There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the iPad is going to save the publishing industry. It’s an amazing device, and surfing the web on it is pretty incredible. Some of the new magazine apps, like Wired, are neat, but they haven’t quite tapped the potential of where these devices can go with content. They’re still print migrating one media to another.

I’ve been on the hunt for a case that fit my needs. Then it occurred to me. I could reuse some of the old media from my desk, and solve my new media case dilema in the process. So Green.

ReadyMade Magazine is a fitting candidate for a DIY undertaking of this magnitude, as it’s the very sort of thing they write about on their website, and in the magazine (and I assume soon on the iPad in the form of an App). It’s also sized very nicely in relation to the device: A bit of extra all the way around. It’s perfect bound, so no unsightly staple scratches down the road, either.

I surveyed the situation and gathered my supplies. Who would have thunk it? In a design office it would be hard to find an elastic? This slowed down my fabrication process, but over the weekend I was able to salvage a hefty blue band from some produce. Again, reusing. So Green. I sketched a few things on paper (recycled) , and made the decision to forgo any sort of detailed AutoCAD drawing before starting the process. I wore safety glasses.

The most important factors in my case design are finding a magazine that’s not too big (and not too small) and a rubber band that will hold up to the task (hint: celery). For god sakes, no saddle stitched magazines, please. Staples and modern technology do not mix. With those objects in tow, you’re half-way home.

After a few minutes of careful consideration, and staring, I started the process by opening up the magazine. I suggest roughly half-way open, allowing for optimum impact resistance on both sides of the device. I like to choose an editorial spread, so there’s no chance I’ll accidentally click on one of the ads. Breathe. Next step.

Here’s where it gets risky. Slide your iPad into the magazine, being EXTREMELY careful to avoid paper cuts. Once you’ve got it positioned adequately, close the pages. Be sure to note which page you left your iPad on. It will help you find it later.

Now comes the important part. Restraint. We need to insure this thing doesn’t fly back open. You’ll need two hands for this, and safety glasses, should the band rupture.  The [former] celery elastic gets stretched around the pages (being careful not to create dog-ears… you’ll confuse future readers). Position the band equidistant from the top and bottom. Breathe again.

That’s it. You’re done. Remember that you’ve just helped save landfills from the nearly 2 billion magazines that end up in them each year. And what’s more, you’ve got a bunch of celery to eat for dinner while catching up on the news, or reading a novel on your iPad.

In 1995, Designer David Carson published a book titled “The End of Print.” Print wasn’t really over, David had just significantly stirred the pot, at least graphically. Print itself had a few years left. But the internet had arrived.

It’s 2010, and print publishers would like you to believe that print isn’t dying, but it is. A recent report from mediaIDEAS says ” “Over the next 10 years, the magazine industry will experience deep-rooted change from primarily a print-oriented business to one where digital products will represent the largest share of a smaller periodical industry. We expect digital to be the primary source of revenue for magazines past the 2016-2017 time frame.”

Digital is expected to increase from making up 1/3 of the periodical industry in 2009, to roughly 75% in the coming years. Death doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can represent a positive evolution. This is post isn’t about re-hashing a tired subject — it’s about the other side of the coin. The Digital side.

I started as a magazine guy. I don’t think print is at it’s at it’s point of extinction, but let’s face it, we’re in a time of drastic change, and save for a few in-denial print editors, it’s no secret.. What used to be a high frequency news medium will need to evolve into low frequency (semi-annual or annual) feature based publications (more akin to a coffee table books) if print is to survive. Some have already gone this route. Others have gone out of business. Others are grasping at straws.

Print-on-demand might be a great way to go about this. Solutions for this already exist — MagCloud is one example. With this model, ad buyers could quantify impressions much like they do online. Print circulations have long been fudged/inflated (they are online as well). I’ve personally seen them inflated more than 200% and sold as such, but print-on-demand could lead to actual readership data that would be more valuable to marketers than inflated, confusing guestimates. And more importantly waste would be drastically reduced.

We ceased publishing the last magazine I was involved with in 2007, upon the realization that the time had come that we weren’t doing anything we couldn’t do more effectively online. It was cheaper, more timely, and created less landfill. Design on the web was more consistent with CSS, content management systems made updates instant, and more importantly high-speed internet was no longer a rarity.

Each year in America, 2 billion magazines (62 percent what gets printed), ends up unsold and in landfills. If you’re not a mathematician, that’s nearly 3 out of 4 printed. That doesn’t count the waste created by units people actually buy (yes, sometimes that still happens). The number of magazines saved by collectors and libraries aren’t significant in the scheme of things. The best estimates by experts of all-things-Green say that only 60% of paper gets recycled. I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, or an overly Green individual, but it doesn’t take a scientist to see that all that paper might be unnecessary.

