AM 12¶
263 words on Magazines
Magazines are a bit of a curse. The idea is quite nice. Some relaxing reading on the side. Great stories, well researched topics, great photos, higher print quality, joy. Then you pick one up for real and usually very little is left of that idea. No journalism or research worth mentioning, the same stock photos they run in the papers and on the web printed in a slightly higher quality and ads as far as you can see, quite possibly with the boundary between editorial content and moneymaking being hard to make out at all. What a shame.
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.
