Hasta La Ideas

Jeremy Leslie thinks that Disappear Here, James Brown and Peaches Geldof’s new venture into youth publishing has a great name. Unfortunately that isn’t enough to detract from its empty editorial and confused design…

As a fully paid up member of the magazine obsessives club it takes a lot for me to dismiss a new magazine. So I surprised myself when I did just that about a new title announced at the end of last year.

Disappear Here arrives courtesy of Peaches Geldof (C-list celebrity daughter of Sir Bob) and James Brown (the man who bought us Loaded magazine back in 1994). I mentioned its launch in a brief post on my magCulture blog late last year. While admiring the name of their magazine (more of which later), I slipped easily into the assumption that any magazine from those two would be disappoint­ing. How could 19-year-old Peaches and the quietly fading Brown create anything genuinely innovative? I added that their description of the project (“a magazine about music and fashion and every­thing you love”) made it sound hackneyed.

The one thing I did like was that title. Naming a new magazine is always one of the toughest creative tasks, and while not the most easily presented or descriptive name for a magazine, Disappear Here is a great title. It sets a distinctive conceptual tone for the project and demonstrates that the people behind it understand what a magazine can be – a world apart, a place to escape to. The best magazines offer their readers a unique world to submerge themselves in, be it the sheer escapism of Vogue, the intel­lec­tual stimulus of The New Yorker, the conceptual experiment of inde­pend­ents like Kasino A4, or indeed the full-on hedonism of Brown’s Loaded. Disappear Here tells you little beyond that, and is a clumsy phrase for the designer to build a logo from. But a clever name nonetheless, a good start.

In response to my post, Brown, not unreasonably, suggested I should check out their pilot issue before passing further comment. Meanwhile, to my amusement, a quote from my post (“what a great name for a magazine”) appeared on the magazine’s website.

It was left to art director Stuart Tolley to mail me a copy of the pilot issue. A quick flick later and two things were clear. Firstly, my initial cynicism was correctly placed. Disappear Here is a mess of a magazine, featuring the worst sort of self-regarding insular content completely lacking the vital glue of an editorial concept to hold it together. It lurches from Geldof inter­viewing Vivienne Westwood to reportage from a Norway rock festival via a column from Tony Benn and endless pictures of teenagers snogging. The lead feature of the pilot issue is that most tired magazine cliché – 50 Things We Love, number 42 of which is “Silky knickers in lurid colours”, because, “We’ve got lots of them. Literally millions of pairs of knickers. Where do they all come from? Sweat­shops full of children of course, but you know what we mean, right?” Believe me, this is not a world many will want to escape to.

Secondly, and in response to the confusion of the content, Tolley has had great fun playing with this editorial mess. Too much fun. One of the basic premises of editorial design is that content and presentation should reflect one another and he has risen to this task without fear. Every page looks different, borrowing from early i-D, RayGun and a thousand other indie mags. This is editorial and design chaos with none of the refresh­ing novelty of its sources.

Geldof and Brown seem to be under the impression they’ve created a super-cool youth fanzine, when the actual result is a half-baked melange of ideas that could have been knocked out down the pub. There probably is a decent magazine somewhere within their thinking, a magazine that might reunite a young audience with print, but with this pilot edition they’ve singularly failed to prove it. 

This article appears in the February issue of CR. Jeremy Leslie is executive creative director of John Brown, co-curator of the Colophon independent magazine festival and author of the magCulture.com blog

This clip from a 1981 news broadcast from San Francisco’s KRON channel heralds the arrival of the consumption of news via home computer. The San Francisco Examiner, along with eight other US newspapers, was able to deliver the text of each daily edition via a basic computer network. David Cole, a staffer on the SFE, conveys what this breakthrough was like and, interestingly, hints at some issues that still occupy media companies today: “This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot, but we aren’t going to make much either.” (Via: Design Observer).

Expect Obama-mania in the media over the next couple of days as Inauguration Day approaches – ‘the nearest America will come to a coronation,’ as one wag has put it. In one of the more CR-relevant tie-ins, tomorrow’s Guardian G2 section will feature excerpts from a selection of speeches by Almost President Obama as interpreted by a mixture of designers and illustrators

Introducing it all is this cover by David Carson

Contributors inside include Sean Freeman

Peter Horridge

Jonathan Barnbrook

Mario Hugo

And Paula Scher

There is also to be a contribution from Alan Kitching but, as I write this, G2 art director Richard Turley has just emailed to say “we just received the Alan Kitching but it’s still wet (!) so can’t be scanned….. not sure what we’re going to do about it yet other than send the work experience into the toilets to hold it under the hairdryer… guess that demonstrates the kind of timescales we operate to in newspapers.” So that one may not appear.

Under Turley and deputy art director Jo Cochrane, the use of illustration in The Guardian’s G2 section has been a consistent highlight – not just for special projects such as this Christmas cover by Yulia Brodskaya

but also in the regular contributor pages. David Foldvari’s dark, sometimes menacing style is the perfect counterpart for the black humour of the regular Charlie Brooker column on Mondays

while the likes of David Hughes, Belle Mellor and a host of other illustrators – some established, some new – set G2 very much apart from its broadsheet competitors.

The New York Times has long been lauded for its use of illustration on the Op Ed pages. The Guardian’s G2 section deserves to be placed up alongside it for its consistent excellence.

Update: Looks like the work experience person did a good job with the dryer – here’s the Alan Kitching illustration in today’s paper

And the G2 cover

We received not one but two of these 4-inch wheely bins in the CR office today. The tiny bins came in direct mailers from one of London’s free newspapers, thelondonpaper, as part of a campaign conceived to promote the fact that the paper is “always printed on 100% recycled paper with ink that’s kinder to the environment”…

Having an environmentally friendly printing policy is, of course, highly commendable – although pretty much all of newsprint paper these days is made from recycled paper. According to Friends of the Earth, wood fibre (necessary to make paper) can normally only be recycled up to five times due to damage experienced to the fibre. So, unless the quantity of newsprint used each year worldwide declines to reflect the lost/damaged fibre, a certain amount of new (virgin) fibre is required each year globally, even if individual newsprint mills may continue to use 100% recycled fibre.

Bearing this in mind, thelondonpaper’s environmental fanfare seems a little ridiculous. Printing huge quantities of newspaper week in, week out is never going to be an environmentally friendly endeavour. And besides, isn’t adding who-knows-how-many of these promotional plastic bins to the world’s stock of non-biodegradable polypropylene matter simply adding insult to injury?