May 2010 Archives

Village Voice fold-in cover

This week's Village Voice cover is a take on the classic Al Jaffee fold-in back covers for Mad magazine. Only this one is on the front cover, probably the first time this has ever been done. Art director John Dixon and illustrator Jason Edmiston have combined to create a striking and totally brilliant cover. Fold in the cover, and you get the answer to the question "A Bullish Market Is Producing Dreams of a Coney Island That's Exciting and Not a Real Dozer." You're going to have to pick up a copy of the Voice (it's free) to find out what's revealed when the cover is folded.

Complex: No coverlines! (Almost.)

DD Tim Leong sends a look at his final issue at Complex before he heads out west, the June/July 2010 issue:

At Complex, the demographic is incredibly graphically aware -- more so than a lot of other audiences. So the mindset behind each cover has been to pick the coolest image possible. That approach has mostly worked for us this past year, but this issue in doing so we picked two great images... that had no room for coverlines. Or rather, we didn't have room for coverlines without destroying the visual integrity of the images. So...

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Maui Wowie

MauiTime is an alternative weekly newspaper based on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Art director Chris Skiles has been there since August 2009. He worked at an ad agency in Houston before taking over the art direction duties at MauiTime. His covers are bright, bold, passionate, provocative, and engaging, heavily influenced by poster design, and done on a shoestring budget (according to Skiles, about $20 an issue, on average). Skiles creates most of the cover images, either with stock photos and illustration, or by doing the illos himself. Here are 10 of the coolest MauiTime covers. … MORE

SPD Members! Get 15% off at the Adobe Store

SPD members, lots of little updates in your email inbox from SPD today, and possibly your big saver of the day: a quick reminder about your 15% off savings at the Adobe store. Go after that new CS5, get started in Flash Catalyst, find your own new favorite tricks in Photoshop and Illustrator, make beautiful even better. … MORE

The Best of MagCulture.com

Our favorite magazine info website, MagCulture, has published a newsprint compilation of the best of their first four years of posting, MagCulture.com/Paper. It's a 16-page color tabloid on quality newsprint, with excerpts and links from 74 stories posted on the site since February 2006. You can order it here. MagCulture is a great site with frequent updates on magazines of all kinds, with an emphasis on the UK, where its founder, Jeremy Leslie, is based. It you want to stay on top of the latest news in publication, website, and digital design, it's essential daily reading.

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

May 24 was Bob Dylan's 69th birthday. That makes it a good time to look at some classic Dylan magazine covers. Here are a half dozen of our favorites, from 1962-2010.… MORE

Can You Photoshop Me Later?

Ever snapped a digital photo around friends and family and been asked if you could "Photoshop" them? Clearly, Photoshop has been engrained into pop culture. With millions of views, here are a few photos and videos seen around the net.… MORE

ADC Awards The NYT Magazine Design Team of the Year

Big congratulations to the team at The New York Times Magazine for being awarded "Design Team of the Year" at last night's Art Directors Club annual Gala. Check out the full list of ADC winners here (pdf link), and some of the great behind-the-scenes work the magazine has shared with us in these highlights from the site over the past few years:


Behind The New York Times Magazine Redesign with DD Arem Duplessis
Celebrating "On Language" Pt. 1
Celebrating "On Language" Pt. 2
Speakeasy VIDEO: "Intuition is Underrated"

Go team!

5 New Favorites in Illustrator CS5

Five new favorites in Adobe® Illustrator from CS5 you might not have found yet, after the jump... … MORE

American Illustration competition winners

The winners of the latest American Illustration competition are online as a cool slideshow. You can see hundreds of illustration samples by many different illustrators, a wide range of styles and subject matter. On display are both the winners that will be published later this year in the American Illustration 29 annual, as well as an additional selection of online-only illustrations.… MORE

Salt Adds Flavor: Behind the Gala Video

SPD members, meet Salt!  They are the brilliant design firm responsible for the opening video you saw at  Friday's Gala.  For those of you who missed it or, like me, want to see it over and over again, watch with us after the jump...
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Cyclo-rama!

