Only Dead Fish

Magazine Cover Of The Year

Every year the Magazine Publishers of America run a little award for the magazine cover of the year. These were the winners from last year. As awards go, I rather like it. Magazine covers are a consistently underated form of design IMHO, and there's real skill in combining aesthetic impact with consistency of brand image and sellability on the newstand. As with many things, it's about combining unique knowledge (of your prospective reader) with great (design) talent. The shortlist has been selected by the American Society of Magazine Editors. The magazine buying public are voting the winners. And here's two of my favourites:

The Perfect Magazine

David Hepworth on magazines:

"My suspicion is that if a reader could design his perfect magazine he probably wouldn't like it. The whole idea of a magazine is that it's a compromise between what you expect and what you don't, between what you like and what the other person likes, between things that confirm what you have always thought and the odd thing that gets right up your nose."

2007 Best Magazine Covers

The ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) have just run their annual "Magazine Cover of the Year". As usual it's a real feast of visual delight and there's some pretty special work included in the entries. Visuals of the full list can be seen here. Below are some of my favourites:

The actual winner is here. And if you haven't seen it yet, check out their "Top 40 covers of the last 40 years" whilst you're there.

Every cover tells a story

Inspired by reading Steve Taylor’s book on 100 Years of Magazine Covers, I have dug out the link for a project the American Society of Magazine Editors ran not so long ago to pick the most iconic covers of the past 40 years. Everyone one of them tells a story…I’ve picked one from each decade for this post:

A story by the legendary writer John Sack inspired this Esquire cover in October 1966. Sack had just become Esquire’s war correspondent in Vietnam, at a time when America had less than 100,000 troops in the country. At 33,000 words, the story was and still is the longest ever published in the magazine, and was a ‘landmark in the history of New Journalism’.

In October 1971 model Darine Stern was the first African-American to grace the cover of Playboy, doing it in some style on a bunny chair specially created by Art Designer Len Willis. Richard Fegley was the photographer.

This unbearably poignant Annie Leibovitz image was photographed just hours before Lennon was shot on Dec  8, 1980, and was used on the cover (chosen as the best cover of the last 40 years) of Rolling Stone’s tribute issue to Lennon on Jan 22, 1981.

Another classic Annie Leibovitz cover shot, this time of the naked and hugely pregnant Demi Moore. It was August 1991, the year after Ghost, and the cover helped cement Demi’s place in the early 90’s Hollywood ‘A’ list

The Sept 14 2001cover of TIME featuring a dramatic and tragic image of the Twin Towers terrorist attacks taken by photographer Lyle Owerkoof

Am I missing something?

‘Digital magazines’ like Monkey and the recently launched Jellyfish - I just don’t get it. Using your mouse to ‘turn the pages’ in a digital facsimile of an offline format may be a neat way of sampling an offline magazine online (in fact we've used the same technology for exactly this) but as a consumer proposition..? You might have the best content in the world but surely this is not the most usable, user-friendly, or intuitive way of accessing it. Online protocols and configurations have developed over time to specifically drive the best level of usability for content and functionality (if you want to go to a new page you don't have to 'turn it' , you just click) so why try and override them with an offline based format? Surely you need to think more about the user experience rather than the way you are used to delivering content? Am I alone in thinking this...?

The best book on magazines...ever

Possibly. Steve Taylor's '100 Years of Magazine Covers' tells its own story. An eclectic and broad mix of covers including The Face, The NME, Vogue, LIFE, Paris Match, i-D, Rolling Stone, Time and Oz are presented alongside references to their 'historical and visual context'. As the write up says: "Magazines, as ephemeral snapshots of a moment in history, can tell us much about the way society and culture work" . Iconic images, iconic covers, iconic brands. Wonderful.

Magazines for the creative

Couple of things for the more creative amongst you...First up Wallpaper*. Always daring to be different, the March issue features a limited edition moving lenticular cover previewing Hussein Chalayan's mechanical dress. Also just in, courtesy of magculture, the latest print edition of thisisamagazine.com features (sometimes slightly bizarre) material collated from the website remixed with a number of printer tricks including fold-outs, die-cuts, tip-ins...amazing what you (and we) can do with a bit of paper.

Look out

Not everyday you launch a new magazine so couldn't let this auspicious occasion pass by without at least a mention on my blog. LOOK is the 'glossy, fast fashion fix for today's discerning young woman' as it says on the blurb. The girls round here seem to like it anyway. It never ceases to amaze the amount of consumer research and NPD work - 18 months of it - that goes into a project like this. And the sheer quality of consumer insight we get from it. These days launching a magazine is as big as any FMCG product launch. A huge sampling excercise is underway today with squillions of sample copies being handed out across the country, and the first issue is out on the 6th. Check out the flash digital edition here.

On longevity of brands

You read a lot about the increasingly short life-span of brands, driven (as so many things are) by the pressures at retail. There are some notable exceptions and here's one - Country Life this month is celebrating its 110th birthday. Yes, that's 110 years old. There's not many brands of-course that can boast this degree of staying power which got me thinking about why - in the end it came down to 3 words. 

1. Clarity:- of proposition and positioning. You know what it is, you know what it does, you know who else is reading it

2. Community:- Successfully creating, nurturing and serving a vibrant community of like-minded people. Creating marketplaces for itself (property, art, antiques)

3. Change:-  with an eye on number 1, recognising the need to constantly evolve, most notably it's product and content distribution

Whenever agency folk talk about their favourite magazine, alongside all the womens glossies, business titles and the NME, this one always comes up. A lot of that, I'm sure, is down to these reasons.

I found my naked pics in a phone box

User-generated-content has of-course been around in an offline format for a long time. Pick Me Up is one of my favourite magazines. The bizarre but true stories it features are as scandalous as they are funny. My favourite headline from this weeks is the one above. Thankfully it doesn't refer to me. But perhaps I will make it an occasional post on this blog to highlight such pearls of publishing genius. I recommend it to all.