Horse Racing Publications

The problem with most horse racing magazines at the moment, is the fact the target audience is of the older generation. This is very much evident in the design and layout of the magazine covers and the features that lie within them. There is no consideration of the font or the composition, other than a generic tabloid layout which doesn't really stand out.
This is why I am intending on creating a horse racing magazine with more emphasis on younger audiences. The focus on layout, composition, and type within the magazine can make a great amount of difference to the appeal to the audience. It would still probably appeal to the older audiences that already read them, but just make them a little more exciting than the format they currently stand in.

 Racing ahead is a monthly racing magazine.
It uses the same grid layout every month for the cover and insides alike. The fonts on the cover are overused throughout the magazine, and look dated.

An inner page feature from racing ahead.
Standardised tabloid layout. Nothing which really involves you within the magazine. Text flowed throughout columns. Layout is still in the past.
The images throughout are generally constrained to the same placement throughout. The images are also confined to square or rectangular frames.

The Racing Post is one of the more popular racing publications. It follows the frameworks of a newspaper for horse racing. The design of the racing post is better than Racing ahead, but still does not market the sport as it should be portrayed.
The fact that it is in newspaper format could be half the trouble. It faces similar layouts throughout due to the constrictions of the format.

Reappropriating magazines to new audiences

Intersection is a car magazine that is moving away from your standard car magazine. It comes from Dazed and Confused creators and is aimed at a different market to say top gear or Fast.
The intention of Intersection is to retarget the market of car magazines and essentially makes cars 'cool' again.

 

Intersection- Curb Your Enthusiasm

The imagery on the front cover shows the change of audience from your typical car magazine. The imagery is quirky, with the types of cars that they use for the feature cover page.

The hierarchy of the title is aligned with the curb within the image. as is the sub-headline.

Essentially, this is the aim of the magazine I intend to create, but rather than cars, I would like to market  horse racing to a younger audience.

I will need to find a design medium as effective as Intersection, that will target people between the age of 18-25.

Magazine Spread- Wired

Language as creation:

This is a couple of spreads from Wired magazine called language as creation.

The heirarchy of information is well planned out with the image diagonally moving into the text. The text has a role as an image as well as text within the top spread.

1990's Revamp

The 1990's saw a re design of many magazines to target new audiences.

Raygun was one of these. They use eclectic designs and re-appropriated the way modern magazines are designed. Raygun began experimenting  and playing with designs realising that there were better ways of communicating to younger audiences than by following the standardised clean grid system.

He experimented with  text that bleeds off the page, and stops mid sentence as well as un-uniform grid layouts. This has shaped the way in which the quirkiness of many of todays magazines move in terms of design direction.

Mag Culture

http://magculture.com/blog/
This is Jeremy Leslies blog that explores magazines.
I am going to use this space to post images from his blog that I find inspiring in how it approaches content,design and typography that stands out.


http://www.colorsmagazine.com/

This is the cover art for  colours magazine, Most of their cover art uses very powerful imagery to draw the viewer right in.














  

Many of the covers compositions draw you directly into the image first due to it being such a striking and powerful image. The way that it is composed will then draw you through that image to the title of the magazine.


Taken From Mag Culture:

"Colors magazine has a long and glorious 22 year history, and the current editor-in-chief Patrick Waterhouse maintains the original vision that ‘diversity is good’; globalisation=diversity=good. Initially, the magazine took on large topics like religion, wealth, touch and multiculturalism. Twenty years after it’s 1991 launch (by photographer Oliviero Toscani and art director Tibor Kalman), Patrick took the magazine in a new editorial direction, in concept and design ‘creating Colors The Survival Guide and a series with an interlinking narrative structure’. The survival guide encompassed the interconnectedness and complexity of the world today, tackling issues of transport and peak oil, apocalypse and human waste. After these first four issues, the structure shifted and became more causal, covering marketing, the network of trade and art. One feature in the process of interrogating art including going to the Louvre ‘to capture the phenomena of people going not to see the work, but to say they have seen it.’

