Hasta La Ideas

Since everyone is looking backward this week, what with New Year’s and all, we thought we’d share our pick from that theme as well. The Society of Print Designers have gotten a chance to talk to Arem Duplessis, the NY Times Design Director about last June’s big redesign of the paper’s Sunday magazine (actually, “big” is perhaps a bit incorrect, given that the redesign was brought on by the paper’s decision to trim pages from it). Duplessis, already a friend of SPD, having won their awards and popped up at their various events, felt enough time had passed between now and the original launch of the new look, and provides some great insight about every portion of the redesign, down to the font selections (Knockout, Dino dos Santos, and Lyon Text):

We were attracted to Lyon because it’s well drawn, very legible and nice to look at, but also slightly more condensed than our previous body copy, which in turn allows for more words per line (very beneficial when your page shrinks). For our serif display we chose a font called Esta for its versatility and had the designer (Dino dos Santos) draw several more weights and customize some of the characters. He renamed our version of the font Nyte. Having a versatile serif face is key for us because we cover such a broad range of topics. Finally, we chose Knockout. We wanted a face that would help us give our cover and interior headlines more impact. Knockout is a condensed face, allowing for larger display. It also has a nice variety of weights, which helps make it a great workhorse font. .

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Get the hard egg nog ready, design fans, because we bring you some of the gloomiest tidings of the year: international design magazine I.D.—not to be (although all too often) confused with the British fashion magazine i-D—is no more. As followers of the UnBeige Twitter feed learned only seconds after it was announced this afternoon, F+W Media has closed 55-year-old I.D., which covered the art, business, and culture of design. The January/February 2010 issue will be the magazine’s last. The news, which has been greeted with shock, horror, and an abundance of exclamation points in the design community, follows the 2009 closures of Domino and Metropolitan Home. “Where have all the design magazines gone?” Tweeted designer Laurene Boym upon hearing of I.D.‘s demise.

“Ceasing publication of an iconic brand like I.D. is never an easy decision, but there are several forces that have worked against its sustainability,” wrote F+W Media publisher and editorial director Gary Lynch in a statement issued today, pointing to the downturn in print advertising as well as “the fragmentation and specialized information needs of I.D.‘s core readers (product designers) and the plethora of information resources available to them—some for free (online and B2B) and others that are highly specialized and targeted to specific industries served.” The company will continue producing the I.D. Annual Design Review, the international product design competition, in an online format. Meanwhile, I.D. subscribers will be switched to Print, may it live long and prosper—in print.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Speaking of magazines, the nice folks at Poets & Writers dropped us a line to let us know that everyone’s favorite singer/songwriter (oh, and occasional designer too), Chip Kidd, has designed the cover of their next issue, which should be out soon. We also got a peek at the brief interview with Kidd inside the issue, wherein he explains the cover, saying it was inspired by both whirling dervishes and spirographs drawn by a twelve year-old boy on the streets of Istanbul. He also gets into his previous work (or lack thereof) in magazines:

I get very little magazine work. I’m mainly seen as a book-jacket person. My most high-profile magazine project was two years ago, when I did a trio of covers for Rolling Stone for its fortieth anniversary. And that was almost too good to be true.

…I was able to work with materials that I couldn’t work with on a book jacket. You know, it’s rock and roll, so I went with prismatic foils and all this kind of over-the-top stuff, which for them was perfectly ap- propriate. The trick was to not make it look so gaudy that it was cheap.

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Visionaire is always among the things we’re most thankful for, so what better time to tell you about the new issue? The fifty-seventh edition of the art-meets-fashion triannual brings together images from 365 artists in the format of an electronic 2010 calendar. The works that light up the sleek HD screen were selected by 52 influential figures from the worlds of art, design, fashion, and film. Curators including Zaha Hadid, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois, and Rei Kawakubo, chose works by artists from Richard Artschwager to Andrea Zittel. Among some of our favorite curator/artist pairings: Pharrell Williams (who we hear is starring in a film by artist Yi Zhou that will debut next week at Art Asia in Miami) selected an image of a Marc Newson-designed aircraft, MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach opted for an ethereal work by Marlene Dumas, and Mario Testino got in the holiday spirit with a Steven Shearer photocollage of inverted Christmas trees. The issue was produced in collaboration with smart, the lower-cased Daimler division that is launching an electric version of its pint-sized fortwo, thus the smart car-shaped plug on the rechargeable display console. And it’s a bargain at a mere 80 cents per artwork (or $295).

Previously on UnBeige:

Anemic ad sales and the game-changing dynamics of this tangled Interweb continue to force media companies to shed titles (except in China, where they can’t launch them fast enough). The latest casualty is modern design-focused Metropolitan Home, the 26-year-old publication edited by Donna Warner. It emerged today as the loser in a shelter category smackdown with ELLE Decor, also published by Hachette Filipacchi, echoing last month’s decision by Condé Nast to keep the lights on at Bon Appétit while sticking a fork in Gourmet.

“We believe the best strategy in the upscale shelter segment is to boldly focus our resources and investment on ELLE Decor,” said Alain Lemarchand, president and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. (HFMUS), in a statement issued today. ELLE Decor will now move from the HFMUS Luxury Design Group (which consisted of ELLE Decor, Metropolitan Home, and the web portal PointClickHome.com) to the ELLE Group, so it sounds as if PointClickHome.com is also history. The December issue of Metropolitan Home, which hits newsstands next week, will be the magazine’s last. According to HFMUS, Warner and her staff will be leaving the company.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.