Magazine design redux

Magazines are dead! Long live the magazine! was a gem of a conference organised by Simon Esterson and Jeremy Leslie, and it turned into something of a reunion. Simon was the art director of my book, Magazine Design and Luke Hayman, who also spoke at the conference, was the designer. All three of us haven’t been together since working on the book in 1990. Luke’s now a partner at Pentagram New York and he showed the wonderful editorial design produced by the team at New Yorker magazine where he used to be art director.

The book’s long out of print but Simon and I have a plan to put the text (and a lot more images) onto a wiki and invite some people to revise the history. We’ll then publish in book and web. We need an intern to help us though, so if there’s any interested design history graduates out there, speak up.

Russell Davies wrote a very nice review of the conference (held last Friday, at St Brides) at his blog, with comments on the wonders of arseblog (one of the subjects of my talk, and our inspiration for footballitaliano.tv).

PS. One thing I learned: judging by what Tony Chambers showed, Wallpaper’s worth buying again!