I still indulge in magazines from time to time, and I enjoyed the (white) copy of AM 12 I got. It’s quite thin and perhaps some of the topics in there could be dealt with in more depth. But it’s a student project in an art school, so it’s probably more about how it’s made and how it looks. The magazine’s topic are the five senses and thus the title is just extruded three dimensionally rather than printed.

Generally quite a bit of care seems to have gone into the details of the magazine, with the pages having a coloured stripe at the side both giving them an interesting design and a nice look from the side. Different papers are used to have more brilliant photos without sacrificing readability of the text; and the content reaches from playful artsy bits (they had me hooked with the little ‘drawings’ constructed from character parts on the first pages), to slightly scientific explanations and interviews. A good mix.

The magazine is rather thick – more like a small book, really – and it covers a rather wide range of issues which are more or less related with the ‘Antiqua’ theme. I am not really sure I ‘get’ the concept of everything there as it’s sometimes unclear to me whether what’s written is there to illustrate interesting trends or developments – i.e. to my benefit, in some sense – or to simply to show off what people or their friends did – i.e. to their benefit. Such things always puzzle me and make it hard to judge how serious to take them.

The magazine uses a few different papers – I quite like the yellow one at the beginning and the back, particularly when used with inverse printing and has an interesting design. They bravely print their page numbers really close to the page borders, possibly to show off the capabilities of the Océ printers they use for the magazine (and who I assume to be sponsors) [I’m a bit of a fan of their devices myself from my teenage copying job – and that was before the magic of the digital days]. And that close-to-border printing works well on most pages and looks a bit embarrasing in the few cases where it goes wrong. The printing technique may also explain why in many places you can feel the type on the page with your fingertips.

Many of the works shown in the magazine were quite interesting or even nice. I liked the article in section Ⅴ about reconstruction of a historic typeface ‘Basel Antiqua’ and the description of the techniques which could be used for that. The typographic images in chapter Ⅷ were cool as well – but who could resist pictures of cute birds formed with glyphs from Garamond? Some of the student work shown in the later sections was cool as well.

What was a bit disappointing was the lack of technical quality in the writing. A design oriented magazine surely shouldn’t be a collection of apostrophes and quotation marks gone wrong – even ordinary newspapers get that right and they have daily deadlines rather than half-year delays (the magazine’s cover says September 2007 and it only came out recently). It is also poorly printed on many of the pages with graphics or font samples on them where the colour used isn’t proper black but a dark shade of grey and uglily rastered in printing. That not only affects the birds mentioned above but also the font samples. Outline fonts do not need to look jaggy like that. Particularly if you present them in a magazine.

What annoys me a bit is their pricing. They sell the magazine for €15 on the web, yet the cover states a €10 price. And then they charged me shipping costs for a heavy parcel rather than the €2,20 needed to actually ship the thing. That makes things feel like a bit of a rip-off.

Last year – when they reintroduced their magazine supplement – I was wondering what happened to their sense of good style. The magazine started out like a real mess. It really looked like the advertising medium it is designed to be. Over time they managed to improve that to a level where it’s not entirely consistent or even brilliant but at least it’s tolerable now.

It looks like they moved their design ‘experts’ on to the paper’s main section by now. When opening this week’s issue something felt wrong. A closer look – and then a double check to the previous issues – revealed that they dumbed their layout down a little more. Extra lines, bigger page numbers, less subtlety. And they replaced their typeyface for subtitles, Thesis TheSans Bold, with a thinner News Gothic which makes things feel less comfortable. Altogether a shame, I think.

Now which of these – admittedly rather limited snippets – do you like better?

I was rather disappointed by the issue of Time I read. I loved that magazine when I was a kid. Perhaps just because of all the images or because having a magazine written in a different language and with a focus on the US seemed exotic or even exciting. Perhaps they even wrote about interesting things back then. But they certainly don’t do that these days. Among all the colour imagery the issue I had completely focused on tidbits as well as lack of depth or actual information.