As more photographers begin to move towards video as an additional component to their still photo shoots, what makes a behind-the-scenes video stand out from the others? Here is an example of a particularly action packed behind-the-scenes video from photographer Dylan Coulter's shoot for the May issue of Men's Journal. With over 9,000 views and numerous blog mentions, this video has taken on a life of its own... … MORE

"Sex" and EW

Just wondering... are the ladies of SATC required by law to line up in this order? Does HBO have them under a strict contract?… MORE

The Face magazine, 30th anniversary

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the first publication of legendary UK style and culture magazine The Face. Art directed by Neville Brody from 1981-86, it was groundbreaking both in its content and its design, and spawned countless imitators. The Face was home to many talented art directors over the years, but for me it was Brody's covers and design that remain most memorable for their imaginative use of imagery and creative typography. Sadly, there's no graphic archive of The Face. We've cobbled together a small collection of our favorite covers of The Face, most designed by Nevile Brody. If you have more favorites, please send them along and we'll add them on!… MORE

The Newsweek Cover Legacy

We were saddened to hear the news last week that Newsweek has been put up for sale by its owner, the Washington Post. We've always been fans of the magazine, and it has a strong visual heritage, particularly on its covers. Newsweek's covers haven't been collected into an online archive like Time's, so unfortunately they're not accessible as a body of work. We dug deep into our archives and collected some of the coolest Newsweek covers from the past 50 years. Let's hope someone smart (and with a lot of money) buys Newsweek and maintains this heritage.… MORE

The SVA 2010 Yearbook

SPD Grids just got its hands on a hot-off-the-presses copy of the 2010 SVA student yearbook. Compiled and designed by faculty advisor/instructor/creative director Genevieve Williams and a top team of seniors, the book is packed with brilliant design and imagery. The yearbook comes in a white box with five books and a DVD inside, all wrapped in a colorful belly band. 
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Flash Catalyst: NO CODE

We've all seen it happen--maybe it has happened to you: you're in a meeting, and someone asks for wireframes. Everyone starts falling all over themselves to explain that it's time to bring in the developer, designers don't do wireframes... that's how it's been at least. Get ready to take greater control of your projects, directing exactly what you want to see in the design, and seeing it--without writing code. Welcome to Flash Catalyst: … MORE

25 Years of Spin Magazine

This month marks the 25th anniversary of Spin magazine. Founder Bob Guccione Jr. was listed on the masthead as Editor, Design Director and Publisher, and was responsible for the original look of the magazine. That look was cool: simple, understated, elegant, geometric, with large photos and plenty of white space. Spin went through a lot of art directors in its day, but the overall look always owed a lot to Guccione's original design. … MORE

Illustrator Frank Frazetta, R.I.P.

Comic book, science fiction, and fantasy fans everywhere were saddened today by the death of illustrator supreme Frank Frazetta. Frazetta was known for his science fiction and fantasy book covers, and also for his many magazine covers for publications like Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, and the National Lampoon. His penchant for drawing scantily-clad women with outrageous proportions made him a favorite of males of all ages, although surely SPD members appreciated Frazetta for his deft drawing and attention to detail.… MORE

Pub 45 After Party/After Thought

What a night it was. Hosted by the gorgeous duo, CD of More Deb Bishop and PD of Real Simple (as well as SPD Pres.) Casey Tierney, which made this year's Pub 45 awards a very special one, there were kudos, cheers, great drinking and dining and all in good humor... and to top it all, those who made it to the after party got to kick back and relax (some even racked it up for a game or two of pool.)
A big thank you goes out to our after-hours host, Pound & Pence for providing the good times, and a special thank you to the gala 45's DJ George of Five Star DJ Entertainment for keeping the grooves spinning all night.

