With Christmas nearly upon us, I’ve put together a list of books for the designer in your life. Or just treat yourself.

Scripts
Steven Heller and Louise Fili
Thames & Hudson. £24.95

Amazon UK | US

Don’t be expecting a big read – this book is all about the pictures. A fantastic collection of script fonts from Fenwick shop signs to Italian hotel bills. A veritable scrap book, the fonts are grouped by country, and all come from the early part of the 20^th century when the use of script lettering was at its peak. Some you will recognise, others will be less familiar, but as a source of inspiration this book is tremendous value.

Reasons to be Cheerful – the life and work of Barney Bubbles
Paul Gorman
Adelita. £24.99

Amazon UK |US

I grew up with Barney Bubbles artwork without realising it. Elvis Costello, The Damned, Ian Dury and the Blockheads – his artwork graced their albums. A proper down to earth commercial artist, Barney Bubbles (real name Colin Fulcher), was the unsung hero of graphic design in the UK, from his early Hawkwind album covers in the 70s to his work with Go-Discs and Billy Bragg. This long-awaited book (revised edition) about his life and work comes 28 years after his tragic death, and pulls together artwork, photos and reminiscences from ex-colleagues and musicians. A superb book whether you know Bubbles’ work or not.

The Art Director’s Handbook of Professional Magazine Design
Horst Moser
Thames & Hudson. £35

Amazon UK|US

Hardly a handbook. It weighs in at a couple of kilos, but looks good on the coffee table. This is the third edition of the vast tome, written by Moser, and drawing on his vast collection, and it originally hit the shelves in 2002. Well, quite a bit has happened since then, and the book doesn’t appear to have caught up really. There is an update on new independent magazines like Meatpaper, Cut and Elephant. But the world of magazines is a fickle one, and there are so many new ones on the block. Still, a worthy addition to any enthusiast’s library.

100 Years of Magazine Covers
Steve Taylor
Black Dog Publishing. £29.95

Amazon UK|US

I’m a sucker for a compendium of magazine covers, and although there are some classic magazines represented here, like Esquire and Nova, there are some rare or hardly seen magazines on show too, like Zig Zag and Lilliput.

You can never be completely comprehensive in a book with such a wide spectrum to take in. The earliest magazine appears to be from 1894, but those early examples are very much in the minority, with the real focus being on the 60s onwards. Perhaps those years generated the most visually arresting covers.

Exploring the “cultural shifts” over the last 100 years, the covers are split into five distinct chapters, such as “magazines and cultural change” and “magazines and celebrity” – there is no denying the research that has gone into the book. It is fascinating to see the rise of black topics emerging through Negro Digest in the late 60s through to Aspire magazine.

The design is bold – as you would expect from veteran publications designer Neville Brody – but it never takes away from the most important aspect of the book. Those all-important magazine covers.

Team CMYK. Photos: Mike Wilkinson. http://mike-wilkinson.photoshelter.com

There was much excitement last night as CMYK scooped three awards at the PPA Scotland Magazine ceremony.

Aurora, the magazine for Highlands and Islands Airports won Customer Magazine, and FYi, produced for the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland took Best Magazine Design in the business & professional category.

Neil Braidwood, centre, accepts the award for aurora magazine

Matt McArthur, centre, accepts the award for FYi

The much coveted Member Magazine award went to Surgeons’ News, published on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

John Duncan, editor of Surgeons' News, centre, accepts the award

The V&A have a postmodern exhibition on at the moment. Right up my street. Neville Brody and Terry Jones are talking this Friday about their massive contribution to the magazine culture that flourished in the eighties (sold out I’m afraid). But it got me thinking about the last time Neville Brody was involved with the V&A. It was back in 1988 when there was a retrospective of his work. The book of the exhibition is on every designer’s shelf.

