Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
« Referrers • Main • Random »
482 words
Neon is the name of a new magazine in Germany. Apparently it's made by the same people who originally made jetzt for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung – a much lauded, mostly entertaining, occasionally annoying and since closed down weekly supplement aimed at young people.
The new one is in the same spirit, roughly aiming at the demography of mid-twenties – people who aren't quite young anymore but don't like to think of themselves as old. That's also reflected in their lengthy motto Eigentlich sollten wir erwachsen werden
. They mix young topics with a slightly sophisticated and possibly stylish image and don't give you the offensive crap you see in youth magazines. A kind of pop magazine with snippets that didn't make it into Wallpaper chucked in.
To cut a long story short, our flat got a copy to check it out. And we were mostly underwhelmed. Criticised were points from their silly list of the 100 most important young people which turned out to be media people with an attac guy and a scientist thrown in for what looked suspiciously like alibi sanity. Lists of 100 can be entertaining – as long as you can relate to the items in there. If they're 70% people you've never heard of and neither would care to have heard of, they're a tad boring.
Other points of critique were too much nudity – who would've guessed? –, it being mostly unoriginal as Die Zeit points out and, being a bit of a layout weenie myself, I don't find a layout which uses sans serif fonts for entire texts, underlines complete paragraphs (or anything at all) and occasionally omits margins particularly pleasing. That price is a bit too high to pay for looks that suggest something is modern or 'hip'. Surely a bit more effort and some more subtle means would have done.
But the impression isn't entirely negative. We learn interesting trivia like that the word Wein isn't allowed to be the sole information on wine bottle labels in Germany and that there hasn't been a war between countries with McDonald's franchises in both capitals - leading me to think that Dubya won't dare to attack us even if we oppose further wars and GM food or support international courts.
They also have nice pictures, whole page photos, a little series of photos juxtaposing love and pop concerts, probably one of the coolest and most relaxing ads I've seen for a while (by Yahoo of all companies), an article pointing out that rap/hiphop videos mostly seem to be sexist and racist endeavours &c. They also mention Google art, which had slipped my attention before, and the iTunes music store.
To sum it up – the magazine isn't outstanding but probably a not the worst way to kill your time if you're in for something light and semi-glossy and don't happen to be interested in girls' magazines.
« Referrers • Main • Random »