HOW magazine cover

HOW‘s February 2012 cover is nice, and reminds me a lot of this custom publishing piece created way back in the day.

WIRED UK’s cover paper stock is amazing

I have no idea what kind of paper they’ve used on this gatefold, or if they always use it and I just haven’t noticed, but it feels amazing. It looks really good too, in fact it has this weird, human skin-like texture that makes the people on the cover look oddly more real (the color itself is also amazing which helps). Best seen in person.

LOCALE magazine’s latest issue

Lots of beautiful photography in the latest issue of LOCALE. This is it’s 30th issue of this digital magazine, so expect to see a redesign of the magazine in the next year. While it looks good now, I think it would benefit from a redesign that focuses on readability for screen. It’s already got the photography and layout down, but on certain monitors can be a struggle to read in places… and increasing the font size would undoubtedly also increase the page count, a value add for our client for just a little added production time long-term.

Centro Y Sur magazine launches on Texterity, we’re very happy with how it looks (because we made it)

One of the many projects I’ve been involved with at October Custom Publishing is the page design, production and art direction – in fact pretty much all aspects of production – of Centro Y Sur magazine. A digital publication from the mind of Jason Z. Guest, we’re currently in our final week of production of issue 4. I thought I’d share a pieces from the last few issues. Seriously, this isn’t just a shameless plug, we’re really interested in hearing your feedback on the magazine’s usability, especially when it comes to navigation and ease of use. We spent FOREVER working on the internal nav for this – and then there’s Texterity’s own nav tools which come as standard in this particular hosting model. So I’m not going to say too much more – you can read the whole issue (and back issues) here. Some more pages from issue 4 after the jump.

And here are the corporeal fruits of our recent labors at the full-time job. This doesn’t count the two digital Buyer’s Guide magazines, the print HIFI+ magazine which we haven’t received copies of yet, or the myriad other collateral pieces we work on. But anyway, it’s nice to see them in person instead of onscreen.

Back at the full-time job, the cover of the latest issue of The Absolute Sound, which is the first one I’ve been really happy with in …well a couple of issues. Really ready to try something completely different with TAS though, give it a bit of a refresh. Couple of previous covers after the jump.

Guitar Aficionado Magazine

So I only picked this up because I was counting the magazines in Borders with Jeff Bridges on the cover (there were a lot). It’s completely different from what I was expecting. I thought I was going to see dry, copy heavy, middle of the road layouts with some crappy manufacturer-supplied photography, and a feature well phone interview with Jeff Bridges filled out to 20 pages with whatever publicity stills and photos they could rustle up from the interwebs.

Popular Science on the iPad

I’m sure everyone has seen this by now, but here I am late to the party and slightly drunk as usual. Bonnier Corporation have been busy working on an iPad optimized edition of Popular Science, cunningly labelled “Popular Science+”. It’s actually very cool, and makes me feel kind of sick at the same time. Sick in an “Uh oh I just came one step closer to being replaced by a robot” kind of way. Seriously though, it does make me wonder how the new technology which is going to pop up all over the place for iPad-like content creation is eventually going to be standardized and/or integrated into inDesign, Illustrator etc. Anyway watch the video at the link below, it’s very cool.

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

You don’t have to be rich to read OceanHome magazine, but it helps.

I’ve been reading a lot of home magazines recently (can’t call them shelter magazines, feels very douchebaggy) because of another project I’ve been working on. OceanHome feels pretty small when you pick it up. Paper feels good, cover very shiny feeling, but not over glossy. I liked the super-bright, clean cover when I picked it up, but the more time I spend looking closely at it, something about the photo is bothering me that I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it the color, has it been really photoshopped? There’s a confusing lack of detail. At a glance it looks great, but spend any time staring at it, and details suddenly become fuzzy messes of color. Was the image really hard to color correct given the amount of information in it?

Coverlines are banal and completely inoffensive. There’s nothing compelling or exciting about what’s happening here. I wonder if they tried to get a shot of the Obamas for their “exclusive”. This is clearly aimed at the high-end homebuyer, and the issue is chock full of very high-end real estate ads including – shocker! – an ad from the real estate agent who manages the Plantation Estate, aka “The Winter White House” featured on the cover. The ad even uses the exact same headline as the cover!

LOCALE magazine project

I’ve been working on this project for a couple of months now – it’s been an interesting experience creating this mini (digital) magazine. I’ll go into more detail later (because I’m lazy and it’s almost 3am), but here are a few pages from the latest issue which went out a couple of weeks ago. I’m excited about where this magazine could go design-wise, and the potential for experimenting once the production process has smoothed out.