FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

The Sports Illustrated's recently-launched SI Vault is a treasure trove of weirdo vintage covers, as Gawker recently discovered. Just how weird? That cover above is merely the tip of the wack iceberg. (I wonder what the people who are criticizing Vogue for its Lebron and Gisele cover would've said about More...

After reading your critiques of the Rolling Stone Obama cover, Tim O'Brien writes:

I'm the illustrator who painted Barack for the cover of Rolling Stone. It seems you've selected a group of designers with a lack of understanding of what Rolling Stone was doing here.

[Rolling Stone makes] no bones about viewing Barack in the most hopeful light. At the time of publication, the newsstands were brimming with photographs of the man, so in this instance, they chose illustration to push the cover out there to get some buzz. I seem to get u More...

The finalists for the National Magazines Awards were announced yesterday. And—like every year—the list included some surprises (Good), snubs (Esquire) and the requisite head-scratchers (Bloomberg Markets?) that make any awards process fun.

And, also like every year, the list, like a lot of things in the consumer magazine industry, was dominated by a disproportionate number of magazines about or originating in New York.

Of the 128 finalists for this year’s Ellies, at least 78 are based (or have significant staff) in New York City. That’s over 6 More...

In the midst of a fascinating 2008 presidential race, Rolling Stone unveiled its endorsement of Barack Obama last week with this cover. Like anything this race seems to touch, the cover was immediately tagged as controversial (with some cable news pundits suggesting the magazine touched up Obama's skin color to make him appear "whiter").

Putting that, and Jann Wenner's politics, aside for a moment, FOLIO: asked some of its friends in the design world to weigh in on the cover. Here are some early returns:

NAME: Dan Trom More...

Time magazine—home to such modern self-marketing marvels as the Person of the Year franchise—has put together a self-deprecatingly fun interactive slideshow. Tapping its 85-year archive of covers, the magazine is enlisting a reader vote on the worst Time cover of all-time.

Some of them, like the one on the right, I actually like.

And while it's not going to make any ex-art directors too happy, the feature is, as they say on the Internet, "sticky."

A full day after the New York Times' shocking revelation about Eliot Spitzer's involvment in a prostitution ring, the New York governor still, somehow, remains in office. UPDATE: Not anymore.

It took less time for Glamour magazine to fire a blogger after, as they say, a majority of readers wanted to "pulverize" him. Here's our story. And here's the More...

That didn't take long.

A scant two hours and 17 minutes after the New York Times broke the story that linked governor Eliot Spitzer to a prostitution ring, I got this press release from a publicist for 02138, perhaps the last (only?) magazine to feature Spitzer and his wife on its cover.

From: [REDACTED]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 6:03 PM
To: Dylan Stableford
Subject: Eliot Spitzer & wife Silda Wall on cover of 02138 ---in happier times

In Happier Times: Eliot Spitzer a More...

CBS' schtick-tastic Andy Rooney (yes, he's still on the air), the curmudgeoniest of curmudgeons, closed last night's 60 Minutes (yes, it's still on the air) broadcast with an odd rant about the effectiveness of advertising in high-end women's fashion magazines. And, here's a shocker: Andy Rooney doesn't understand the appeal of couture fashion spreads nor the ad pages that run opposite them.

The segment ("Andy Rooney's Eye for Fashion") could've been called "Help, Grandpa Took My September Vogue Again!"

W More...

Don't get me wrong. I like David Carey. I've met the new Condé Nast group president just a handful of times, and he seems softspoken, smart, funny. Sweet, even. And I count him as one of my Facebook friends.

Still, if I were doing a profile on the heir apparent to Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend—as the New York Observer did this week—I'd surely dig a little deeper than, say, Condé cronies like David Remnick—or Carey's weakness for office cantaloupe and fruit smoothies—to paint a picture of the guy.

Here are some of the quotes about Carey the Observer managed to squeeze into its More...

Justin Heister, founder of a small East Coast skateboard magazine called Focus, is, oddly, a self-proclaimed "Donny Deutsch fan." So much so that he talked his way onto CNBC's Big Idea with Donny Deutsch show this week to talk about the magazine's logo.