This years Design conference brought together the many designers of IPC, for a day of presentations and workshops. Carla Franks was the guest speaker , and she gave us a presentation on ‘Inspiration’. Carla was able to talk us through her work on Oprah magazine, providing the IPC designers with an insight into the highs and lows of its launch.

Karla showed a wide range of designs and spreads. Explained with behind the scenes stories that brought the work to life. The work itself was very New York, an extraordinary attention to detail, producing spreads of great elegance. Her personal passion for photography was also clear for every one to see. Carla spoke about her personal belief in the need to constantly challenge oneself a designer. As Milton Glaser said, “To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” Karla’s presentation showed she is a  master of  magazine design, and the clarity of the design work was inspiring.

New York Times R&D Group: Newspaper 2.0 from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

I also notice that the use of fluorescent colour is usually in a solid block, but that the edges of that block are angled, not square. This brought to mind ‘dazzle camouflage‘. Dazzle camouflage works on the idea that unlike conventional camouflage that blends an object with its background, you take one object and break it up. It was rightly assumed it would be very difficult to hide a battleship but it was felt with the use of angled lines and shapes you could break it up. Thus confusing enemy gunners. So I was wondering how visually confusing the use of angled and strong coloured edges was on the eye.

So I have broken out all the magazine covers to see how they behave. I have taken my local newsagents shelf as a starting point. Then I have just shown the fluoro colours, then the flouro and primary colours. Do the individual magazines hold their own? Does the use of strong angles in the design cause them to break up? Have the individual magazines become invisible and camouflaged? Hmmm…..

Loaded bagged IPC’s December Cover of the Month, and immediately ran into the usual run of complaints, culminating in the decision not to put the cover on display in the Blue Sky Cafe, as it was recognised that this sort of material still genuinely offends many people. Which in this day and age, I am absolutely delighted by, as the ability of magazines to enrage and infuriate was the reason why I got into this line of work in the first place. Thank god they still work!

Commenting on ‘men’s’ magazines has tripped up smarter people than me, but in its market, this cover is good work, so it’s right that I make the attempt.

Before I explain why this cover is a worthy winner, I do need to declare an interest. Which is that Steve Sutherland and I saw this cover several times during its production schedule, offering our opinion and advice as usual. However that notwithstanding, the work you see here is 100% that of Loaded’s indominatable editor Martin Daubney, and his excellent new art director Blue Buxton.

I believe the reason why people get so upset by this sort of imagery, is that it sexually objectifies women, and creates an inaccurate view of women and their place in the world. Which is fair enough, if only it were true. But it’s not. Loaded, like most men’s magazines, is a fantasy. And whilst it’s always possible for this fantasy to be misinterpreted, the magazine never pretends to be anything that it’s not.

Women’s magazines also like to run images of famous women supporting impossible body images, and dangerous ideas of what men might find desirable. Which although intended as light entertainment, stand a greater chance of being misunderstood as they support a much broader mix of genuine practical advice and positive emotional support.

Both men and women’s magazines operate in thoroughly desensitised and highly credulous markets. There was a time when no credible women’s magazine editor would ever run the mythical (and highly irresponsible) cover line: ‘Drop a dress size by this Friday’. Now such lines are commonplace. Likewise, men’s magazines find themselves creating their own equally implausible scenarios.

So after all the fuss, is the cover really any good? Well, yes! Here are seven things to think about.

1.    The picture. Men’s magazines have always succeeded on the basis of Right Girl, Right Time. We’ll have to see if that holds true here, but on paper it looks promising. Page 3’s longstanding favourite Sophie Howard along with some brand new girl who fair leaps off the page. Glamour photography is an artform just like any other, and this picture really is very well made. Shot by Zoe McConnell and art directed by Blue, the lighting is spot on: strength in the shadows, yet still well rounded, clearly lit on the faces, but a very flattering back light on the ladies’ derrières. The retouching is good too. So often it’s completely overcooked, but here the touch is light enough to retain a real sense of believability in the fantasy. Moles are retained, and the skin texture is nicely seen.

2.    The colour way. As noted in my earlier post regarding US glamour http://npdnotebook.com/2008/magazines/only-in-america/, a red logo on a blue background always works. And the use of just one colour creates a sense of class that is not seen in the weekly market.

3.    Value. Nuts magazine has fairly done it for the monthly market, with 50% market share. So Loaded has to walk a fine line between looking like there’s tons in it for £3.40, but at the same time, reflecting that this is a perfect bound, monthly purchase, and as such a more considered presentation. So all four drop-in images have a white border, which holds them nicely in the same aesthetic corridor, so to speak.

4.    Shagging reindeer on the cover. There’s absolutely nothing about this inside, but as an illustration of the Loaded brand values, this works for me! Although I must say that a chimp with a machine gun is still my favourite route to this particular part of the Loaded DNA.

5.    Hollyoaks in the hot spot. As we have discussed before, this area is the key to sales success in any market. I would like to have seen the type bigger here, but that aside, given the proven power of this show, the promise of Soap’s Superbitch getting super rude is pretty good.