Magazine Publishers are in scramble mode. They aren’t quite sure how to monetize the digital age. As a last gasp, they’ve taken out a print ad campaign, touting the virtues of print (to people that still read print). Brilliant. They note that print still has 300 million paid subscribers (so if you adjust for inflation it’s likely more like 150 million). What they fail to point out is that the Internet has 1.8 Billion users. Latin America has as many Internet users as print has paid subscribers. And Internet numbers are quantifiable. The Internet is a much larger audience, and if they would accept it, they could do great things with it.

Publishers like Bonnier have recently been hyping up statistics / print numbers that on the surface look really great. Transworld Business, a Bonnier-owned publication actually just posted some of these numbers today under the title “Magazines Aren’t Dying; Read the Truth.” Again, on the surface you’d think wow, things are on the up and up. While they didn’t take it out and try to hide it, they also didn’t exactly point out that those numbers are from 2008. A lot has changed since 2008 in the digital world. Unfortunately the Magazine Publishers of America, the organization that generated the data Transworld highlights hasn’t updated their numbers since releasing its 2009 kit (thus 2008 data). Oops. In fact, TransWorld quietly killed off one of it’s own publications (Quad) in 2009. I guess there is some fitting irony that a print publisher would publish these numbers on the internet to save print, roughly a year and a half after the numbers were released.

2008 this is not. The Magazine Publishers of America, in fact, just added a Digital section to its Web Site to help transitioning Publishers adjust to the coming digital age. They clearly understand the change. Hopefully their members will soon.

I still can’t believe this one actually worked. Not from a photographic standpoint; aside from dodging the occasional flying bicycle, or flying Ben Hucke, my part wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. Rewind two and half years.

When I first moved out to Oregon, the Tigard Park had just been completed. One thing about the park jumps out immediately as a bit out of the ordinary: The concrete T-Rex head right in the middle of the park, atop a hip. Cool, but, what the? Then I saw a skateboarder handplant it. I can’t even remember who. Maybe Kevin Kowalski. Either way, I had just moved from State College where Chad Kagy, Morgan Wade, Anthony Napolitan, Jeremiah Smith, and a few others had been doing downside handplants on quarterpipes at Woodward, and when I saw the handplant done on a skateboard I immediately thought how amazing it would be to do that on a bike.

Over the next two years I brought a few people by the park and suggested the handplant, sort of jokingly, but also sort of serious. I wasn’t going to push anyone into it, but it just made sense to me. Last summer Ben Hucke came in and said he had something he wanted to shoot at Tigard, so I went down there with him, not knowing what he wanted to do. He wanted to handplant the T-Rex head, of course. After a number of tries over the course of a couple hours (more just feeling it out and getting up the balls to hang onto the bike) he stuck it perfectly. So we shot horizontal and vertical long lens versions and called it good. The photo was set aside to be a print ad for Haro bikes, and then Ben left the team. Rather than let it sit any longer, I posted the shot as a free Goods BMX screen background, because, well, Shad is cool, so why not.

I still like that angle, but I had really wanted to shoot it fisheye in the beginning. I didn’t want to mess with Ben’s head being that close at first though, and I wasn’t totally confident where he was going to end up. So I stood back and let it happen, shooting it long lens.

A couple months later Ben came into the office and said “He’d had a dream.” Not a Martin Luther King Jr. sort of dream, but similar. “I think I can do a can-can in that T-Rex handplant.” I didn’t think much of it, then realized he was serious. The thing about doing something new on a bicycle is, if you have it in your head, and you have the mechanics of it figured out, you’re more than half way there. It’s all mental. It’s not my job to argue with that, It’s my job to document it.

A few more weeks went by, and Ben hit me up about a Dig Magazine interview he’d been trying to get shot forever. I haven’t shot any print editorial for the last two years. I love magazines as a medium, but I’ve gotten into the mode of putting things on the internet for all to see after they happen. Holding onto great shots for anywhere from 2-5 months isn’t really in my vocabulary anymore. But I’ve always loved Dig, the guys who do it, and helping Ben get some coverage wouldn’t be a bad thing. He hadn’t had any magazine photos in a couple years other than ads, despite a banger of a web video coming out every couple weeks. So I was down for the project. Keeping the can-plant under wraps for two months wasn’t easy for me, though.