This photo of Brody is from when I worked on Design magazine in 1988 (organ of the Design Council). The feature was all about designers and what they like to do in their spare time. Brody reckoned he had no time for hobbies, but when pressed, he chose watching videos with a takeaway. I commissioned photographer Julian Hawkins who gamely lugged an old telly with no screen up the stairs to Brody’s studio on Tottenham Court Rd (now sadly demolished). I carried various other props like videos (no DVDs then), and popcorn packets. We shot him through the back of the telly, remote control in hand. This was the paste-up era remember, so any camera tricks had to be done in the camera. It’s all so easy now!

Great quote from Brody though: “At the moment it all seems ridiculous. I keep on saying that next year I’ll change my name and grow a beard and live the life of a bum”

In the era of the always-on, always-connected, never-sleeping, cloud-syncing, at-your-fingertips media, the one thing all of us print heads can agree on is that a physical magazine – considered, planned and committed to ink and paper – offers a rare opportunity to disconnect and lose oneself in a moment of calm. Nothing is updating live before our very eyes. There are no shifting RSS sands and when you pick it up tomorrow, it will be the same thing it was today.

This unhurried state of affairs is at the heart of Delayed Gratification. Forget the deadlines, forget up-to-the-minute, let’s think about all this for a while. Then let’s think some more and when we’re done, let’s write something about it all.

The magazine comes out quarterly and we received the January-March issue which was delivered to CMYK acres courtesy of the rather splendid Stack Magazines service – if you haven’t signed up, then why the devil not?

Throughout the magazine, the design is elegant with headlines and icons set in Clarendon and a strictly limited colour palette which lets the wonderful infographics, in particular, really shine. A fussy riot of elements would really have undermined the theme so I’m glad to report design and editorial are working very nicely together.

On the subject of graphics, the mag opens with one of the nicest contents pages I’ve seen in a long while with subjects mapped out as underground lines running through zones representing each of the three months the title covers. It’s not a world-changing idea but it’s perfectly executed and requires no head scratching to work out what’s going on.

Flicking momentarily back to the cover, it features artwork by Hassan Massoudy and, in keeping with the magazines thoughtful approach, a full spread is devoted to an interview with the artist – a far cry from most magazine covers whose job is to grab the attention and hold very little interest beyond that.

As you might expect from a digested news mag, the range of subject matter is pretty wide-ranging. Subjects run from the Keys/Gray debacle on Sky TV to a renegade ice cream maker to cosmic evolution. There are a mixture of ‘full fat’ features and ‘in brief’ morsels which, at first might seem to run against the theme of the mag but which provide essential balance to stop things getting too hefty and also give a sense of orientation as they run through the monthly timeline. The writing is, of course, well informed and very engaging too. I never really found my attention drifting off despite there being plenty worth looking at!

Each month gets it’s own section and these all kick off with a grand old infographic – January concerns itself with government spending cuts, February with global twitter trends and March with lyrical themes in pop songs.

As a designer, I’m personally more drawn to the more graphic-heavy spreads. My favourite moment in the mag is the feature on soap opera mortality rates – it seems 2006 was veritable bloodbath!

Advertisements are very much conspicuous by their absence. This is a more and more common trend among niche titles who are opting out of the ad-funded model. There is some credibility in this plan – with the range of free magazines having rapidly expanded on the ad-funded model, consumers have been faced with a wave of reworked press releases and anaemic commissioned features tainted by concessions to advertisers. I should add that I don’t believe all freebies conform to this model – some are excellent – but by goodness there are a lot which do.

This means, at first glance, a pretty high cover price – £12 a pop – but with all effort being expended on entertaining the reader not placing product, you get a lot of meat for your money and the gamble is that this gains you a loyal readership who see the value. Effectively the response to being undercut is to go upmarket.

Others have written in much more detail about this so I won’t go into it any further but it’s an interesting development to observe.

All in all the Slow Journalism Company have done a great job and Delayed Gratification is a highly recommended read. I can’t wait to see what they do next…

Femina: French magazines from the Belle Epoque

We are going all French here at CMYK Towers. Emma, our intern from Biarritz is helping on the advertising side of things, and Benedicte, our freelance designer from Bordeaux is laying a few pages out for Scotland in Trust magazine.

