ISO50

I guess for the most part it all comes down to personal choice. I’m looking at National Geographic’s from the last 40 years compared to from the last 10. Huge difference. Again, the only difference I can see is the shift to purely digital.

Is digital lesser quality or just less warm feeling than the old film/hand-drawn covers? As a follower of this blog, I think it is quite clear that I prefer more of a retro-style.

I am sure there are many people that will find the clear image of the man hanging from the crane to be much more quality than a hand drawn cover of triangles and circles.

It seems that in a few cases, the designers of magazines have forgotten the primary purpose of the medium, which is to tell the story. I think that some magazines have too many distractions and competing elements and I find that the story can be lost amongst all the junk. You can throw in all the graphical elements you want to make the design look interesting but if you can’t follow the story then the design has lost its purpose.

I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but my opinion is that not enough time is spent on understanding and employing good typography and basic design principles and I think this plays some part in the lack of quality in magazine design.

I recently saw a traveling exhibit of Vanity Fair covers which compared 1930s covers (all illustrated save for one photo-collage) of the original magazine with its 1980s re-invention which prominently feature some stunning Annie Leibovitz photography. The real shift seemed not so much from illustration to photography, or analog to digital but from editorial to celebrity. The modern magazine has shifted to a) having celebrities on the cover and b) printing all those blockquotes/contents on the cover. Design has been abandoned or forsaken by marketing. The New Yorker still stands out as the only publication of record I know that effectively uses a stable of illustrators for the cover and interior. I particularly cherish the covers by my favorite artists and its something they’ve commoditized so apparently there is a demand by their readers who wish to buy prints of memorable covers.

I think this turn on the kind of photos in the mags and books is part of a global cultural phenom that is going further and further into the “concept art” in which the important thing is the idea, and not really how it looks. It is part of a global over-rational situation (that ends being completely irrational). People care less and less about the beauty. People just wanna buy and show things that makes them feel clever but not sensitive, to be in the fashion everything must be perfect (quoting Scott), and maybe it is helped by the Trends, that bombards us all the time with cold and empty images saying less than a triangle but imposing the public, a “wannabe”, the appearance of the “””””cool””””” being. Obviously it is a vicious circle because at the same time the trends tends to take what people want and reinforce it.

ps. the paris review seems to use a grid and composition that matched their original idea of the design, but doesnt fit very well with photography. If they would fill their complete canvas with the picture, move all the information boxes towards the middle and use the right colours, i’d look fine.

“Make the logo bigger!”

This visual pollution seems like the work of marketing departments run amok Few marketers see the value in a cover like the NY… and at the same time the audience isn’t discerning (or perhaps demanding) enough.

I recall fondly the days of Dirt Rag – where you just had the logo and reader-submitted artwork. Things like this:
http://www.dirtragmag.com/covers/36cover.jpg

Now it looks like this:
http://www.dirtragmag.com/covers/145cover.jpg

Think about where a magazine lives. It sits on a large shelf with 400 other magazines. Perhaps it’s not the lack of readers, but maybe that it’s the bulk of product.

I know that a magazine with nicely organized print on the cover with a beautiful photograph will not get nearly as many looks as “25 SECRETS OF THE ORGASM”.

Maybe like music, magazines are a dying breed because of the internet. I only hope that the ones who really really love what they do keep at it. Kind of like the renewal of vinyl album releases.

I really dig the point by Jason “I think that some magazines have too many distractions and competing elements “.

This just makes me think what does it take to make a good magazine? stay on one topic? cover a million topics?

1. People don’t like to think anymore. (or it’s at least assumed they don’t)
2. In most cases the biggest motivation is money. In some cases it’s different, it’s even different for some groups at different times in their history, and there is more room for creativity and risk taking.
3. Good work doesn’t come from focus groups, no matter the goal, yet far too much weight is put behind appealing to the most people.
4. Perhaps the design and the art world used to closer together, allowing for more overlap?
5. Some level of abstraction, whether it be using two colors or using illustration, is almost always more interesting than color photography. Unless it’s really an interesting photo, a color photo is pretty close to reality, and that makes it pretty boring.

I think another good example of this Blue Note album covers, they were beautiful when there were black and white, two color, etc. But later down the line the move to full color was made and the results were half as good.

For the record, the link provided as an example of bad design and desktop publishing (http://donswaim.com/images/ripley-parisreview.jpg) is not a real Paris Review cover but a poorly executed parody.

To be fair, at the time I doubt these publications were vying for the same degree of attention and Google-shortened attention spans of modern magazine fans.

I’ve also noticed a similar trend in music cover art that’s really taken over the past decade as well by using almost strictly photos and simplistic typefaces. It’s always a shame seeing art disappearing off the bookshelves but I think the quality that remains is much more engaging to the real artists out there who still buy and support the publishers (and labels) that still respect infusing an artistic sense into a medium increasingly based on immediacy and attention-grabbing headlines.

I’m a graphic designer and a subscriber to the Paris Review and have been for a couple years. It’s worth mentioning that most writers consider it to be THE pinnacle of literary publishing. And yes the covers are not as pretty or interesting as they could be, but the photography is always part of a larger feature in the magazine. I consider it to be outstanding, and don’t understand the criticism it’s received in the previous comments.

Did anyone bother to even crack a PR open?! the interior layout is better than a lot of other publications in my opinion. Ad-free and showing a massive amount of restraint.

My final point is that the Paris Review has been finding and featuring quality lit for over 50 years. They’ve been dedicated to their mission and have realized it on their own terms without succumbing to advertising or an alternate agenda. I feel that speculating on the quality of the operation of such a magazine is a real low blow for designers to throw. To me this only adds fuel to the age old comment of writers and copywriters, Designers don’t read!

The Paris Review is a great publication, not only for what it contains but for what it’s done for contemporary literature. Pooh-poohing a handful of covers appears infantile and petty in comparison. The story of the publication is an amazing one. Google the founder George Plimpton and do a little nosing around.

Dear Scott,

This has been such an interesting discussion! I’m grateful to you and your readers for taking such an interest in the covers of The Paris Review.

I share that interest, to say the least. My first act when they hired me to edit the magazine, six months ago, was to hire my favorite book designer, Charlotte Strick, to be our new art editor and to redesign the magazine. (Charlotte is the mastermind behind such recent hardcovers as 2666, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, and Freedom.)

Partly for reasons that your readers have touched on, Charlotte and I decided to move The Paris Review away from photography in favor of other kinds of contemporary art–always choosing things that would reproduce well in our specific format. Our first cover features a Redon-esque painting from the recent William Kentridge retrospective at MoMA. (No market testing involved: I walked into the show and fell in love.)

We also went back to the original “masthead” (as you designers say) of 1953; we preferred the warmth and the proportions of the old metal type to a digital approximation.

The new magazine is slightly slimmer–and a lot heavier–than its immediate precursor. We chose a text stock that would hold artwork as well as the old stock had held photos. We studied the covers from the 1950s-2000s, not in order to copy them, but to see how various editors had solved the design problems that come up, over and over again, across the decades.

It is a frustration to me that we can’t use metal type all over the cover–here we have had to bow to practical considerations–but I think you and your readers may agree that the design works very well in “person,” possibly better than it does onscreen.

I’ll be grateful to hear your thoughts on issue 194.

Best regards,
Lorin Stein
Editor, The Paris Review