MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie on print as a document of time

But this deeper role as cultural register gives the print magazine a longer term function: it’s why museum exhibitions regularly use magazine covers as a shorthand visual clue to identify an era. Nothing says the Sixties like a copy of OZ or Nova; Spare Rib means we’re in the Seventies, The Face the Eighties, and Dazed & Confused the Nineties.

Magazines aren’t produced with this future role in mind; only time reveals which magazines own their era. This means we can’t yet be sure which of today’s magazines will come to represent the 2020s; but we can reflect on how the rich mix of text, image and design that goes into magazines, at both conscious and subconscious levels, delivers this sense of time.

The written content is the most obvious part of that mix; the stories told and the choice of words not only reveal what mattered at the time, but why it mattered. Underlying this is the language itself – phrases, idioms and grammar continually change and quickly date.

The accompanying images offer similarly multi-layered details. The subjects, their clothes and hairstyles, the street scenes and the stories they’re set in – and also the style of photography and illustration (even the choice between the two forms can be revealing). The way all are edited, cropped and captioned adds further information.

Then there is the design; a new typeface, stylistic trick or visual reference ties a layout to a time, and the sophistication with which text and image interact and the design details present on the page speaks of the technology used to build a layout.

Magazines don’t get produced in a vacuum – they refer to their predecessors but also to other media. In the Nineties the considered cue for writing was to mimic the internet – bite size chunks only, no long form here thanks. Today long form is something to boast about. Computerised production is now so sophisticated that many designers are responding by roughing their designs up, printing and re-scanning headlines for instance, to add a rougher edge to their pages. When everything is possible at the touch of an InDesign shortcut key, the art is to introduce your own distinctive parameters.

Thus today’s magazines head off in so many different and contrary directions that it’s nigh on impossible to predict which ones will be exhibited as shorthand for the 2020s. If pressed, I’d opt for The Gentlewoman and Apartamento as strong options; not only for being brilliant magazines in their own right, but because they’ve forced existing magazines to change their outlook while also encouraging new magazines into existence.

Neither of these are on the D&AD winners list this year (both have been previously); such is the way of awards – you have to enter to win. Many great magazines are present of course, but setting aside the many singular examples of great craft and creativity, what can we parse from the collective body of work?

Covid-19 is very present of course, as subject and driver, reminding us how magazines can adopt very different approaches to the same subject. Italian newspaper supplement Salute uses its rigorous typography and rich design language to impress authority on its content, while Virus shares a series of CCTV images of life in New York during the first, most extreme stage of lockdown in March 2020, raising the complex issues of control and identity in the face of an invisible threat.

Two magazines are less about, and more a result of, Covid. The tenth issue of Rubbish FAMzine (a regular D&AD winner, created by the Lim family in Singapore) was planned as a record of their visit to Japan. With borders closed the issue was created at home, instead bringing Japan to Singapore. And in Brazil, Netflix replaced their annual Tudum event with an exuberant one-off magazine.  

So much for the differences, what about the similarities? Two interlinked themes jump out from the judges’ selection.The first is the desire to create a bespoke response to the content of every issue. This is most evident with Buffalo Zine, the fashion biannual that can boast 11 Pencils, since scoring their first in 2012 with their debut issue.

Working with the best photographers, stylists, models and brands, Buffalo creates fabulous fashion content. For many publishers that would be enough – wrap it up with a typical fashion magazine finish and press print – but not Buffalo. Every edition adopts a thematic approach that informs the fashion stories but also the physical character of the printed item.

Issue 10, here, was the Unfinished issue: retouching instructions were left on the page, images missed from the InDesign layouts, and even the page edges were poorly cut. A loose letter apologised for the problems, explaining the team had not had time to complete everything before heading off for their holiday (oh, pre-pandemic life!).

The team’s next issue, also listed here, was a massive volume of hippy-inspired eco-friendly visuals that both respected and parodied ideas of dropping out and communing with nature. The various formats are all cleverly designed and mediated to match the theme, and the project stands head and shoulder above the other fashion biannuals, many of whom work with the same contributors but barely half the wit of Buffalo.

Meanwhile, another regular presence on the list, the New York Times Magazine, reinvents itself on a weekly basis. Every issue leads with a different story that receives a bespoke design response. They also run several regular special annual issues, and the Performers issue is one of these. Typography and photography combine to create a chaotic but optimistic reading of the pandemic year and its effect on performances on TV, film and social media.

Together, these two publications establish the second theme I draw from the list: that the once discrete worlds of independent and commercial publishing are drawing ever closer. Further proof is the presence of Vanity Fair’s 2020 Oscars edition, led by the creative team behind indie photography magazine Toiletpaper. Once unthinkable, such collaboration makes absolute sense now. We all have the same tools and thus the same options, regardless of the size of the publisher.

The D&AD Annual will be one place future curators will refer for guidance when they populate exhibition cues. Then we’ll know which magazines truly come to represent our age.