In the meantime, let's look backward again to the World War I era. Doesn't this cover have a similar mystique to some of Moebius' work?
Vanity Fair — November 1917
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Character and Voice
Still, all in all, I think illustrative graphics give character and voice to a magazine, and I'm just surprised that some magazine editors wouldn't want to give it a shot again. The New Yorker certainly benefits from quality artistic covers. When are we going to see more periodicals go for the gold?
Beautiful cover. I love the colour palette. Can you comment further on when magazine editors stopped using illustrations? I wasn't aware that this had happened in such cut and dried terms.
ReplyDeleteI'm talking about covers mostly, and in general terms. For the past 30 years and longer, most magazines have used photographs that are generically interchangeable, and where they use art on covers or interiors, many times it is cut and paste stock art, or dull to the point of invisibility.
ReplyDeleteThere are exceptions, like the aforementioned New Yorker. But as an inveterate clipper, I have not been tempted to clip printed graphics for many a long time now. I'm sure stuff slips through my radar, cuz I rarely look through magazines now, except to glance at covers at the library.
It used to be that people would save magazines for the beautiful images and graphics, but now most people might save a magazine just for its information content, which of course these days usually becomes useless within a couple of years.
We can see from the internet how many wonderfully talented illustrators there are in the world today, yet we find their work primarily on the internet and and in books, and usually tiny and crowded over with blurbs. Look at that Vanity Fair cover and imagine all the blurbs that today's editors would be jamming on it, with the masthead taking up the top third, along with the barcode and subscription box.
Where art IS used these days, it is underused and undervalued.
If there are major exceptions to this, and I haven't been aware of them because of my self-exile from the periodical world, please let me know-anyone- because my scissors are getting rusty from disuse.
nice!!both of them!!
ReplyDelete