6.    Launderette Lesbians. This really did divide the publishing team, as many felt that the picture overplayed the girl content, and dragged the title down to the level of Front, Loaded’s much weaker rival. But given the high polish of the main image it gives context and permission for a much edgier picture, both in content and styling, without screwing up the brand.

7.    Snow over the logo. The oldest cliché in the world, but undertaken here with real class.

And http://streetstyl.es/ -

I love the concept of both sites – simple propositions (recipes and street fashion respectively) simply laid out in a highly visual style.

Looking at these sites I thought it’d be a great format for saving images from the web for a kind of image bookmarking tool. Ever lost track of great images you found online? In 2 seconds of Googling  and I found 2 services to let you bookmark & tag images, as well as browse your saved images as thumbnails - http://weheartit.com and http://vi.sualize.us

After trying them both out for the past couple of weeks, here’s a non-extensive list of the features and functionality for a basic comparison of the two:

Visualize: http://vi.sualize.us

Visualize Features:
•    Firefox plugin which allows you to right click to save any image on the web
•    When you right click to save, a popup opens, which is faster & doesn’t take you off the page
•    Tagging is in same format at del.icio.us (which I’m already very used to), with ‘suggested tags’ & ‘your popular tags’ displayed
•    Can save images from within (html) webpages or just any online image (so you can save an image with a URL ending in .jpg for example)
•    Tag list is displayed with tag words sized according to popularity (cloud style)
•    Overall it’s quicker, easier, clearer to see what’s going on and it’s less intrusive
•    A bit too much text on the ‘Your favourite pictures’ page – I’d rather have larger thumbnails as the images speak for themselves.

We Heart It: http://weheartit.com

We Heart It Features:
•    Firefox browser button ‘I heart IT’ allows you to click to save any image within a webpage (html)
•    When you click to save an image, ‘add to my hearts’ thick pink border appears over every image in the page, you can’t remove this after you’re done unless you refresh the page.
•    Selecting image to save opens a new page where you can tag the image; this can be a little slow and disorientating (in terms of navigation…)
•    Lack of feedback after you’ve added tags – it’s not clear your image has been successfully saved until you go to your ‘my heart’ page and check.
•    Layout of ‘my heart’ page is nice and clear with large thumbnails and little text between the images

Overall, my favourite is Visualize , as it’s a bit quicker, more like del.icio.us in it’s tagging functionality and you can save images alone or on webpages. I do prefer the visual design of We Heart It however, and this is pretty important for an image saving tool.

More on Image bookmarking sites on NY Times: Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing

But I think static cover images becoming moving web images shows how different mediums allow you to deliver against the same brief but with different solutions. The medium is the massage, after all. Ta.

‘Nuff Said

as Stan Lee would say….
with thanks to the SEO Rapper

I see Barack Obama has adopted the font Gotham for his ‘Change’ poster, banner, flags etc campaign. As many of you know, Gotham is sweeping the magazine world as the font to use, so much so that it’s being dubbed ‘the new helvetica’.

Speaking on the recent helvetica film, about the font, typographers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones said that “GQ [the magazine that originally commissioned it] had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it, It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.” That description pretty much sums up both the font and Obama. This got me thinking. If Obama is Gotham, what font is McCain? Arial, Cooper, Antique Olive…?

But let’s not stop there, what about our own Gordon Brown? David Cameron? …er George Osborne? Your suggestions please…

I’ll get the ball rolling… George W Bush – Comic Sans

It’s also blindingly obvious that one of the major ways that we, as journalists, can continue to play a meaningful role is to take every oppoprtunity to master all the tricks in the book when it comes to reaching our audience wherever they may be and whenever they may be there. Which is a round-about way of saying we need to get online, offline, mobile, outside, inside, upside, downside… whatever it takes to make sure that we are able to communicate as very best we can.

Multi-tasking, cross-platform journalism is about to become a reality, not just a watchword - if, indeed, it hasn’t already.

But, just because I’m a mischievous imp and just because Charlie Francis sent me this link and it was so brilliantly written, I thought I’d share one very good journalist’s feverishly hilarious take on that blackest of black arts, SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which, if you’re not familiarr with the term, is a geeky way of describing a method whereby you can best ensure that all your words of wisdom reach the widest audience possible by using the words and tags that online search engines search for.

Which is a good thing, right? Right. But what it does do is change the way we look at how we communicate and turns the “art” of writing into something more of… well, a “science” really. Which is not necessarily music to everyone’s ears, especially as it suits some of us very nicely to go around convinced that every single word that flows from the metaphoriocal pen is a muse-donated drop of sheer glistening poetry. Like, no machine’s gonna tell me what to write, right? What am I? Some kind of robot?

I jest, of course. Journalism by its very nature is the “art” of crafting a story so effectively, efficiently and entertainingly that as many people as possible can enjoy it. And SEO is just a new tool in our box.

But learning to live with it and love it may not be a stroll through the park for some, especially those who are still recovering from having their sovereignty as a writer challenged by the web’s insistence that we replace publishing our opinions “at” people with a new, more democratic process of engaging in conversations “with” our readers.

Anyway, here’s Charlie Booker’s personal take on SEO:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/charliebrooker.pressandpublishing