Being in London for the holidays, I was able to attend the magCulture meets UnitEditions events for the launch of their latest publication, Impact 1.0 and Impact 2.0. Both books are a documentation of innovative design magazine covers as chosen by Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook.
The idea behind the books were to document these magazine covers before they were lost from public consciousness. Interestingly the original book consisted of 800 pages, which were too many and was cut down and subsequently split into 2 smaller books. These covers were chosen purely on the criteria of "did we like it". All the magazines as well were photographed personally by Shaughnessy and Brook.
Whilst on the topic of photographing these covers, Tony Brook also personally photographed Lance Wyman's work for his book The Monograph. Speaking to him, he also talked about Wyman's habit of drawing a sketch everyday for a number of years. This was something that he believed that every designer should do and was amazed at the varied range of what Wyman decided to sketch on that day.
A magazine worth pointing out was the Emigre covers. These took my interest as Emigre are a studio that is being researched for the CoP essay and personally found it as a surprise that it featured amongst the modernist cover designs. but what Emigre represented was a change in discourse. Prior to Emigre, design was not entirely written as discourse. Rudy VanderLans changed this through these issues and subsequently how we write about graphic design.
With the books being about documenting innovative cover designs, I posed a question to the panel (Adrian Shaughnessy, Tony Brook and Jeremy Leslie) of what would deem as a innovative cover design today seeing the wide range of cover designs in the magCulture shop alone.
They responded by saying it comes down to personal choice. Rarely do you see a these magazine seen in this context, i.e on the shelves with other independent magazines for extended periods of time. Taking the magazine out of its context, it becomes its own. Using the latest Ordinary Magazine as an example, Leslie suggested that for a magazine to be innovative not only does the cover have to appeal to you but the content inside itself as well. Accessibility of design today means creating innovative design is harder because of the amount of independent magazines circulating today. Therefore the content should reflect the cover and work together to create a more unique magazine and reading experience.
Finally I realised the backgrounds of the magCulture instagram posts are of the shop floor, which was nice.
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