This latest book from Jason Godfrey is even more of a niche work than his previous excellent Bibliographic which looked at a hundred essential design books. This one covers magazines for designers and the graphic arts industry and there is much to enjoy even though visually each only gets a cover or two and a few inside spreads.
What I liked about the contents is the historical scope, here are publications that started decades ago and a few managed to last until this century, BDG Blatter, a German title ran from 1925 to 2005, Typografia 1888 to the present from Czechoslovakia or the famous Swiss TM, 1933 to the present. The pages from the older magazines are quite fascinating to look at with a range of layout styles, typography and graphics. Nearly all of the titles are what could loosely be called trade journals but nicely a few others are included like @Issue for business and design, Colophon for book lovers, Portfolio for the visual arts.
The book is a treat to look through, designed by the author and the spreads have several pages from each magazine with two or three hundred words about how it started and its editorial point of view. All the magazine spreads have captions with the issue number and date. I was thinking how unlike the pages of this book are when compared to similar design titles put out by Phaidon Press who are somewhat obsessed with too much white space and tiny type. '100 Classic graphic design journals' has plenty of big pictures but none of the pages looks crammed or unreadable.
The ideal book for any graphic designer.
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