I knew if he did the can-can it had to be shot from the front, and I wanted to shoot it fisheye, which meant being right up in the line of fire. I’m good at jumping out of the way, and my gear is insured, so why not, right? I figured out where I could be (sort of) safely, then figured out where I could put lights out of the line of flying bikes. We went relatively early, so the skatepark was empty enough to where I could set up lighting where I needed it. The nice thing about being at a local spot that we can drive right up to is that I can bring bigger lights. Normally for BMX you can get lights close enough that you don’t need a ton of power, and smaller strobes suffice, but with an overcast day and the light changing constantly, I needed enough power that I could overpower the natural light to where I didn’t have to keep changing my exposure, and also pull out detail from the clouds when it went to full overcast. It was changing minute by minute, and without knowing when he might land it, I had to balance the light so it would look good across the board. I used two Elinchrom Ranger Speed packs, which are powerful enough to do the job, and fast enough to stop the action. One light was about 5 feet to camera left, at about 4-foot high, and pointed a bit upwards so that the fall off from the light was hitting him more than anything. The main light was down below, camera right, about 20 feet away, pointed at him. Pretty simple set up, but enough power to where I could keep my same settings as he was firing out attempt after attempt.

Look closely and the T-Rex has a cigarette in it's mouth. Not an accident.

The photo turned out to be a lot of work, more so for Ben than myself. It took us two days, several hours each. No exaggeration (my photo files prove it), he did well over 350 attempts, some just “regular” feeler handplants (shown in the photos here), some can-can attempts, and a few that turned pretty ugly. A couple hours in on the first day, I wasn’t real sure it was even possible. The bike kept flying away from him when he’d take his foot off. The clouds were coming in and out. It would start to drizzle here and there, so he’d have the pressure of getting it done before the rain, and before the skatepark got crowded. After hundreds of perfect feeler handplants (which two months prior probably would have been a cover) and some fairly committed attempts at the can-can, he crashed hard. A good hipper. That was the end of that. At this point the skatepark was filling up with people, my lights were in the way and loosing charge, and he was hurt enough to shut us down. He’d gotten close, but I still wasn’t confident it was possible, or if he’d try it again in the future.

A couple weeks of healing from the hipper, and rebuilding confidence, we went back to try again. I’d shown him the photos of the first attempts, which was enough to get him psyched up to try it again. We also had gotten some pretty good assurance from the magazine based on those samples that if he got it done, there was a good likelyhood it would be a cover. That was enough motivation for Ben. Another cloudy day, with showers creeping in. Turns out aside from a new pair of shoes he’s wearing the same outfit. I assume he changed his close in that couple weeks at some point, though. Another couple hours of attempts, and I was getting less and less confident. My lighting set-up was the same, since we were happy with the previous day’s outtakes, but as the attempts dragged on, my power packs were getting drained. Having your flashes die before the shot gets done is not a good thing.

Notice the difference in the sky over just a few minutes. This change was constant.

I didn’t actually realize how dangerous the trick was until he missed his hand on one attempt. He’d done so many handplants at this point it was starting to seem basic. But you’re flinging yourself into an upside down position, and when he missed his hand it sent him totally upside down. Despite the bike almost killing me, he landed in the transition perfectly enough that he didn’t really get hurt. He did just barely miss his shoulder on the coping which would have been ugly, and a few degrees more upside down it would have been even more ugly. Until that point, despite getting hurt on the previous day, what we were doing seemed relatively safe.

All of a sudden you could see the trick start to click in his head. He found the spot in the trick where it was starting to come together, and you could tell he was getting closer and closer. Then he landed one, but put his foot down and we were both in shock. I think he was also a little mad for letting himself put his foot down, but right there we knew it was possible. So he kept going. You could tell it was going to rain any minute. 20 or so tries later he rode away perfect. A guy walking out of the City building across the way in a suit yelled “That was awesome, man.” He really had no idea. Just as Ben was riding over to check out the shot on the back of my camera it started to rain. The timing couldn’t have been any better. As soon as we got all the gear packed up it started pouring.

When you’re shooting something no one has ever done before you don’t know what to expect, or how to give them advice on how to fix what they’re doing. Sometimes you can help people out by telling them if they’re going to fast, or they need to go faster, but with this one I really had no idea. We’d never seen it done, so we didn’t know what the position needed to be to get back on the bike. Fortunately the rain held, the flashes kept firing, and Ben walked away with a bit of limp, but a happy limp.

Check out Dig Magazine Issue 76 for Ben’s cover, interview, and photos by myself and Shad Johnson. You can also download a Dig iphone app from the Apple App Store and check out the mag there when the new issue is up. I think that one is $1.99.

