Category: Publishing

Publishing

Inked: Tattoo Lifestyle Magazine

By Delphine Hirasuna |

The stylish-looking Inked magazine is a sign of just how far tattooing has evolved from the days it was thought of as the mark of hardened criminals serving 20 to life and sailors who spent too much time in exotic ports. Tattooing has gone mainstream. It has moved from being a symbol of outlaw rebellion to a fashion statement. It is now the sixth fastest growing retail business in the U.S., with the fastest demographic growth among middle-class suburban women.

Just as tattoo parlors have moved from dank back alley places into upscale salons on main street, so has the way they are depicted in magazines. Inked more closely resembles GQ than a “babes-on-bikes” kind of soft-porn rag. Film, music and sports celebrities often grace the pages of Inked, and stories range from fashion to people profiles. This is a trend-conscious lifestyle magazine featuring a diverse range of subject involving personalities that happen to be tattooed.

Actually before creative director Todd Weinberger was brought in to relaunch Inked in 2007, he had been the creative director for both Philadelphia Style and DC Style. That high-end sensibility is evident in the quality of the fashion photography and sophisticated use of typography.

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Publishing

iPad Raises Questions, No Answers

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Sports Illustrated and Wired are the latest magazines to demonstrate a prototype of how its online content could work on an iPad-like tablet. While dazzled by the possibilities, as someone in the communications design field, I started wondering about all kinds of practical production matters. This may seem silly but I wondered if reporters and designers would be “joined at the hip” creatively, assigned to sit side-by-side, desk-to-desk, in the editorial office and work in unison to produce “content”? It used to be that editorial and art departments were separate entities and sequential processes. And the interactive staff often was not even in the same part of the building. Now, more than ever, visual, interactive and editorial content have converged. How will that change the physical configuration of an editorial office?

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Publishing

Ten Years Told Through 92 Covers

By Delphine Hirasuna |

From the Magazine Publishers Association and American Society of Magazine Editors comes this two-minute video “Covering the Decade in Magazine Covers.” This edited America-centric view of the Aughts glaringly omits world-altering stories such as the disputed “hanging chad” Presidential election that started the decade and the rise of social media and focus on climate change that ended it. Overall, however, the video is a fascinating glimpse at the visual devices that publishers use to grab consumer attention at the newsstand. Faces, especially of celebrities, dominate most covers. Pop culture and sensational headlines trump the promise of substantive, thoughtful reporting. Obviously, the magazine reading public is more interested in being entertained than informed.

Publishing

Ramparts: Those Were the Days…

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Rampart

The recent publication of Peter Richardson’s “A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America” evokes memories of when San Francisco dominated pop culture and counterculture.

The 1960s gave birth to what became known as “the San Francisco Sound” (the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana and others), the hippie movement, vocal anti-Vietnam War protests, and some ground-breaking magazines including Rolling Stone (1967), Berkeley Barb (1965) and later Mother Jones (1976). The magazine that preceded and influenced them all was Ramparts.

Founded in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts soon became the muckraking voice of the New Left when Warren Hinckle took over as executive editor and Robert Scheer joined as managing editor. Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Hunter Thompson, Eldridge Cleaver, Christopher Hitchens, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Erica Jong, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jann Wenner, and Adam Hochschild were just a few of the noteworthy writers who contributed to the editorial content.

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