Magazine Design

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and Sophisticated Survey
Review: Having read the previously posted reviews, I feel compelled to shed some informed light on the matter. To be clear, the book provides several hundred very sophisticated magazine layouts designed by the most influential designers of our generation. The book design itself is an informative and elegant demonstration of capable page layout, composition and pacing. It is not a low-level how-to instructional for beginners. The book speaks to a higher-level design audience regarding the conceptual value of the work surveyed. A comprehensive showcasing of progressive magazine design, the book concisely covers critical editorial components including format, navigation and systems, and provides commentary on the emerging Webzines trend and its impact on the industry. Perhaps most importantly, the text is insightful and informed.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading a comprehensive survey of progressive and influential editorial design on an international scale. A design library must-have.

Rating:
Summary: Designer Porn
Review: I have to echo some of the plaudits and complaints about this book. Yes, it does provide a very nice look at design work from some of the leading magazine designers in the field, with tons of spreads and covers from such ultra high-end publications like Colors, Matador, and the like. But while these can be exhilarating to look at, they're unlikely to be of much practical use except to maybe the 5 or 10 designers in the world who are given the unlimited resources required to produce such works of art.

For the average magazine designer (like myself), the book isn't particularly helpful in helping us try and arrive at elegant design solutions to our problems. The book's emphasis on high-end magazines is of no use for those of us grappling with text-heavy magazines with very little photography. The book does attempt to provide examples of the full gamut of items: from barcodes, to spines, to navigation, typography, and so forth. However in many cases, the text and examples provide only the most cursory of insights-navigation systems in particular was a big disappointment. Obviously, the book is much stronger when it comes to photography-related issues. Extremely vexing is the lack of any discussion of advertising, for example, how to integrate 1/3 page and smaller ads into the overall design. Also irritating is the book's own typography, which is often squint-inducing.

So, I guess I'd file this under "designer porn". Nice to look at, but unless you're a superstar (or rich), you'll never get near any of this stuff. On the utility scale, this rates way low although there is a nice bibliography at the back.

Rating:
Summary: Rather disappointed
Review: I was rather disappointed by this book. It is beautifully designed, but rather empty: I would rather appreciate more exemples and less white space - I specially missed more text, more pictures of beautiful design, specially good design from everyday magazines. The author's background seems to make him favour mostly design and architecture magazines. He seems to forget that some people would also like to know about design for day-to-day magazines. Not only design's state-of-the-art, but also the bread-and-butter of design. The book seeems to have been written for the appreciation of other designers. Well, I'm no designer, I'm a journalist. And I'm not interested in obscure swiss design magazines, but on good exemples of everyday magazines I could take as references for my understanding and practical work as a journalist. Also, the interviews are not interviews at all, but abreviated biographies of a few leading designers. Perhaps they explain something about magazine design, but they seem to be mostly designers' eulogies, for the sakes of the book's content. Even so, it might be a good buy, as I have not been able to find other books on magazine design...