Hasta La Ideas

As Condé Nast hunkers down for a McKinsey-style “optimization,” Michela O’Connor Abrams is critical of the publishing company’s decisions with regard to Domino, the young shelter magazine that was shuttered earlier this year. “I just thought that was tragic,” O’Connor Abrams, president and publisher of Dwell, told FishbowlNY editor Amanda Ernst in a recent interview. “There was an amazing brand with vitality, with all of the kinds of assets and the ability to be on many different platforms like Dwell. It clearly had a rabid base.” And the decision to bring in McKinsey? “Mystifying and troubling all at the same time,” said O’Connor Abrams. “I personally regard Condé Nast as probably one of the most envied and revered editorial houses in New York. I don’t know how you get a business model so wrong. Closing Domino was not a good decision.” She credits Dwell‘s endurance to a business model that relies less on advertising (and therefore on an artifically inflated subscriber base) and more on “charging the right fee to the reader,” which in the case of Dwell is now $5.99 per issue at the newsstand.

Previously on UnBeige:

(Photos courtesy Wallpaper*)

As you’ll recall from our report yesterday, the October issue of Wallpaper* is guest edited by “design titans” Karl Lagerfeld and Philippe Starck, who we like to imagine hammering out the details together on an outsized silver sofa moored somewhere off of Cap Ferret. The issue hits newsstands later this week, but with editor-in-chief Tony Chambers‘ description of the two covers created by Lagerfeld and Starck as “pushing the boundaries of magazine design” (tracing paper! peek-a-boo peel-a-way technology!), metaphors and thumbnail images just couldn’t tide us over. Thankfully, Wallpaper* was good enough to supply us with these photos of the covers: Lagerfeld’s features model Baptiste Giabiconi clad in Dior Homme that readers can peel away for a back-to-nature look, and Starck really went back to nature, tackling the theme of evolution in three transparent layers. Inside, while globe-trotting Lagerfeld mixes his photos with talk of houses and objects, Starck focuses on his newest passion: understanding the meaning of life. “It is my mission to make intelligence sexy,” he insists.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It was a Sunday that struck fear into the heart of obsessive-compulsive newsstand owners everywhere, as T: The New York Times Style Magazine celebrated its fifth anniversary with an August 16 issue that sported five separate double covers. Usually content merely to palpate their papers to verify the presence of the bonus magazine (published fifteen times a year), savvy Sunday Times buyers around the country this week could be seen shuffling sections to examine the cover and secure their favorite. And who can blame them when the quintet featured the magazine’s T logo reimagined by Frank Gehry, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Doug and Mike Starn, and Francesco Vezzoli?

Subscribers were at the mercy of their deliveryperson, and ours was good enough to deposit the Gehry (above, at far right) at UnBeige HQ. While Frank had fun with a jigsaw, the Starns did their thing with bamboo poles, and Vezzoli riffed on Man Ray‘s famed “Tears” photo, a project that we have to hope comes with the knowing wink of the artist’s estate. Holzer, meanwhile, played it cool in ethereal blue, and Koons took his T tropical, complete with a smiling signature inflatable. Each T was matched with an inside cover featuring actress Carey Mulligan in one of five personas created by fashion designers Alber Elbaz, Nicholas Ghesquière, Marc Jacobs, Stefano Pilati, and Miuccia Prada. Want to collect them all? We hear that all five issues will be available for purchase at The New York Times Store.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Was the Lance Armstrong-inspired artwork we featured on Friday too abstract (or pricey) for your tastes? Not to worry. Fans of figuration and cycling alike should race to newsstands, where the August issue of Bicycling sports four different illustrated Armstrong covers. The magazine commissioned a diverse quartet of graphic artists to depict Armstrong in four distinct eras. Alex Gross rendered “First Yellow” Lance (pictured above, at right) in a dotty field of sunflowers after his first Tour de France win in 1999, while Sterling Hundley focused on Armstrong’s seventh straight win in “No. 7” (below left). Charity-minded Lance comes to the fore in “The Comeback” (below right), Havana-born Edel Rodriguez‘s cartoony rendition that suggests a guest spot on King of the Hill, and David Cowles took on the challenge of creating an illustration of Armstrong pegged to his latest Tour bid (above left). His solution? Paint-by-number, an old favorite of Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. After three and a half years away from the Tour, Armstrong finished third on Sunday, after Spain’s Alberto Contador and Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck. But colorers-by-number, take note: ESPN.com’s Bonnie Ford observed Armstrong on the podium and writes that he “looked
uncomfortable dressed in something other than yellow.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This weeks cover for the New Yorker was developed by artist Jorge Colombo. What separates this cover from previous ones is that his medium was an iPhone apps. called ‘Brushes’. The artist explains his process below:

The drawing was created by Colombo in just an hour, while he stood outside the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. “I got a phone in the beginning of February and I immediately got the programme so I could entertain myself,” says the artist on the New Yorker website, where a film of his process can also be viewed. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” Colombo also stated that drawing on the phone had the advantage of allowing him to draw without being noticed, although he does mention one drawback of phone painting: that when the sun is up, it is hard to see, “because of the glare on the phone”.

To see additional work by the artist you know the drill.

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