This is how I know I’m getting older: I have now watched a graphic design style slide from the indie to the cool kids to the normies.
Obviously this has happened many times in history, but it was a notable moment in my own history when I stood in line at the co-op and thought to myself, That’s strange, I’ve seen that design before.
But enough of a weirdo generalist introduction. Let’s talk about magazines.
Taste of Home. It’s not a sexy magazine, or something that’s after the hot new trend. It’s a solid magazine for solid people. I think the appeal in the grocery store checkout is for moms who don’t want to think up what to cook for dinner. It’s a magazine that has a real purpose, but not much excitement.
It used to look like this:
Now that I’m learning more about copywriting and sales letters, this magazine looks like a magazine-sized visual sales letter. Bright colors, enticing taglines, the number of things you’ll find inside that is inevitably a lie (even Vogue does this). Just trying to sell more copies at the checkout, ma’am.
The design reminds me of the blocky titles of the 90s but updated with the “we can never capitalize a word, ever” attitude from the early 2000s.
Ok, but here’s the thing. Now Taste of Home looks like this:
The title has morphed into a compact logo and the lines are much cleaner. Instead of a tableaux of food and color, we have one featured dish on a plain background. The type is simple (although not simple enough imo) and even has a hint (but not too much!!1) of a handwritten feel.
Now where have I seen this magazine cover before?
Hmm.
Hmmmmmmmm.
I trust you can spot the visual similarities. This particular issue is from 2008, around the time of BA’s design update. I was a subscriber at the time, and the teardrop motif was big for a while until they started phasing in handwriting.
Points to Taste of Home for skipping directly to the handwriting trend, although it doesn’t look like there’s any actual handwriting on that cover.
I really liked this era of BA. The magazine was clean and fun, they used some visual storytelling techniques as a result of the clean design, and there were really good ideas for recipes and parties. Part of me wishes I hadn’t unsubscribed, but I moved a couple times and then I started eating only meat. No need for recipes that involve vegetables, so it wasn’t a priority.
So imagine my surprise when I found a BA at my local co-op the other day, looking like this:
(Actually, wait, first I should tell you that I was big into indie and alt magazines for a while. There’s a great local cigar shop in Portland that stocks magazines from all over the world. That’s why I recognized these design elements.)
Look at this. It’s like Kinfolk (the food) mated with The Gentlewoman (the design). Blocky type. Heavy underlines. Lots of framing devices. Negative space. Freeform typesetting. The only thing missing is Millennial Pink ™. Did I mention negative space?
Like literally this same cover was on the newstand. No taglines. No promises. No nothing. I’m interested to see how that works out. Maybe some simplicity is called for now that the expected magazine is gasping its last breath.
(After a while, I made myself stop buying magazines because I felt like the content/money ratio wasn’t good enough. I can get better facts, narrative, and motivation from the internet, although I do miss the glossy pictures that I could tear out and put on my walls.)
We shall end with my favorite edition of The Gentlewoman, featuring the ever-awesome Angela Lansbury wearing the ever-problematic Terry Richardson’s glasses. This is the one with the blocky type, the framing, and – yes – the pink.
The Gentlewoman is one of those magazines that reacts against the “fast/cheap/short” model of magazine journalism by doing long-form interviews with badass ladies and lots of minimalist-traditional fashion. Always a little too rich for my blood, but I appreciated how they talked to actual real women who work for a living. It was the “cool” fashion magazine, the kind that eventually make their way into Anthropologie stores because of their good aesthetics.
Is The Gentlewoman in danger of losing its spot at the top of the design food chain? BA is nipping at its heels.
My instinct says that there’s a new offroad thinking-woman’s fashion magazine in town, but I don’t know what it is.
If you have any idea of what that might be, please let me know.
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