of one, you could count on all kinds of unpublishable entertainment—long paranoid screeds hand printed in tiny, careful letters on three (or 12) over-s More...

I wrote a while back that most magazines were not particularly concerned with that ambassador to the reader, the table of contents page. Still true—but Esquire is an exception to the rule. TOChinations at the magazine predate January’s redesign—the book has a history of putting collaged, structuralist, and sometimes even more whimsical arrangements on its contents page. One (from late last Fall) put content in the form of an array of cubes—it looked more like a recent NYT infographic than anything else. Stunnin More...