Even a hope that they would at least have good design was vain. In fact, the magazine was full of ‘graphs’ – which in these Powerpoint days certainly count as an equivalent of information – which were a bastion of inefficiency. This example could be rated as the most inefficient way to display two data points:

For me it’s not even clear whether the graph presents any information about the projected world population. Did the U.N. just spit out a single number for 2050 and they connected it with a slightly curvy line because that looks more interesting? Or is there more behind it? A Time reader would never know.

The also had a graph about stars vs non-stars in films. It looks like another missed opportunity.

It’s teh data, it is.

Now the magazine is back. Just by its new name Zeit magazin Leben which quite uncleverly manages to merge both the old ‘magazin’ and the new ‘Leben’ names along with ‘creative’ capitalisation and mixing of typefaces, it radiates all the sophistication and lacklustreness of design-by-commitee. While it isn’t quite that bad – a lot of the old content remains after all – I fail to be impressed. Somehow the layout just looks boring and the only excitement it offers are capital letters crammed all over the place. Talking about crammed – the small pages make things just look less relaxed as well.

In fact, their columnist Harald Martenstein writes it best when bitching about the art directors responsible for the layout of his texts. In each iteration of the layout he lost some more characters for the beneift of more free space and photos. Bitter reality looks very crammed, though, with apparently only the ads making it onto the paper:

Upside: Photos may look better on glossy paper – but the web taught me not to look at images within text anyway and I quite dislike glossy paper because it can be hard to read due to reflections. Further downside: The magazine doesn’t seem to be included in the PDF download of the paper anymore (Update: the magazine started being included in the PDF the following week). Let’s hope all these things develop positively.

But of course the magic disappears once you actually flip through the pages and are reminded that you didn’t care for fashion to begin with (and what they’re showing just seems to hit the extremes between crappy retail and the fashion show extravaganza where it takes really hot models to make those creative ‘clothes’ look good) and that the content is negligible.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have magazines which fill the gap between information and entertainment? Which lack the urgency of a daily or weekly newspaper. Which devote their energy to going into detail. Which look nice. Enjoyable reading. Stuff that’s more inspiring than informative.

I’m pretty sure such magazines exist. But they may not be commonplace. And if you suffer from shopping-phobia and live in a small town it’s somewhat unlikely to come across them. It turns out that once more the internet can be helpful in that situation. And so I tried picking up some links I came across and just ordered magazines that I saw people mention.

The first magazine I tried was I/O Magazine. On the opening page they nicely describe themselves as A student project with the participation of international gym members who surrendered to the specified motto ‘See it again for the first time’ […]. It’s just shy of a hundred pages and contains graphical work of all sorts – photos, collages, drawings. It’s a bit hard to really see a great theme working there. It’s more like a high quality printed version of a flickr group with interesting images. And quite an enjoyable one at that. I really like the photos I’m attracted to power – 220V, babe.

And then I tried the current issue of spatium, a typographical magazine. The issue is named Hamburgefonts and thus focuses on type specimens. They split it in two parts, a short colourful one giving photos of a variety of current type specimens, books and brochures and a longer, less colourful with some texts on font samples.

The design of that second part is quite fun as the texts (available in both German and English) are written to be samples of the different weights and styles of different font families. So you just read your way through the text and at the same time get to know some fonts. Perhaps those fonts could have been chosen a bit more extravagantly – who needs to see the likes of Myriad or Sauna yet again? I also thought the writing wasn’t particularly good in many places as was the decision to not use ligatures in the texts written in SabonNext – particularly in serif italics, not having ligatures looks quite irritating to me. And, personally I would have appreciated the use of hanging punctuation as well – particularly when using typefaces with somewhat large quotation marks.

So in total I think the magazine could have used some more focus on the details in producing. And in print quality as well. Not that the quality is bad – but showing small photos of type specimens means that not having absolutely fantastic print quality will make things blurry and the details in those photos impossible to see. And I would have also written the name of the magazine somewhere more apparent than on the last page.

