How To food¶
248 words on Magazines
A while ago I ordered the second issue of How To magazine on the topic of food. A pretty magazine on one of my favourite activities had a certain appeal.
The magazine was a delight to receive with nice packaging and a pretty cover letter.
Design-wise I thought it was a mixed bag. After seeing the cool outer cover, the paper and print quality of the inner pages were a bit disappointing. I also don’t consider full page gradient backgrounds the height of snobbish style …
… and was a bit puzzled by the article’s text going flush with the edge of the background while hanging punctuation was used to break that strange line:
I’m sure this can be ‘explained’ as stylish or clever, but how clever and stylish are things which need to be explained?
Writing-wise the magazine didn’t stand out too much either. Rather, most of its texts confirmed the impression that the people who are keen to make magazines like this aren’t necessarily the best people to write them.
That said, the choice of topics was quite wide-ranged. From serious and to a certain degree boringly politically correct reminders of bad ‘issues’ like industrial food production, anorexia and people starving to death in the world to more dada features like the execution of a cheeseburger on a scanner or mockery of poorly translated marketing gobbledeegook on food packaging or photos showing scened modelled with sausages (which reminded me of Titanic’s series of sausage ads).
