Grey Magazine

The next magazine I would like to introduce to you is Grey Magazine. Grey is about photography. It comes out twice a year and there are two issues out so far. Although it's a magazine, it comes as a book with a hardcover. There are several different categories inside like Designer, Editorial, Abstract and Interior Design. It's filled with beautiful photographs from the start to the last page with only little advertisment in the beginning and no articles but only short descriptions now and then. In the first issue, there's a manifesto by the editor-in-chief Valentina Ilardi Martin. I don't want to write the whole page down, but here's a short excerpt of it:

„Grey is the result of research and conviction, not strength or false provocation. Each page painted in grey – for nothing pure remains. These pages reclaim a necessary return to the simplicity of beauty, the melancholy on each page recalls a humble antiquity that values the precious work of many, made in the name of passion, dictated by a critical mood which has grown with an eye of respect towards that which has been done and said. Our research aims to transform an image into prose.“

I will buy the issue that are yet to come for sure and it already became one of the magazines I am looking forward to the most next to Acne Paper.

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POP Magazine Issue 22

I've never been interested in POP magazine until last summer, when the first issue of POP with Dasha Zhukova as editor-in-chief came out. In this issue, Dasha Zhukova talks in the editor's letter about how everything is made digitally available today and whether it will be the end of today's print publications or not. At one point, she says: „However, art and fashion magazines serve a more aestehtic purpose than an informative one. It is the beauty of the layouts, the quality of the design, the feel of the paper, all the tactile sensations that make these publications worth buying. These magazines are collector's items of sorts, visual time capsules of the period in which they are published.“ While I think this doesn't apply to all fashion magazines, it certainly does now to POP. I am not buying magazines anymore to keep me updated or to get the latest news, because that's what I have my Google Reader or Twitter for nowadays. I have already written a bit about all this in one of my previous blog entries. This issue of POP Magazine contains over 360 pages and is full of beautiful editorials, well written articles and interviews with a great layout and design.

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This issue is also a good example on how you can connect digital content with a printed publication. They included some graphic markers for something called augmented reality, where you will have to go to their website and show the marker to your webcam – something very interesting will happen. Unfortunately, I couldn't test this so far, because thepop.com/ar and POP's iPhone app are both having problems at the moment.

Elle Collections Spring/Summer 2010

After having seen Susie's blog entry about the Elle Collections magazine, I decided to see whether my local newsagent had it in stock. I've never heard about it before surprisingly. Without much hope, they actually had a pile of copies there, so I grabbed one and must say, it was a very good purchase.

After flicking through the first few pages, you'll notice how different it is from an average magazine. Instead of just showing pictures of the runway collections like those on style.com, there are collage and selections based on a theme. For example a two page spread dedicated to fashion invites or one dedicated to facts about Chanel's fashion show. Also, the typography and design is very beautiful. The cover is a matte-grainy paper and there are different types of paper within the magazine.

There are different articles with questions they asked to various persons, such as editors of magazines or famous fashion bloggers – or a pleasurable article of an editor of The Times about how he experienced his first season at those fashion shows without having had any previous knowledge in fashion.