Contents page design

There’s a short blog post about contents page design for print magazines – specifically The Absolute Sound magazine – over at this site.

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.

Awesome photography in The Absolute Sound issue 223

Joel Salcido shot this feature for The Absolute Sound, who are one of the clients we provide magazine design and production services to at October Custom Publishing. Love the stepped levitation. Would love my household objects to levitate in real life, but oh well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some recent TAS work…

Some recent work, featuring some particularly awesome photography from Adam Voorhes.

October Custom Publishing Facebook page

I’m building a Facebook Fan Page for October Custom Publishing (my company), in order to try and get us out there a little more. On there you’ll be able to view almost every page of every magazine we’ve either published or been hired to create thus far. I’d really appreciate you becoming a fan, and I’m happy to return the favor! Take a look at the page here. Introduce yourself!

Visual Aid books arrived from Amazon!

I ordered two Visual Aid books from Black Dog publishing. They’re chock full of fantastic infographics on a random and very wide variety of subjects, and perfect for stealing ideas from…I mean looking at for inspiration. They’ve also recently started selling posters of their infographics, so now I have to figure out how much I have left on my credit card, what I’ll tell my wife, and where I will hang them when my house is in foreclosure. Take a look at their site here.