Thesis #2

For my other thesis idea I was wondering if I could work on the relationship between fashion and personality. There is always a story behind what people wear.personality, fashion and style go side by side. Clothes are the symbol of one's mood and insight thinking. This can be depicted by the fact that many times it happen we dress up according to our mood and state of mind.Colors of clothes and designs clearly depict the personality of a person. Fashion does not necessarily means that one has to wear what is common to all but it relates to an individual own thinking and perception.

Thesis

For one of my thesis proposal, I am planning to design a fashion magazine that defines beauty in a different way.In 2004, the manufacture of Dove products came up with a global campaign about beauty. They wanted to find out more about how women around the world feel about beauty. Women had been talking about the influence of media, advertising and fashion magazines on them. One of the results of the study done by Dove campaign was that only 2 percent of the thousands consider themselves beautiful. Women always want a broader definition of beauty. Dove’s goal was to make women feel more beautiful. Unfortunately most of the magazines publishing these years don’t do anything about real beauty and does not allow women to get a better understanding of themselves.Today fashion magazines keep telling us there is a perfect look we should try to achieve. These magazines are changing our assumption about what natural beauty is. Women seem to have trouble claiming beauty for themselves but they are comfortable comparing themselves with other women. Beauty is a complicated subject and magazines could play an important role to show different sides of it. Fashion magazines could change a direction of how women think about themselves. Everyone recognizes and admires beauty but magazines are promoting a certain ideal of beauty that could damage young girls. Our media and magazines are all about wrong statements of beauty and that could destroy a beauty myth.

New York Look

New York Look, Spring 2008

New York Look, the semi-annual fashion magazine from the editors of New York, announced itself with a bold, graphic, black-and-white cover for its inaugural issue. In an age of instantly available and ubiquitous runway photos, the cover presents a catwalk photo readers have never seen before, shot by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin. Pellegrin captured the beauty, chaos, and drama of Fashion Week with the fresh eye of an outsider. Fashion covers are usually staged, highly produced affairs. This cover was unmistakably fashionable but used documentary photography to tell its story—and the stunning artistry of the picture perfectly captures what was special about New York Look’s singular approach, covering the collections rather than the clothes—looking at the fashion shows as a phenomenon, rather than a simple showcase for a product.

Citation: "American Society of Magazine Editors - Stories of the 2008 Best Fashion Magazine Cover Winner and Finalists." Magazine Publishers of America - The Definitive Resource for the Magazine Industry.Web. 10 Apr. 2010.

American Society Of Magazine Editors

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) is a non profit professional organization for editors of print and online magazines which are edited, published and disturbed in U.S. The National Magazine Awards have been presented each year since 1966. For next year I'm planning to see if I could design and brand my own magazine cover and spreads. Cover design is another important element in a world of magazines. 80 percent of consumer magazines’ newsstand sales are determined by what is shown on the cover. The cover image and design reinforce the brand, an important identification factor because the average reader spends only three to five seconds scanning a magazine cover before deciding whether to buy that issue. The first Image is the winner of the 2008 best celebrity cover. The second one is the winner of the best concept cover and the third one is the best magazine cover of 2008. I really like the second image and the use of illustration. I'm taking narrative sequence this semester to improve my illustration skills. I really want to mix illustrations with images and I think this could be an interesting idea for my magazine cover.

Irving Penn

I was always inspired by vintage magazines. While I was looking at Vogue, I found pictures taken by Irving Pen, an amazing photographer who brought most beautiful and memorable photographs in the history of magazines. For the layout of my magazine I want to mix the modern magazine layout with the old ones. I'm starting to look through old editions of Vogue to start something unique and new. Images play an important role in magazine layout. I'm planning to take photography courses in order to take my own images for my thesis project next yer. Irving Penn is definitely one of my inspiration. here are some of his amazing fashion editorial assignments.His unique style of fashion photography used natural light rather than all the expensive studio lighting, favoring a simple black or white background to bring out specific features of his subjects.Irving Penn played a significant role in the evolution of fashion photography.Here are some of his amazing fashion editorial assignments.

fashion magazine

In the competition for domination in the fashion magazine world., one magazine stands out, Vogue owned by the Conde Nast Publication Family. Here's how the top fashion magazines fared in 1997 in terms of circulation and advertising dollars.

Vogue
Paid Circulation: 1,126,193
advertising in millions: 148,980
Elle
Paid Circulation: 984,014
advertising in millions:100,401
Harper's Bazaar
Paid Circulation: 732,303
advertising in millions: 73,531
Marie Claire
Paid Circulation: 702,063
advertising in millions: 42,617


Vogue total audience is about 9.5 million. This number includes subscribes, newsstand buyers and pass-along audience. Although only a tiny percentage of these readers can afford the fashion shown in the magazines, they still enjoy reading about them. It can be as much as wearing the clothes.

citation:
Mogel, Leonard. The Magazine: Everything You Need to Know to Make It in the Magazine Business. 3 Sub ed. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Pr, 1992.

If you had a fashion magazine of your own....

