Category Archives: Magazines

Fortune’s Homage To Kodachrome

Fortune magazine dips into the archive to pick out 20 great images shot on Kodachrome (here) after Kodak announced it was going to discontinue producing the film.

How Is It That The Economist Is Not Only Surviving, But Thriving?

The Atlantic has an excellent story (here) on retooling the newsweeklies to compete in the internet economy.

In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting [...]

Writers And Editors Battle It Out Online

Did you know that writer Dan Baum once turned down $90,000 to write a 30,000 word story for Rolling Stone to instead take a contract with The New Yorker where he wrote 30,000 words a year for that same $90,000. The contract was up each year and after 3 short years Editor David Remnick called [...]

SPD Photography Award Nominees Online Now

I love seeing incredible photography in a well designed page. In the end the design can make or break the impact of the photography. There’s some great designers out there but it usually comes down to whether or not the editor will let them do their thing.
You can see some of the photography nominees for [...]

Esquire’s Innovate or Die Covers

Esquire editor David Granger must have an innovate or die policy with his cover creation. Awhile back they started stuffing the coverlines behind the subject to give it a 3-d effect (which I think is brilliant), but now they’ve gone on and done flashing E-Ink, cover flap mini mag advertisement, perforated/tearable and now shot one [...]

Discover and Cultivate Talent

The winners of the Hearst 8×10 Photography Biennial were recently announced (here). I was struck by how novel it seemed for a company like Hearst who publishes magazines like; Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper’s BAZAAR, Marie Claire, O, Popular Mechanics and Town & Country to hold a contest that “is an international competition to identify and promote new [...]

Life.com Launches

The new Life.com just launched and it’s worth a visit to go peruse some great old photography. I think they’re planning on simply using it as a portal to sell Getty images, but it’s nice that they put a decent user interface on it and created edited material to check out.
This is from the press [...]

Something To Prove Again

At some point we will arrive at the place where magazines have something to prove again. Maybe they will be owned again by brash men and women who want to electrify their readers or maybe the owners will need to pad their ego before their pocketbook or maybe they will need to prove the power [...]

JPG Magazine Profit And Loss

If you’ve never seen an income statement for a magazine it’s a very educational document to check out. It just so happens that JPG Magazine’s P&L was published recently over on Gawker/Valleywag (here) and I have it embedded here for you to see.  They are claiming that in part, the demise of the magazine was [...]

NYTimes Magazine Gingrich Cover

Well, Isn’t that interesting.

From Karl Baden http://www.CoveringPhotography.com

Wonderwall - Navigate By Photography

Finally some real progress in magazine-like website design. Wonderwall is a new celebrity tabloid site created by MSN and it’s no surprise if you’re familiar with MSN’s history on the web (Brian from Media Storm used to work there) that they’ve innovated the logical next step. Reproducing magazines online requires using photography in a big [...]

Newsweek Set For New Identity

From a story in the New York Times (here):
“Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and [...]

Utne Reader Video Magazine Review

The original content aggregator, Utne Reader has a new feature where they review magazines and books in a video presentation. Cool Idea.

Found it on the Creative Review blog.

Rodale Publishes Nearly Up To Date Back Issues on Google

Looks like Rodale has some sort of partnership going with google or maybe they’re just giving in to the inevitable and allowing the scanning of all but the latest issues of the magazine. I found all these titles with the last 3 years of back issues available up to the November or December 2008 issue: [...]

Flipping Digital Magazines

I agree with some of my readers who think this page flipping of digital magazines is a joke but if this is what it takes to get magazines to publish a digital version then by all means, go for it. I think there’s a very small portion of your audience that’s looking for a digital [...]

JPG Magazine Can’t Stay Afloat with Inexpensive User Generated Content

I’m a little surprised by the number of emails I’ve received and the number of blog posts I’ve seen (here, here, here, here, here and here)  regarding the demise of JPG magazine. Taking something that works well online and printing it seems kinda like taking a magazine and turning it into a website. Does anyone [...]

Time Magazine Trolling For Free Pictures on Flickr

Dear XXXXX,
We would like to publish your photo in Time Magazine in a year-end issue and also on Time.com. If you are the author of the photo and can give Time the rights to publish it, please send a high-resolution image to xxxxxxxx@timemagazine.com. While we can’t pay you for this use, we’ll give you an [...]

Pentagram Redsigns The Atlantic

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman give the 151-year old general interest magazine it’s 8 redesign (see the process here).
They revert back to an old nameplate from the middle of the last century and bring back a version of the “TOC on the cover,” something that’s very common with literary magazines.
“In a magazine of ideas, [...]