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Blue's off-the-grid design motif (above), sets It apart from traditional travel
magazines. Wired (below) continues to explore the boundaries in design,
even though the typography is much more low-key than its reputation would
suggest; while the premiere Issue of Sweater (right) has a deliberately
arbitrary, unravelled edge to appeal to its night-crawling audience.
The best magazines are creating this complete experience. In these highly competitive times,
seductive covers, provocative images or compelling writing alone cannot make the maga-
zine and garner impressive doorstop-size awards. It's the total product with a consistent
voice and imagery. It's all about look and feel. The cover, the page-flipping and the skimreading
all lead to a particular world with its ideals and attitude. I'm hip to cool music, style
and the end of print! Well, at least I am when I read RayGun, or rather, when I experience the raucous
confrontation of type and image slamming onto the page. The consistent lack of consistency in its disturbed
type, random grid, layered imagery and overall graphic irreverence made a direct hit on the
jagged nerve of youth. Like music, where the lyrics are harder to decipher than the sound and experience,
the visual experience is used to challenge the reading of RayGun.
Through design, the content is turned into experience. The art director's vision becomes the voice
of the magazine. The recent launch of Blue was promoted as much for its concept as for its art direction
by David Carson. Carson streamlined his signature style to give the "journal for the new traveler" a
clean, linear, modern experience.
The magazine as an experience in itself is crucial to its branding. As with other products, the
brand name is trusted to deliver the desired experience. Magazines as brands distinguish themselves
on the newsstand and in the mind to become the must-buys and must-reads. Magazines use style to
brand because style itself is the significant means of communication. Fabien Baron updated Harper's
Bazaar's tradition of exaggerated photography and dynamic typography into a hip fashion experience.
Baron spawned Extreme Bodoni, a graphic sport where type
competes in the ability to overlap without losing legibility points.
It has become synonymous with elegance, trendiness and a
sense of self-conscious style. People are aware of the intention
that is communicated by design, whether
or not any other message gets through
(if, in fact, there is a message). Entertainment
Weekly is very entertaining, Saveur
is full of delicious spreads and Wallpaper
surrounds you with cool modernism. From
National Geographic to Interview, magazines
must portray a consistent worldview
and evoke emotional attachments that reaffirm
membership in the club.
A magazine conveys its fraternal affil
iation by amplifying the design elements
of the genre. Take a fast-growing category,
the British lad magazine. Started almost
20 years ago with innovative men's fashion magazines such as The Face and Arena, it is now at the
level of the Page Six pinup. The graphic symbolism and custom typefaces developed by Neville Brody
made The Face diverse, yet coherent and extremely powerful, and his subsequent work with Arena ini
tiated the Helvetica revival that's become the font of fashion. However, in the last few years a slew of
British magazines such as Dazed and Confused, Loaded, Maxim, Stuff and Eat Soup have arrived
Each newcomer is slightly louder and more tasteless than the last amore
screaming tabloid type and mostly, more glossy naked en, able-bod ed and accessible. These
magazines of post-feminist masculinity hark back od of
added! irony! and they are now penetrating th
Branding is not a new concept, desp
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