Adventures in a world of print
Photograph: Scott Hunter
Yesterday Don from CMYK showed Cassie (our intern from Napier University) some old school interview techniques. He still uses shorthand for goodness sakes! While it might be easier to interview someone over the phone, sometimes there’s just no substitute for a face-to-face at their place of work. In this case, Don is working on the cover story of the staff magazine we produce for Edinburgh University – AS Life.
Traditionally CMYK has always published or designed magazines for other people. Sometimes we even helped with content and strategy, or selling advertising. And we get paid.
Last week that all changed. We bought a magazine. Continue reading ‘New era for CMYK’
Things have come a long way since I saved up to buy my copy of Cycling Weekly back in the mid seventies. It was printed in two colours, red and black, on cheap newsprint. After I had exhaustively read every word, it was recycled by putting it between my vest and bike jersey for those cold morning rides.
Fast forward 35 years, and WH Smith’s shelves are groaning with cycling titles, in the wake of Bradley Wiggins’s Tour de France win and Team GB’s clutch of Olympic medals. Cycling has never been so popular. Continue reading ‘Yellow jersey’
As a magazine enthusiast, I get anxious if I see anyone mistreating the very thing we strive so carefully to produce. But magazines are, of course, meant to be read, and it is unusual when someone keeps a hold of their copies for a long time, revering them like museum artefacts.
An old friend of mine, stylist Angela Moffat, has been buying Vogue for more than 25 years. I met her recently, and asked whether she still kept them in pristine condition. A simple question, I felt, but Angela needed time to collect her thoughts on this weighty topic. Here’s her considered response:
“Back in the day, a journalist friend, Richard Moore, wrote a feature for The Herald about me and my Vogue collection. He and I shared an office and I often ended up as fodder for his articles, from testing whether restaurants treated customers differently depending on the way they dressed to being dragged into the search for ‘Scotland’s Most Eligibles’. Richard and I also shared an office with PR Kirsten Dalgetty, and as soon as he said he was writing about collectors Kirsten announced: “Angela collects Vogues”. My immediate response was: “I don’t collect them, I’ve just never chucked them out”. I was duly dubbed ‘The Accidental Collector’.
“Anyway, I now find myself analysing how my feelings have changed. At first I was very precious about my Vogues – pages were not to be scrunched to turn them over, and perfume samples were not, under any circumstances, to be opened. Looking back, it seems weird, but at the time these magazines and their fashion spreads were new, exciting works of art, so I wanted them to be kept perfect.
“At some point that obsessiveness disappeared. I am not entirely sure when. I do still keep every issue, but they get chucked into my bag and become dog-eared like school jotters. Maybe it’s because in my youth fashion was a new world to me. As time went on I saw trends being regurgitated. They were no longer unique and fresh, and the magazines reflected that. So as a collector I went from careful to careless. Having said that, woe betide anyone who scrunches my prized copies from the Eighties and Nineties!”
One of my favourite Christmas covers from a 1968 Queen magazine uses this striking model to hang decorations on.
Launched in 1861, Queen came to the fore in the swinging sixties when it was owned for a time by Jocelyn Stevens. One particular Christmas issue (1960) cost him a fortune, when he decided to run a plain gold cover, with masthead and a small coverline that read: ‘Not to be opened until December 7th, 1960′. Every copy was tied up with a red ribbon and bow. Apparently he employed workers from a chocolate-box factory to do this mundane task. Anyone got a copy of this with original ribbon? Would love to see it.
Merry Christmas everyone!
WHILE looking in the attic this week for my Black & Decker drill, I was delighted to discover a set of my old Goal magazines from the late Sixties. Bang went the next two hours as I wallowed in football nostalgia and marvelled at the transformation that such magazines have undergone since. Continue reading ‘Back of the net’
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