Ephemera: Magazine Collections
These posts were originally written during 2001–2005 on my old blog Design Writings. The sites they reference are still around and full of history. Several of the magazine and periodical collections are designed by some of the most famous, pre-eminent mid-century designers and are a fun way to reflect back on what was important during those years. The online and interactive magazines are a record of the kinds of design work being done at the time of publication.
Wednesday 08|14|02
Atlas Magazine
The creators of atlas magazine, one of my favorite sites from early in the days of the web (1998), have just published a book. The old atlas issues are back up for your enjoyment. Even today, 4 years after their last issue, they still seem fresh and interesting.
Friday 02| 8|02
Eye Magazine Online
Eye Magazine, one of my favorite design journals, is now available on line. The printed quarterly is rich and meaty reading across the discipline of Typography, Design and Design History.
Unfortunately, the site is hit or miss as to whether the article is actually published on the site or just its metadata. The site structure is difficult to navigate, but there seems to be a lot of good cross-referencing. The site has implemented a “concept index” to tie concepts to articles but I couldn’t really get it to work in a way that meant anything to me.
Hopefully they will work out some of the kinks and expand the site to be as good as the printed journal. (2020 update — they are still going strong)
Tuesday 02|12|02
More Magazine Madness
Everyone is talking about the online archive of Life Magazine covers over at the Time.com site. They go back to 1936 and are a great historical account of our culture over time — up to 1972. Wonder when they will get the 1972 — today posted? (2020 update — a search shows a variety of Covers sets but not the chronological set as referenced in this post).
Wednesday 02|13|02
Fortune Smiles Upon Us
Following the theme of sharing Magazine information — this site presents a chronology of covers for Fortune Magazine.
The bulk of the info —the cover images, include covers by many of the greatest designers of the mid-century. Cover images shown are from some of the greats — including: Herbert Matter, Herbert Bayer, Fernand Leger, Joseph Binder, George Giusti, Lester Beall, and Alex Steinweiss, just to name a few.
What the site lacks in logical IA and slick graphic design is made up for in the discovery of the subject matter. The covers alone are worthy of scrutiny for their use classic Poster compositions. Exploring the covers over time reveals the influence of the Bauhaus style and composition as it came to America and the collection shows that understanding business and money doesn’t have to be dull. (2020 update — the original site referenced is no longer available, but there is another site (linked) with all the covers and who designed them. Clicking the boxes opens up a giant jpeg of each cover.)
Thursday 12| 5|02
Aspen Magazine
From 1965 to 1971, a multimedia magazine of the arts was published by Phyllis Johnson. Dubbed Aspen, the magazine was to feature “culture along with play,” was bundled and sent to subscribers in boxes and each issue designed by a different artist and editor and included multimedia — way before we were calling things multimedia (this meant including phonograph records and a reel of super-8 film.
This site is a web version of the magazine. There is a rich description of the original premise and includes issues 1 through 9. Guest artists and editors included Andy Warhol and David Dalton, Quenton Fiore, George Maciunas and Dan Graham. Contents of the magazine include the work of William Burroughs, Marshall Mcluhan, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and David Hockney among others.
In the website, each issue included a detailed explanation of the issue’s contents, photos of the contents that were sent to the subscriber and links to the articles. There are audio files on the site of the phonograph records, quicktime videos from some of the films (by Hans Richter, Moholy Nagy, Rauschenberg and others) and lots of images of the actual pages as well. The film clips from Moholy-Nagy (1932) alone are worth the time to spend on this site.
There is a rich, robust index organized by Artist and Authors, Audio exhibits, Movie exhibits, Interactive exhibits and the Advertisements.
This is a fabulous archive about an interesting magazine (if you can really call it that.) Given the scope and complexity of the offering, I can see why it only lasted ten issues. It’s experimental nature is such that it was destined to fail on a commercial level.
Thursday 06|20|02
July 1942: United We Stand
The Smithsonian Institute has put together a terrific site that looks into depth at the United We Stand, July 1942 campaign that encouraged magazines from all over the nation to print a patriotic, theme related cover. The site has a full database of over 300 magazine covers divided up by different patriotic themes: The War Effort, What We Are Fighting For, Reaching Many Audiences and Designing the Covers. This site is visually rich and very topical considering we are coming up on the first July 4th following 9–11.
Sunday 08|17|03
Arts et Métiers Graphiques
A lovely site, Arts et Métiers Graphiques, about the French Graphic arts magazine that was published from 1927 to 1939 by Charles Peignot, head of the French typefoundry Deberny et Peignot in France. Done as part of a Masters Thesis at RIT (my MFA alma mater) this site taps into the collection at the Cary Library and has indexed the full run of the publications in a searchable database.
Tuesday 09| 2|03
Esquire Magazine
Every cover of Esquire Magazine from 1933 to the most current issue. (2020 update — you can browse every issue of Esquire from the 1930’s to today — all pages, all covers, all ads.)
The first several years have weird claymation looking type figures as illustrations on the covers. Reminds me of the 1960’s classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and that other one that had the Heat Meiser in it.
According to the site these are:
The Esky Years
These are the year’s when Esquire’s cover was dominated by our mascot, Esky, a mischievous little man whose interests ranged from mountain-climbing to soldiering to — on one special occasion — trying to climb into Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage.
Weird. But still — overall it’s an interesting collection that chronicles time through design trends and style. There’s even an alphabetical subject index to peruse if you don’t feel like trudging through 70 years of covers.
All posts originally published on Design Writings on the dates referenced. I have attempted to correct broken links where material still exists and inserted notes where appropriate to give some 2020 updates. Still super interesting collections of design publication history.