Colors places great importance on the communication of imagery and now uses comics, and detailed infographics (and animated shorts) alongside photography. The equation for Colors has evolved under Waterhouse – Visualise. Objectify. Thingness. Deconstruct. Show how things work. Process. Celebrating human ingenuity. Build around it – but it appears to be working. Discovery, open-mindedness and keen observation are paramount to Waterhouse, who’s passion and clear vision for the publication’s future is undeniably concerned with humankind, ethical debates and other complexities of life. "



http://magculture.com/blog/?p=19053#more-19053
Blog Post which explores different routes that some big magazines are taking in terms of redesign.

The New Yorker gets a revamp:

 

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http://magculture.com/blog/?p=19452#more-19452

In this blog feature, Mark Neill is talking about his redesign of NME magazine.
Neil says "It was very important for me to give it this voice, a visual language something that theNME lost."
In essence this is the same thing that I am trying to achieve with a sport magazine.
The interview is good reference into how Neil approached the re-design.

Jeremy Leslie

Jeremy Leslie is the founder of MagCulture. An online blog that celebrates the design of magazines.
He has been the art director of many magazines and now focuses on his blog.

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/2645-cut-magazine

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/2066-which-magazines-would-you-save

What magazine would you see go?

"As Thursday will see the launch of our second printed publication, we thought it apt that our weekly discussion should deal with a subject very much on our minds.

Jeremy Leslie, founder of the fantastic magCulture knows a thing or two about magazines is asking your opinion on an industry in constant flux through the recession. So, simply, which magazines do you deem worthy for praise and which are destined for the chop? Click through to let us know what you think…

I gave a presentation earlier this year at Colophon2009 about the general state of the magazine industry. The main point was that the discussion about digital replacing print was a distraction from the main issue. Instead of worrying about ‘The End of Print’, magazine makers needed to understand they are part of a major industry that has its ups and downs, and that their recent record of ever-upward sales figures was never going to be sustainable. Sure, the internet presents a challenge and is creating problems in specific areas. Newspapers, listings magazines and other information-based publications are natural targets for digital replacements. But technology has always led publishing in new directions, and many magazines are benefiting from the internet.
A more important factor affecting magazine publishing right now is that for the past fifteen years magazine publishers have seen their earnings through copy sales and advertising income zoom upwards. The result is newsstands packed with more magazines than ever before –there are now 20% more titles on sale in the UK than there were in 1993. Not only is the mainstream magazine market saturated, it suffers from duplication. How many celebrity magazines, woman’s weeklies, men’s monthlies do we need? And things aren’t so much better in the independent sector. How many biannual fashion glossies can we deal with?
So now, after the boom, comes the bust. The round of magazines closures we are seeing will continue as the market recalibrates itself, and I believe that, in place of quantity, quality will come to the fore.
There will less magazines, but they will be better magazines. Which is fine by me. My appreciation of magazines is based on their ability to attract, engage and intrigue, not their ability to make a mint for their publisher. This is less ‘The End of Print’, more ‘The End of Print As We Know It’.
But lets not wait for the publishing companies to decide which magazines should survive and which should be closed. Which would you save? And which would you see go?"

http://www.magspreads.net/p/interview-jeremy-leslie-of-magculture.html
An interesting interview with Jeremy Leslie regarding what drew him into magazines and inspiration for creating magazines.

MUTE Online Magazine and Bi-annual magazine: Graphic Design

Mute magazine is a london based magazine that was created in the 90's. It exploresanalysis of art and technology in a modern society. Mute magazine is an online magazine, but also publishes bi-annual journals with collections of articles. Mute broke away from the standardised magazine of the 90's and was a lot more experimental in  the design and layout of the published journals.

http://www.metamute.org/

The following images are taken from Mute Magazine Graphic Design.

The layout of this page from Mute still conforms to a magazine layout. They are a lot more experimental in how they do this though. The shapes that are used throughout this page are leading you through the page. Your eye is drawn to the green shape. You then follow this down to the cut out countryside which goes up in to a cut out of an industrial image. This will then lead you to the start of the text with its larger text at the beginning.
This is a well thought out and composed image.

The layout of the page in question here incorporates the overlapping of graphic image with text. This involves the layout of the page with what you are reading. It is as much about the graphic imagery under the text as it is what you are reading.

The use of space also draws you through the page.