Magazine design tends to have a distinct ‘follow the leader’ mentality. Hence why most fashion magazines nowadays look like Fantastic Man. Now design company Pentagram, with Luke Hayman leading it, are influencing magazine design in their own way. Now that Pentagram have blown up, Hayman has become a design version of super-prodcuer, lending his hand to a number of projects. They’ve redesigned everything from Vibe to 02138, Harvard’s luxury lifestyle magazine. The Pentagram blog has an in-depth post describing what they did to each magazine.

Vibe

Khaleej Times

Radar

I’ve taken my time, but I’m finally on Twitter. Go there for my micro-updates, random thoughts and stuff that just isn’t long enough for a blog post.

Lanvin’s Lucas Ossendrijver is probably top of my interview fantasy list. With interviews the problems usually boil down to, ‘what can I say to make them open up?’ or ‘What can I say that they haven’t already answered 20 times before?’ Mr. Ossendrijver definitely falls into the second category.

He did do an interview and photo shoot with my second favourite menswear magazine Men’s Non-No (Fantastic Man is my favourite, in case you were wondering). I can’t read a word of Japanese, so I couldn’t tell you what he was saying, but the photos seem to suggest that the magazine were following him as he visits restaurants.

R&B can get cheesy at the best of times. But sometimes it can go too far. Take Az Yet’s ‘Last Night’ – which I only knew I had thanks to Apple’s Genius – for example. Here’s the lyrics to the chorus:

Last night I was inside of you
Last night while making love to you
I saw the sun, the moon, the mountains and the rivers
I saw heaven when I made sweet love to you

What? He saw the sun, moon, heaven, mountains and rivers? If you start hallucinating when you have sex, you shouldn’t mention it again, let alone put it in a song. Here’s some more choice lyrics.

Deep in the night, right by the fireside
You felt my candlelight in your soul
You felt incredible, I started to explode
I almost cried cuz it was so beautiful

If hallucinating wasn’t bad enough, this guy calls his penis a candle light. And to top it all off, he cries when he comes. I’m starting to wonder how guys like this got a date in the first place.

Any shop that doesn’t stock size 46 footwear can piss off. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Just to clarify, I don’t mean shops that run out of large sizes quickly – that’s to be expected, I mean shops that don’t even give the option anything over an 11. People with big feet like to wear nice footwear too. Rant over.

*This post was inspired by Kyle Hackett’s rant about brands that start their sizing at medium.

P.S The size 12 I refer to is a UK 12, which is a US 13.

In a year where magazines were dropping like flies, it’s interesting to see how a magazine like Monocle has become such a great success.

Although the internet has been part of the daily routine for years now, most magazines still haven’t got the hang of not making their websites work in tandem with the print publication, rather than making it look like an afterthought.

Monocle’s online team leader, Dan Hill posted an extremely extensive (I can’t stress this enough, it’s really long) overview of the Monocle launch and how they went about the print publication, the website and the relation between the two. It’s well worth a read if you like Monocle, or just magazines in general.