Check out this breathtaking concept video from Bonnier Group, the Swedish media company. It demonstrates an elegant, highly developed magazine interface for the sort of tablet computer that Apple and other companies are said to be working on:

I’ll be first in line when Apple releases a device that can accommodate this sort of interface, which is close to what I’ve been dreaming about for the last couple of years.

[via Peter Kafka of All Things Digital.]

This tablet fantasy from Time Warner is pretty good too, although too busy and multimedia-ish for my magazine tastes.

Pretty fricking great: This morning Google added dozens of old magazines to its Book Search database. These are scans of entire magazines, ads included. What a trove it is, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning. Here is New York magazine in its earliest glory days:

Now we just gotta get them to add the full run of Spy (the funny years, at least).

I have a spy at The Weekly Standard—let’s call him Z.—and he emailed me earlier today to say that Bill Kristol locked himself in his office first thing this morning so he could go into InDesign and crank out his latest Standard column about Sarah Palin. Kristol’s been writing about Palin for both the Standard and The New York Times, so he’s having trouble coming up with fresh justifications for her candidacy. It’s pretty thin gruel at this point, and he’s getting frustrated. Apparently his cursing has been audible throughout the floor all morning. Kristol stepped out for lunch a few minutes ago, and Z. went into the publishing system and printed up a copy of Kristol’s work-in-progress. Z. just emailed me a scan of the page:

(Visit the magazine covers tag for more exclusive Panopticist scoops.)

The scan might be hard to read at this size, so I’ve retyped the text and posted it after the jump.

[Continue reading "Exclusive: William Kristol Is Having Trouble Writing His Next Column About Sarah Palin"...]

This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

In the late ’90s, I occasionally did freelance typesetting for a small firm that designed annual reports for AOL, Boston Properties, Tommy Hilfiger, and other corporations. It was a really good gig, and my Quark skills improved enormously from having to lay out elaborate financial tables in meticulous, pixel-perfect fashion.

It was at this firm that I acquired the hilarious Publishers Clearing House spoof below, which was tacked to a bulletin board in a corner of the office. I pulled it down and made a color copy of it. All the jokes are about the advertising industry, and everything’s very inside-baseball. So it’s likely that this originally appeared in some sort of advertising-industry trade publication. I have no idea where it was published, and I’ve always been curious. If you know, please post in the comments!

I’ve been wanting to post this for several years, but its unwieldy size and awkward layout made it difficult. Even with the new Panopticist design, I’ve had to cut this up in Photoshop so I can post a readable version.

Anyway, pretty much everything in this is funny and spot-on, and there are dozens of perfect little details. As the tagline for Popular Concept says, “It’s Stuffed Full of Zingers!” Here’s the whole thing; zoomed details are after the jump.

[Continue reading "Hot Deals! Subscribe to X-Acto!, Boot Lick, Bathroom Stall Digest, Professional Award Judge, and Other Advertising-Industry Magazines"...]

Here’s an outtake from my December 2005 Vanity Fair assignment:

Other outtakes are here and here.

Remember The Great Magazine-Cover Spree of 2005-2006? In the fall of 2005, Vanity Fair approached me to do some fresh covers for the magazine’s Vanities section. I worked on a bunch of concepts for them, and four new covers eventually appeared in the December 2005 issue. Here they are; I’ve never posted them before. A few of these have been modified slightly from the published versions.

The hed was “The Celebrity Invasion,” and the dek was “V.F. samples a few of the new star-studded magazines on the drawing boards.”

(“Esquire” doesn’t have an “n” in it, so I created one by chopping out the “u” and rotating it 180 degrees. Whee…)

Outtakes from the assignment are here, here, and here.

Thanks to something Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes created, the October issue of Vanity Fair has gotten a little bit of attention. The issue also contains something I created: a fake cover flap you can cut out and attach to a newsstand copy of The Weekly Standard. It’s on page 272, in the Vanities section. More details are here.

(You know how sometimes you get an idea for a magazine cover, and you sit down and create it, and it makes you laugh, but then you think, Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t post this, because it’s kind of in bad taste? And then you put it aside for a while? And then two or three months later you revisit it, and you find yourself thinking, Hmm, why not post this? And then you spend some time redesigning it, and then you upload it to your server? Like this?)

(The main coverline font is Tobias Frere-Jones’s lovely and ubiquitous Gotham, which you can buy from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

(Go to this page for more covers like this.)