More images to follow in the coming days, so stay tuned.

See you all at our next event!
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Meet the Fortune Art Department, 1947

What was it like to work in the Fortune art department in 1947? The obsessive Fortune online archive Full Table has a scan of an issue of Time Inc's in-house journal FYI completely devoted to answering that question. There's a photo and bio of every art department member, plus background info on how they put pages together, handle production and printing, research photographs, and much more. We find out that the staff refers to art director Will Burtin as "The Human Art Director."… MORE

Those Photo Booth Pics...

from the Gala are coming soon.  We promise!  Glenn Glasser worked his tail feather off taking some amazing photos of you all Friday night.  Who knew we had such an enthusiastic bunch of exhibitionists!  Given that there were about 450 attendees it's going to take us a little time to sort through the files.  Please stay tuned to spd.org for updates.

Thank you again for joining us for such a memorable evening.  And another congrats to all the winners!… MORE

SPD GALA: Ladies and gentlemen, the top awards...

We're down to the final stretch: The last three categories: Redesign, Members Choice and Magazine of the Year.… MORE

SPD GALA: Live From New York

If you can't make it to the 45th ANNUAL SPD GALA, stay tuned right here for updates live from Cipriani's Wall Street.

UPDATE: The Society of Publication Designers is proud to announce the Gold and Silver Medal Winners of our 45th Annual Magazine Design competition held this past January. A total of 47 Gold Medals and 44 Silver Medals for Design, Photography, Illustration and Digital work were presented at the Awards Gala Friday night, May 7th, hosted by PUB 45 Co-chairs Debra Bishop, Creative Director of More and Casey Tierney, Photo Director at Real Simple. The full list (pdf) of all the medal winners is available here. 

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Pub 45 After Party!

Fast Forward: It's Friday, May 7th at about 11pm. An amazing night of awards, great drinks and  tasty food has winded down, but you have yet to call it a night yourself. You're giddy from the past four hours-worth of drinking and dining and find yourself standing outside of Cipriani's Wall Street with the rest of your gang when your fellow art and photo directors turn to you and ask,  "So...where to now?" You heedfully reply: "POUND & PENCE, and it's barely two blocks away, so we can all walk there!"

To continue the party:
Pound & Pence
55 Liberty St
(corner of Nassau and Liberty)
11pm-2am

Map after the jump.

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Rare Specimens, Indeed

So you think you've got rare specimens? I'll see your rare specimen and raise you one major rare specimen that I dug up in preparation for the upcoming HOW conference in June. I recently dug up some old stuff for a talk on inspiration, and while combing through my bookshelves, came across one of my earliest attempts at page layout--my J5 scrapbook. … MORE

Woodtyper

Nick Sherman is a young type designer at MyFonts.com, and a lover of wood type. He did a residency at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, has taught typography and letterpress printing at MassArt, and advised on Typeface, a documentary about the Hamilton Museum. 

I met Nick last year at TypeCon in Atlanta, and recently came across his blog, Woodtyper: Notes on Large and Ornamented Type and Related Matters. Definitely a person to watch, and clearly, to read. http://woodtyper.com/

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Film Titles Galore

Christian Annyas is a web designer who created an exhaustive, rich site, for his collection of screenshots of film titles. The site's organization and design make it easy to navigate and a great type resource. There's even a quick synopsis of each film plot, end cards, trailers, and Amazon links for purchase. Thank you, Christian.

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SPIN's 25th Anniversary Cover Zips Up, Counts Down

SPIN Creative Director Devin Pedzwater shares some of the thinking that went into the magazine's new anniversary issue:

There has been a lot of excitement in the SPIN office in anticipation of our 25th anniversary. With the May issue, we carefully curated a list of 100 impactful moments that reflected the past 25 years and SPIN's role as an observer of--and at times, participant in--that cultural history. The package presented us with a unique cover design challenge.

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