Something big is happening at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh this August. It’s something magazine-shaped and we’re delighted to say we’re very much involved!

Magfest 2012 is a PPA Scotland project and has been developed by a group of enthusiastic Scottish publishers keen to celebrate about not only their own work but the whole vibrant, diverse world of magazines in the UK and around the globe.

There will be public workshops, an industry day and a public exhibition held in the splendid Our Dynamic Earth building. There is an absolutely brilliant list of speakers already confirmed including Jeremy Leslie (MagCulture), Andrew Losowsky (The Huffington Post), John Bird MBE (The Big Issue), Christopher Ward (Redwood Publishing), Alison Bradley (Fusion Flowers), Barry McIlheney (PPA), Heleanor Gilmour (DC Thomson), Chris van der Kuyl (BrightSolid), Max von Abendroth (European Magazine Media Association), Lucy Johnston (Bread & Butter Marketing), Karen Canty (Future Foundation), Richard Nicholls (Future Foundation), Mark Millar (Future plc), Paul McNamee (The Big Issue), Paul Keers (Axon Publishing), John Sanderson (UPM), Matthew Ball, yours truly (Matt McArthur) and more.

If you’re interested in magazines, you should be interested in this! Register now at magfest

You don’t know how a bike ride will turn out until you’ve finished it – and the same is true of The Ride, created by the Diprose brothers, Philip and Andrew. There are no cover lines, and the contents list is a bare list of titles – all of them very brief – and “entry points” such as standfirsts and fact boxes are absent. The only way to find out what each feature is about is to read it – and those who do are richly rewarded. There is humour here (a 110km hill race in Mallorca on an empty stomach), quirkiness (a claim that the modest Bathgate Hills, near Edinburgh, are in some ways superior to the classic Tour de France climbs) and drama (an account of the 1,600km Iditarod Trail in Alaska). It’s a visual treat, with beautiful landscape photography and illustrations in every conceivable style – often with the cyclist by no means centre stage.

National Geographic have a fantastic Titanic cover this month in tribute to the liner sinking 100 years ago.

The trademark yellow border is interrupted by the boat as it sinks beneath the waves – making for a powerful image.

Inside too, the magazine does not disappoint. 32 pages of feature, including a massive fold-out perforated poster. The iPad issue (which I haven’t seen) has a 360° representation of the wreck on the sea bed.

Our fascination with the ill-fated boat continues.

How apt that this week I should be reviewing the 1st birthday special issue of The Dog magazine – as our family bought a wee Springer Spaniel puppy at the weekend.

It’s always disappointing when you lose a pitch for a magazine, and that’s what happened to CMYK a year back, when Red Dog Music asked three companies to tender for a new music magazine to promote their store.

In a way though, I am glad we lost the pitch – as we may never have come up with this quirky little mongrel of a magazine. That honour goes to the 16K Design Works based in Edinburgh. Now, far be it for us to blow someone else’s trumpet – but they have made a pretty fine job of this quarterly A5 ‘magalogue’. I should have said it a year ago, but I’m saying it now. It’s a wee smasher.

16k were the guys that put Clash magazine on the map – treating every double page spread as though it were a music flyer or an album cover, using different typography throughout and ignoring any grid. That magazine shouldn’t have worked, but because of the subject matter – rock music – it absolutely did.

They approach the design of The Dog in much the same way – there must be thirty-odd fonts used in this issue. That goes against the old adage – keep it simple, use no more than three typefaces etc etc.

So I’m not saying this would work with every type of magazine, but here again, 16k are working in the business of music, and so this mish-mash of a mag is perfectly appropriate to its audience.

Clearly, some pages have style sheets applied, and follow a format – but as with music – other pages go their own way, like the hand-written review of the shop, lovingly recreated in scribbled fonts and squiggly lines. It’s like a doggone work of art.

