Newspapers: August 2008 Archives

Alternative Newsweekly Design

Alternative Newsweekly Design

I recently gave a presentation to the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. There's some great design being done at those papers, ranging from super slick to down and dirty, almost all of it being done fast and cheap.

One of the best alt weekly designs is the Las Vegas Weekly. Their art director, Benjamen Purvis, uses a lot of design and typographic tricks to create a visual version of the noise, color and neon of Las Vegas, with plenty of 3D type and bold photos and graphics. It's wonderful stuff, super-sophisticated, in the design world of Esquire or Los Angeles, as good or better than what many national magazines with much bigger budgets are doing.


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"The Stranger" Cover Archive

One of my favorite online publication site trends is the creation of cover and issue archives. So I was very happy to find that the complete collection of Entertainment Weekly covers is now available on their website as part of a complete issue archive. There are over 1,000 covers, art directed by Michael Grossman, John Korpics, Geraldine Hessler, current DD Brian Anstey, and even a couple years art directed by myself. This is very cool stuff, some amazing photography, and it's fun to see how the EW cover has evolved over the years. It's also a wonderful snapshot of popular culture since 1991.
Even better, The Stranger, the alternative weekly based in Seattle, has posted the last 10 years of their covers. The Stranger covers are like the cool punk version of The New Yorker, with illustrations, photographs and graphic design that are stand-alone visual statements, with lots of attitude and passion. Like The New Yorker, The Stranger covers are the visual voice of the publication, a dialogue each week between the paper and its readers.
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