I had a few copies of ground-breaking French magazine Femina, dating from 1906, lying around, so I asked Benedicte to give her opinion. The magazine is still going in fact – Emma knew the title, however, it seems to have morphed into a fairly standard women’s magazine, lacking the identity it had in the early days.

Our guest blogger Benedicte takes up the story:

Here are a few copies of the vintage fortnightly revue for women Femina which recently celebrated the 100^th anniversary of its first issue, published on the 1^st February 1901.

The concept of a magazine targeting women as its only audience was imported from America and Britain where titles like – Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, The Music and Romance, among others, were real publishing successes in the late 19^th century.

However, don’t be fooled, the women pictured in the different articles (or ads) or interested in the magazine, were not really representing the exact composition of the society. The subscribers were in fact, unsurprisingly, since they were the only ones who could afford it, from the Haute Bourgeoisie Parisienne.

Through these yellowish stapled pages, you can get a fairly good idea of what the Parisian elite under the III Republic must have been like as well as an insight into feminism and the development of the press at the time.

For example, issues number 125 and 136 represent very good examples of the influence that foreign issues and events could have on French women’s opinions. While number 125 (1^st April 1906) features an in-depth article about the events that took place in Downing Street on the 9^th of March 1906 when a group of London women led by Lady Warwick demanded to obtain the right to vote; number 136 (15^th September 1906) publishes letters from readers after the editors started an informal referendum on whether French women should be able to vote or not.

But enough history for just now. Because, Femina was far from being only a political orientated publication. Women were to find in it everything that une femme du monde had to know about: the latest fashion and trends – but also the gossip, to be aware of the places to be seen or which books to read. Quite ironically, but not surprisingly, for the time, most articles, if not all of them were written by… men.

As you go through the oversize (285 x 345mm) publications you realise there’s no such thing as “modern” journalism or magazine publishing. Advertorials? Montages? Journalists and publishers in the 20^th century did not invent anything. Everything was already there!

Pages bursting with more ads that you can look at, recipes, different fonts and heading sizes, special tips to prevent hair falling out or alternatively how to get rid of unsightly hair, comic strips towards the end of the magazine, etc.

It’s definitely with a hint of nostalgia (after all, I haven’t been back in France in a little while now) and a grin on my face that I read these two pieces of history that every magaholic would like to have as part of his/her collection.  And if you ask me, the best was without a doubt the series of very unexpected ads running through each issue. Here are a couple of samples to look at. Enjoy!

“The most deep-rooted freckles completely and quickly disappear with LYSIANA CREAM which is not a blusher and is not made with any medical product. It clarifies complexion in a perfect manner and gives it a perfect whiteness/purity. Results are fast and lasting. Try it once and you will be convinced.”

“Lose weight: get younger”

To lose weight safely and without any risks, take the GIGARTINE PILLS made from algae. They are given/recommended by doctors to reduce chin, belly, hips and slim the waist.’’

Killing time in Athens airport last week, I picked up a free airport magazine called 2board. I flicked through, expecting puffery for the watches, perfumes and sundry cakes on sale all around me. Instead I marvelled at superb photographs, many of Greece, many not, and at absorbing features including one on The Gypsetters, a social group who had hitherto not crossed my radar. These affluent hippies, inspired by Lord Byron, wander the globe in Pucci kaftans, whatever they may be, and keep their American Express Black Cards in crocodile wallets. Nonsense, but enjoyable nonsense, and lavishly illustrated with portraits of  Gypset icons such as Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo and Brigitte Bardot. All this is seemingly documented in a book entitled Gypset Style, by Julia Chaplin, in case you want to know more. But 2boards real triumph is to look so good while running all its content in two languages – Greek and English. This is a devilishly difficult thing to do. I once had a friend who edited a tri-lingual industry magazine called Pumps, Pompes, Pumpen. He found it far from easy – and he didn’t have to worry about gorgeous layouts.