SPD 47: Andrea Dunham's Favorite Magazine

I likey them fetishistic trade magazines that, when you crack their spines, they smell like petroleum and blast out the retinas with their blindingly white, glossy 92 lb. paper stock. And though I'll likely never set foot in a car that costs as much as condo, LOTUS magazine's opulence-meet-austerity aesthetic allows me to pursue my delusion that I'm merely a paycheck away from the purchase price.  After all, their tag line is "YOUR CAR/ YOUR MAGAZINE".  I have an '08 Subaru Outback--and it's white-- never mind that, it's not stopping me from responding to this accusation emotionally, it's so gratifyingly art directed.

Every spread a centerfold, every page a poster, it's testosterone tempered by taste, I turn these pages wishing I had the balls to abandon my dwindling expense account and offer to intern  in their spare, minimalist offices in--wait. It may be the work of couple a guys freelancing. Who probably work from home.  In their skivvies. Unnerving. I digress. Back to the subject matter; vintage to modern Lotuses, exemplars of engineering and design, hot women, exotic foodstuffs, expensive hobbies like underwater archeology, power celebrity and more hot women. A natural draw for creative expression, it's a sex bomb paired with a minimalist, elegant but still decisively masculine font and it's done so f*ing, achingly well. In the Summer 2011 issue there's a feature called "Street Cars Named Desire" with 42 pages of insane cars designed kind of like giant trading cards. I'd list more faves but head to LOTUS's accompanying website, magazine.lotuscars.com for the splash/page sizzle reel that'll show you more sexy spreads. Though not quite as dynamic as it deserves, the site is smartly organized and typographically pleasurable.