Best Magazines Ever!
Guys particularly like lists as Miranda Sawyer noted in The Observer a couple of years ago [observer.guardian.co.uk]. Not that women don’t find them interesting, it’s just that guys seem to like them a bit more. Guys take up a lot of space in lists too, this could be because they are mostly written by other guys. Good Magazine have just compiled a list which they are featuring on their website. It ’supposes’ to be a definative list of the ‘Best Magazines Ever!’ [goodmagazine.com/bestmagazinesever]. It’s problematic.
Not that I’m going to go all geeky ‘List Guy’ on this topic… but, yeah… I am. I mean, who were these ‘aficionados’? And why, as ‘eclectic’ as they may have been, was their choice in titles best best summed up by New Yorkers, Print Fetish, [printfetish.com] who described this selection as ‘pedestrian’. As noted on MagCulture [magculture.com] and on the Canadian Magazines blog [canadianmags.blogspot.com] it really should have been called ‘51 greatest American magazines’. Although not all the magazines listed are produced in the US of A, those that aren’t were tokenary inclusions (Loaded but no i-D? C’mon).
Lists are fun but tricky. A list of ‘Best Ever Magazines’ is doubly so because magazines, by their nature, change from edition to edition, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite dramatically. Take the inclusion of Details [men.style.com/details] for example, a magazine that’s gone from New York-centic hipster guide to edgy Men’s fashion mag to bloke’s best mate to modern girlie mag to it’s current incarnation as metrosexual lifestyle manual. It’s tricky to determine what sort of benchmarks can be used to set certain magazines apart. For a start, there’s so many of the things, though this hasn’t stopped your (sort of) humble author from compiling the Boicozine All Time Top 10 Magazines (a personal selection, mind… subject to change). Here goes… Comments more than welcome…
01 i-D [i-dmagazine.com]
02 Relax [nmca]
03 Harper’s Bazaar (US edition) [bazaar.com]
04 Smash Hits [wikipedia]
05 Self Service [selfservicemagazine.com]
06 Grafik [grafikmagazine.co.uk]
07 The Face [wikipedia]
08 Select [wikipedia]
09 Details [see above]
10 Vogue (Paris & Italia, you can forget the US edition)
[vogue.fr] / [style.it/vogue]
Actually this is really hard… here a few that didn’t quite make the cut but are/were excellent none the less: Sleazenation, Lime Lizard (UK), KGB (USA), RayGun, Frame, The Architectural Review (UK), Games, Mad, Playboy, Interior Architecture (Australia), Sin (Australia), Comet & Challenge (Australia), Spex, V Magazine, Tokion, Lodown… actually there’s loads. Compiling lists can also kind of suck.
Reading List: February 2007
Crikey! A book! How did that get in there? Well, I guess at least it’s not a novel or something, although I did try to get through John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos [flickr] after buying a Village of the Damned [iMDB] / Children of the Damned [iMDB] double bill DVD. The Wyndham covers from the 70s are ace. I just don’t have the attention span for novels anymore. Sad, really. So what’s on me shelf?
Identity Kits: A Pictorial Survey of Visual Signals
I bought this from the States off Alibris UK [alibris.co.uk] after visiting the recent Alan Fletcher exhibition [designmuseum.org.uk/alanfletcher]. It was put together by Fletcher and ex-Penguin Creative Director, Germano Facetti [arts.guardian.co.uk] and published in 1971. It was kind of disappointing. I expected loads of corporate identity stuff from the 60s but it’s more esoteric than that. Still a nice thing to have. Kind of bizarre in places.
Entertainment Weekly [ew.com]
I love this mag at the moment. It’s like Smash Hits (takes off hat and bows head) for adults or a slightly smarter version of Heat minus the morbid fascination with people’s weight (actually take that away and there’s not much left of Heat really). One warning though, this is a quintessentially American magazine, dipped and glistening in good ol’ US corn(ball) syrup, so there is the chance EW could leave you feeling a little queasy.
Monocle [monoclemagazine.com]
This mag garnered so much media attention before it hit the shelves (I too waded in to the various discussions but mainly on other people’s websites [magCulture]. Cheeky!) that I don’t think I should mention it any further. So I shant… for now.
Wired [wired.com]
Mark [mark-magazine.com]
I made a promise to myself that I would hold out on buying Mark again for as long as possible after they parted ways with Machine [ourmachine.com] after only 3 glorious issues… but I gave in mainly because there were some lush houses inside this issue. Unfortuntely I hadn’t realised that A10 [a10.eu] seems to have covered most of them already. Dang!