I'm always thinking about if I could start my own fashion magazine what would it be look like. while I was checking this website www.forums.thefashionspot.com, I found someone asked the same question from people. I started reading most of them because it's important for me to see what people at my age would like to read and see in fashion magazines. These are some of the answers:
1)i would have a thematic magazine that could come out every three months..
*would have articles on fashion, sociology, politics, music, art, decoration, architecture and of course at least 100 pages of editorial pages with the most fresh images/concepts on the planet.
*it would be a different magazine for people who like to read as well as enjoy visuals and it would be a fountain for new talents.
*layout and art direction would match something never seen before, embracing top technology, special papers and surprising effects.
2)a showcase and resource for 'undiscovered' or under-appreciated talent...
but at the highest level...with a real focus on 'craft'...might include some poetry and illustrations...no gimmicks or flashiness...very simple and straightforward graphics that only enhance the content and don't 'compete' with it...maybe some sort of 'collage' format...something that looks old and new at the same time...and lots of big beautiful pictures of beautiful clothes
3)I'd call it "Sepia" and it would be a fashion magazine for women of color. I'd feature ads and editorials with the world's leading Black models and beautiful celebrities from around the world, and we'd print articles on everything fashion related in movies, music videos, regions around the country and globe, and even fashion of days past. Famous photographers shooting the kind of dramatic, elaborate photographs I love to see. I'd also have things related to skin and hair care, general health and well-being.
4)My magazine would not include any photographs, everything would be illustrated. It would concentrate more on smaller and independent designers, and take a look at fashion outside Paris/Milan/London/NYC fashion weeks, although there would be material about those too if something good appears. It would be directed for women, not teens or men. It would have a slightly feminist motto, and it would not be "a style bible", something that dictates what you should wear. It would rather be a magazine that shows different collections, and different people's dreams about fashion. There would be different themes in every magazine - a little bit like i-D sometimes has.

As for articles, there would not be any articles. It would all just be illustrated. A very visual magazine.

Thesis

I really want to work in fashion magazines in future so I decided to choose something about fashion for my thesis next year. When I was looking through different fashion magazines at Chapters,they looked the same to me. They all are using similar text and image to influence the culture's standard of beauty. If we look at British Vogue with American Vogue we can totally see the difference. Each country has their own perception of beauty but they all are aiming to convey the same message: Women's beauty.The use of particular text and images encourage young women to buy fashion, hairstyles and makeup that will make them look fashionable and trendy. I was aiming to come up with a new design and typography through printing articles and ads in order to promote a certain kind of fashion and beauty. Each category of my magazine will be analyzed and discussed in terms of its affection on my audience, their self-steem and life goals. There are so many fashion magazines out there with a same concept so I need to work harder to compete with them.

Harper's Bazaar- Greek Edition

An Interview with Kostas Aggeletakis
(Creative Director of HARPER’S BAZAAR-Greek edition)

1. Which are your criteria for choosing a typeface for a publication?
Typography is an artistic expression and as such is very difficult to define these criteria. Choosing a typeface for a publication is a total different procedure from opening a recipe book which can advice you on what you can or cannot do with letters. I never follow certain rules but I always have in mind the following:
a. The content of the publication. Every typeface has a personality, so I want its personality to respect and communicate the content of the publication.
b. Legibility
c. The medium (screen or paper).
d. The audience. I’ll use a total different set of typefaces for a children’s book and a different one for the annual report of a big company.
e. The overall quality of the typeface. A high quality font with all the letters, ligatures, numbers, punctuation marks, currency and mathematical symbols available is the one that I’ll trust to do my work.

2. Do you prefer serif or sans-serif and why?
It’s difficult to answer this question. I can’t choose between two typefaces knowing only that the one is serif and the other one is san serif. There are many other factors for my choice beside this.

3. Which typeface you would never use for Harper’s Bazaar?
Harper’s Bazaar is a historic American fashion magazine with a very sophisticated perspective about fashion and beauty and with audience in the middle-upper and upper class. Harper’s Bazaar had been the home of many talents such as Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland , Richard Avedon, Man Ray, Andy Warhol and others. The visual identity of Harper’s Bazaar has the signature of his legendary art director, Alexey Brodovitch and his Bazaar’s iconic Didot logo carries a big part of the magazine’s history. Having all these in mind and since typefaces convey the social position of a magazine, determined by the reader’s upbringing and earlier influences, it’s hard to use any typeface which does not convey all the above. In recent past Harper’s Bazaar used DIN, but this is one font that I would never use in this magazine. DIN is not the only font that I would not use for Harper’s Bazaar (of course script and blackletter typefaces are out of the question) but I think this is a very good example for someone to understand which typefaces do not match with this publication.

4. Would you ever compromise legibility for aesthetics and when?
Legibility or readability isn’t the only task of a font. A typeface is not only the medium by which we convey to the reader the meaning of text, it is also shapes and forms. Graphic design is also shapes and forms. Therefore, letters may sometimes loose their legibility for the sake of aesthetics, but this does not necessarily mean that they loose their power.

5. Is economy of text a major concern when it comes to choosing a typeface for your magazine?
Not really. In a fashion magazine like Harper’s Bazaar long articles are not usual, so there is no need for a narrow typeface.

6. What do you see to be the next trend for magazine design?
Magazines and newspapers are no longer the only media we use for news, fashion, entertainment, etc. Needs have changed, therefore the medium has to change as well. In this context, the new magazines must portray their character. The “new” magazines will be like coffee table books. Magazines with a strong concept, sophisticated images and illustrations, eye catching typography, high quality papers, in new formats and all sorts of different sizes. These are the magazines of the future.

7. Which motto describes best yourself and your work?
“Art is not a reflection of reality, it’s the reality of that reflection”
- Jean-Luc Godard

Harper's Bazaar

Harper's Bazzar is one of my favorite magazines. I was always inspired by their logo. Modern typefaces, characterized by horizontal stress, flat and unbracketed serifs and a high contrast between thin and thick were the final step in designing the most fashionable brands such as Harper's Bazaar. They used Didot typefaces for the cover. Harper's Bazaar typeface singled out by the American Society of Magazine Editors as part of "one of the most dramatic magazine reinventions in history."