FITNESS titles are battling each other for shelf space as never before. Alongside the new gender-specific running mags is Outdoor Fitness, now on its fifth issue. It focuses on running, cycling and swimming, though not necessarily triathlons, and is as breathlessly enthusiastic as all the competition. It could do well, because plenty of people out there like to mix and match their keep-fit regimes. But you get the feeling it’s still finding its way. For instance, will its target audience be interested in rugby hero Lawrence Dallaglio, whose lantern jaw graces the current cover? The previous issue had on the front World Mountain Running champion Jonathan Wyatt, who was more relevant but hardly more inspirational, looking distinctly off colour in what must have been the unforgiving light of some god-forsaken rocky ridge. Still, there’s much info and entertainment within Outdoor Fitness; let’s hope it has the stamina to keep going. (Bauer, £3.99)

Making Magazines 2012. Photo: Phil Sayer

Just returned from the fantastic Making Magazines 2012 conference – a joint effort between our chums at Magculture and Eye Magazine.

What can I say – it was a sell-out – with speakers as diverse as Gill Hudson (editor of Reader’s Digest) and Russell Davies (founder of Newspaper Club). The audience was diverse too, with students hoping to gain some insider knowledge rubbing shoulders with heavyweights like Paul Harpin of Haymarket Publishing.

Everyone learned something on the day about making magazines.

“It’s not a proper job” opined Marissa Bourke, who was lured away from working on Vogue to become Creative Director for UK Elle.

“I never thought about having to use Futura” she revealed, in conversation with Simon Esterson of Eye magazine, “so I just hid myself away and re-designed the magazine without telling anyone”.

Either no-one noticed, or Bourke has got away with it, as some foreign issues of Elle appear to have started using the new font. Needless to say she won Redesign of the Year 2008 along with Cover of the Year 2008 at the BSME Awards.

The relentless art-direction of celebrity covers does take its toll though. Some stars are very approachable, like Kylie. Others have a tendency to take over – like Lady Gaga, who became very involved in the selection of the images for the cover. Pete Doherty, who guest-edited the mag one month, was a bit of a handful apparently. Who knew?

Bourke spoke too, about the design of the subscriber covers, something most consumer magazines have now developed. It might surprise people to learn that the newsstand issue can take many weeks to design – as cover lines change on a daily basis – but the subscriber issues (which are already paid for), have less intervention, and are rattled off in ten minutes or so. Bourke often produces some of her most creative work like this.

It does seem odd though, that one minute she was talking about flying a team out to LA to do the cover, and then in the next breath saying there was zero budget for the twice yearly ‘Collections’ supplement. There though, Bourke’s creativity reveals itself again. Clothes are laid on the photocopier and literally scanned, in a colourful collage – and then the photocopy used as an image on the page to amazing effect.

I really was inspired by Matt Curtis – who showed his remarkably inventive work for Eureka, a science magazine supplement for the Times newspaper.

His ethos appeared simple. “The Times newspaper is serious, so the magazine needed to be fun”.

Every layout was an absolute gem, showing both ingenuity and hard work.

Try spray painting plastic spheres from a model shop, then supergluing them together, photographing them from above (in proportion with your double page spread), to illustrate nuclear fission. Not a fake PhotoShop shadow in sight – it’s all in the camera. Or stripping down a Kalashnikov to its constituent parts and hanging it up with fishing wire to show an exploded ‘Eagle’ style three-quarter view of the gun. That’s dedication.

Curtis spoke a lot about pace in the magazine. Allowing full bleed double page spreads to interrupt the flow between complex infographics, allowing the reader time to stop and think or gaze in wonder.

There is humour too, in the work, possibly derived from all those meetings in the pub (that’s rule number four). He is playful with the type in headlines, cheeky with the details in infographics, or he’ll set columns of text to echo a wave.

Curtis deserves his promotion to “Olympics Art Director for the Times” – his made-up title – as they created the role especially for him. I can’t wait to see how he gets on.

The main speakers were interspersed with historical snapshots from experts in their field. Cathy Olmedillas, founder of Anorak magazine, spoke of her passion for style bible The Face, while Jeremy Leslie of Magculture unearthed a midget gem in Lilliput magazine, a pocket-sized men’s title from the thirties. I have a copy of that somewhere on the shelf – I might bring it out for a blog post in the future.

The packed day was rounded off with an ice cold beer with proceeds going to the St Bride Library.

Look out for Making Magazines 2013. You can’t afford to miss it.