T-Shirt Factory [beamst.com]
Another book?! Well, sort of. It’s more like a compendium. T-Shirt Factory marks the 6 year aniversary of seminal Tokyo T-Shirt emporium, Beams T and features a majorly random selection of design from a wide range of designers and illustrators such as Geoff McFetridge [thedirectorsbureau.com], Work in Progress [workinprogress.com] and Deanne Cheuk [deannecheuk.com]. Not a lot in there to read (and it’s mostly in Japanese) but an excellent, if erratic selection.
Home Sweet Borough
Why do London’s Borough Councils need their own unique graphic identities? Is there a better, more efficient way for the various councils to communicate with their inhabitants? A number of factors have recently lead me to ponder this question. I think it started after having a look at the Legible London [legiblelondon.info] website put together by NLA [newlondonarchitecture.org] and the Mayor of London’s office. Seems folks have trouble finding their way around Olde London Town. Could be something to do with the wide variety of signage that changes from borough to borough. Something design agency Bibliothéque [bibliothequedesign.com] tackled after a recent request from This is Real Art [thisisrealart.com] to help promote Creative Review…
The other thing that seems pretty evident from the assemblage of logos above is that many councils seem to find it hard to justify investing in keep their identities fresh and engaging. I mean, look at poor old ‘Southwark’. You get the impression that many of these marks and symbols are hang overs from the 80s and Britain’s ‘golden’ age of privitisation when it was expected that councils would be in some wierd sort of competition with one another. This idea of constituents as ‘customers’ has proved hollow with the steady rise of Council Tax which is too expensive to provide any sort actual ‘best value’ comparison. Councils as commercial bodies only work when Tourism is heavily involved, as is evident in the identity work for an aggressively marketed ‘destination’ like the City of Melbourne [thatsmelbourne.com.au].
So here’s the idea. The Olympics are coming up, London needs a lot of work. Let’s start with an umbrella identity for the various London Boroughs [wikipedia.org/london_boroughs] that can be easily applied to the various signage around town, so that means one standard set of typefaces for all the boroughs. Then each council could be allocated a colour palette (of no more than 2 or 3 colours) and a graphic element to go next to their name. This could be derived from the coat of arms that each council already has available to use. Then, to make the operation as cost effective as possible, all design work could be done from a central bureau, like a sort of design laboratory. Whaddya reckon?
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I (heart) Teenbeat
Teenbeat [teenbeat.net] / [myspace.com/teenbeat413] are a proper (and personal fave) indie record label based in and around Washington DC, run by Mark Robinson and his merry crew. The label was founded in 1985 by group of “young geeks and punks” looking for somewhere to exhibit their homegrown noisefests. My personal introduction to Teenbeat goes back to 1992 when 4AD [4ad.com] offshoot, Guernica [discogs.com], released an album called ‘Imperial f.f.r.r.’ by one of Mark Robinson’s many personal projects, Unrest [last.fm/unrest]. Since then I made sure to check in and see what’s cooking on a semi-regular basis.
Since Teenbeat’s dalliance with 4AD back in the mid 90s, the label has continued on it’s merry way, releasing it’s own distinct brand of idiosyncratic, often twisted, indie pop. The Teenbeat D.I.Y. aesthetic stretches to the various album artwork produced for the label which borrows then mashes up many influences from the world of 80s & 90s sleeve art.
Visit the Teenbeat website to download the Teenbeat Book of Numbers to your iPod. It’s a catalogue of everything the label has done eva. Here’s a couple to whet your appetite… Number 108: Unrest ‘Perfect Hairdo’ Comb / Number 295: US Olympic Commitee demands Teenbeat band, Olympic Death Squad, cease name use. I’ve also posted some Teenbeat Graphica for your perusal.
Pulp Theatre
The term ‘Grand Guignol’ has come to refer to “any dramatic entertainment that deals with macabre subject matter and features over-the-top graphic violence” according to the unofficial but comprehensive Grand Guignol website [grandguignol.com].
The term comes directly from a theatre set up in Paris called Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol that ran from 1897 to 1962. The theatre specialised in a type of ‘pulp theatre’. This consisted of short, sharp plays (usually about 5 or 6 packed into one seating) often of a ribald and saucy or grisly and gory nature. Their little horror shows became particularly when known, largely due to the luridly authentic special effects employed. Often spare parts from butcher shops were used to achieve effects such as live amputations and decapitations. The Grand Guignol even came to London during the roaring 20s but was considered too sordid an affair to stay in town for too long.
A theatre group calling themselves the Thrillpeddlers [thrillpeddlers.com] seek to keep the genre alive and wacky funster, Angie Reed [angiereed.com] has written a little ditty about the ‘Old Mistress of the Grand Guignol’. Let’s hope there some sort of revival in time for next All Hallow’s Eve.