With the order or the magazine I also got myself some typographical buttons. I guess I just need to get to know some people now who appreciate coffee table magazines about typography and can chuckle about that Grotesk button…

Add to those ‘reports’ their record ‘reviews’ which also invariably seem to serve mainly to point out what extensive back catalogue and general music the writer can refer to for coming up with inadequate comparisons to other bands (although in many sad cases that back catalogue doesn’t seem to be all that comprehensive), to point out that the writer actually has read all the PR material and other press reports and jokingly mentions their key points in the first sentence before going for his own two paragraphs of fame and you’ll start thinking Zhil byl korol’ kogda-to, Pri njom blokha zhila (damn have to find out how to write this properly in cyrillic letters…)

That isn’t to say that good articles don’t exist. And it’s great to read them. But the number of people who are able – both from their musical background, their knowledge of the subject at hand and their writing skills – to write good articles seems to be minute. So, invariably you end up getting music magazines ‘for the train journey’ or ‘for the CD’ rather than ‘for the music magazine’ (actually the free German magazine Intro tends to have nice photos as well).

And when I bought the Rolling Stone (Germany) this week, I actually mainly did it to read the report about Haldern for which they bought one of Richard’s photos (I’m afraid he’ll have to suffer from Almost Famous style remarks for this in the forseeable future…). And that article was, err, rather bad, making the weekend sound rather unpleasant, which up to that one rainstorm it wasn’t.

But then I listened to the included CD. It was from their “rare tracks” series – which can be quite annoying. And indeed many of the songs on there are a bit annoying. But somehow it’s one of the weirdest and most fun compilation CDs I got from a magazine in a long time. With a title of Another Time, Another Planet they promise A journey into far-out sound and we get just that. You may want to grab a copy if you can:

1. Joe Meek: I Hear A New World
2. Butthole Surfers: The Hurdy Gurdy Man
3. The Flaming Lips: Take Meta Mars
4. Hawkwind: Silver Machine
5. Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet: Shake Some Evil
6. Yma Sumac: Chuncho
7. Tiny Tim: Tiptoe Through The Tulips
8. C.A. Quintet: Underground Music
9. Jad Fair & Daniel Johnston: I Met Rocky Erickson
10. The Residents: This Is A Mans Mans Mans World
11. The Royal Macadamians: Houseboy
12. Joe Meek: Entry Of The Globbots

In the section on how to keep fit during long flights, they suggest a couple of exercises. Two of them look like this:

Thankfully they have supplied drawings to demonstrate this rather than photographs. At least in our plane I didn’t have quite such a comfortable distance between my knees and the seat in front of me. I also couldn’t bend down in the way the woman does in that photo. (Admittedly her head does stick into the seat in front of her even with the generous legroom she has in the drawing. So I’m not quite sure how they think that exercise works.)

A bit further on, they offer information about their aircraft, for example the Boeing 777 I was in:

While the drawing is all nice, and the tidbit about rose names is reasonably ridiculous, I thought the icons they used for the numbers were quite bad. Most of them just so don’t give a good representation of what they’re supposed to mean. And even those that do aren’t too good. How many did you get right (without looking at the numbers and using your knowedge about flying)? Thankfully, they also supplied us with a legend for the symbols.

If you read the note about the food on the plane, you wonder a bit though… if they have the equivalent of five juicy steaks per person on the plane, why are you served dried shit then? And if they really carry ten kilos of supplies for each passenger, why don’t they serve it?

My last helping of mockery goes to the maps they have in the back of magazine. Well, in the old days I really loved those. You could see where all the different places are and where you are going. These days they’re probably quite superfluous as they have those nice map and current location displays on the TV system. But the maps are still there and they’re covered by gazillions of those little route lines because of the massive networks of ‘partner’ airlines that exist.

There used to be something really instructive about those maps in the old days: The lines indicating the routes weren’t straight. Going from London to San Francisco would look like you’re making quite detour just to go via the North Pole. But as anybody who had done a couple of flights (or was a mathematician) would tell you, those weren’t actual detours but rather the effect of the earth’s round surface being drawn on a paper. The line you fly is the shortest route and would be straight if it were drawn on a globe rather than a flat piece of paper.

Looking at the maps today gives a different impression, though. It looks like they’ve been changed to display all routes – as in connections of two cities – rather than the actual flight paths. But somehow they preserved the curvy lines, rather than going back to straight ones for this exercise. So while this looks like they’re doing the right thing at a first glance, it looks blatantly absurd a bit later.