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.
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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.
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. (more…)
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!
Yes, as usual I’m the last person to comment on this. Rolling Stone have gone from their 10 x 12 format to regular, perfect-bound magazine size, in the process re-tooling their existing look to work in the new version. It’s interesting how they tested it… according to the editor’s letter they “produced a version of that edition [the annual summer double issue] in the size and style” of the new one and “mailed it to 3,00 subscribers to get their thoughts. the response was a major surprise: Readers loved it. We realized that the only reason to resist change was nostalgia.” Here it is next to a regular-sized UK Esquire.
Personally I liked the old format, but don’t read RS enough to care much about the change. I think one thing they had going for them before is that they didn’t look too much like Paste and all the other music mags borrowing heavily from their interior layout and font choices due to their unique format. Now, I’d be hard-pressed to tell pick a Paste layout from a RS layout from arms length. With squinty-eyed-blurry-vision of course… I’m not blind, just making a point. I wonder how much of a role cost played in making the change. Would love to know how their production costs changed.
I’ve mentioned before my full-time job is art-directing a high-end audio enthusiast magazine. When I came onboard, the magazine was a mess in terms of consistency and general readability, as well as attractiveness. The previous art director had too much work to do on several publications and couldn’t devote the time necessary to get the magazine to where it needed to be. When the redesign took place, there was quite a response from the readers, some negative, some positive. But it makes me wonder just how much value the reader places on the look of a magazine, especially a niche publication with a smaller core audience. When they’ve put up with sub-par layout for so long (twenty years in this case), how do you measure the importance of changing the look of the magazine, and how do you justify the cost? What are your goals? With us, it was to become consistent, more high-end looking, and to attract a new audience, as well as making the magazine easier to read for the existing readership. Obviously if your editorial content is compelling, you’ll draw in readers, provided they actually see the magazine. I guess my question is, how do you measure the success of a re-design? A comparison of advertising sales to the pevious years? Reader response? Subscription rates or newsstand sales? A mixture of all of the above?
I had to post this. I mentioned the re-design of Bon Appétit a couple of posts ago, and was just flicking through it while re-watching Battlestar Galactica (that’s fraking right), and came across the contents page (they have three, this is the third and seems to act as the secondary toc, just like the ones talked about in the previous post). I really like it and really hate it at the same time. Please just take a look. (I apologise again for the picture quality, I know it’s bad, but I’m using my phone right now for two reasons: my camera is missing and my phone is so much faster!)
Magazine design, layout & all the rest 
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