Gear used:
Nikon d300
Nikon 10.5mm fisheye
3 Pocket Wizard Multimax Transceivers
2 Elinchrom Ranger AS-RX Speed Packs with A heads and reflectors

I miss the era when magazines pushed the limits. In general, that time is gone. A newsstand (albeit a very thin newsstand) full of grid driven formulaic publications. No fluidity. No experimentation. All based on formulas. Maybe it’s a bit of nostalgia, but the print publications of today just don’t push the boundaries on the visual and editorial concept end.

There are magazine formulas. Countless meetings on sales driving cover-lines, theories about placing numbers on the cover to draw female buyers, logo placement for newsstand position. The result is a see of the same. Gone are the days of Raygun, Bikini, Speak, The Face, Plazm, Emigre, and others.

There are some great, clean designs on the newstand. Magazines doing nice things. But there is no wonder going into the next spread. The grid throughout is forced, and typography is predictable. We need a new breed to push the limits. I’m not hoping for another grunge era, or another David Carson. I’m hoping for something that creates an edge. There are still a (very small) handful that fill that void.

One of my current favorites that continues to draw me in is Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story. I hesitate to call Zoetrope a magazine as it breaks the mold and contrasts the formulas. This publication of short stories features up-and-coming writers as well as established legends like Coppola, Woody Allen, David Foster Wallace, along Anthony Bourdain. Each issue features a guest designers —and that doesn’t always mean a graphic designer — like Chip Kidd, Lou Reed, Julian Schnabel, Mike Mills, Wim Wenders, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Gus Van Sant. Filmmakers, musicians, artists, designers, the publication has a different visual voice with each issue.

In a stand full of formulas… full of grid driven Helvetica headlines, Zoetrope: All-story is a great departure into a more experimental realm of publication design. You can subscribe online for $24 or pick them up at better news stands and bookstores. I came across Zoetrope for the first time a couple years back, and since then I’ve found each issue to be a refreshing departure from the norm. If you’re looking for a magazine the follows the rules of publication design to a T, you won’t enjoy this, but if you’re looking for something outside the box, pick it up now.

You can check out my previous post on magazines of a another era here.

You can see some of the magazines I’ve designed in the past here.

In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.

A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some.

My time at Stuff was the tail end of when magazines were still made the “old way.” These days, everything is done on a computer, and layouts barely see paper until it hits a press plate. Printers don’t even have a real pre-press (film to plate) phase anymore. Everything is direct to plate. For this reason, it’s gotten a LOT cheaper to make a magazine.

So there I was, waxing layouts to boards, shooting things with a Stat camera to halftone them, and repeatedly stabbing myself with X-acto knives (not on purpose). But, somehow, I was making a magazine. The old fashioned way. As time went on I started pushing things farther and farther with typography, bringing things as far as the publisher and the parent company would let me. I had a lot of leeway. This was a time when Neville Brody, David Carson, Art Chantry, Martin Venezky, P. Scott Makela and others were making some really progressive typographic magazines. The Face, Beach Culture, Blue, Speak, Raygun, Bikini, Sweater, etc. These were magazines that where pushing visual interpretation as far as they could, offending a lot of design purist, and making a lot of others happy.

Stuff went all over the board as I had pretty much open reign to fuck things up. Some of it, looking back is really terrible, but most of the stuff I hate is the stuff that wasn’t experimental. Some of it is still some of my favorite work that I’ve done. I was blowing things up on the copier, running things through the fax machine, even taking other people’s trash from the Stat camera room and reusing it. I started learning photography at Stuff as well, so really, that magazine was my education. There is no better way to learn than doing something. While I was going to school during that time, the real stuff I was learning was at the magazine. In school you learn the rules. At Stuff I could break the rules. Sometimes people got in arguments over it.

In the middle of 1998 they hired a full-time art director. I continued to design the poetry page (Re:Verse) for a few months, but I otherwise focused more on school, and the magazine I was starting with Brian Tunney, Nine-Ninety. Later that year the publisher who gave me all the opportunities along the way was fired, and ultimately the magazine was rolled into a nightlife publication called Stuff@Night. This is a collection of work from “The Stuff Years.” Still some of my favorite work, over ten years later. Thanks to Robert Birnbaum and the rest of the crew for some good times.

If you missed it before, you can also watch the film I made on Jordan for Level Magazine, here.

The October 5 issue of ESPN the Magazine has some of my work in it. The subscriber copies contain the EXPN supplement (not available on newsstands) which features two of my shots as shown above (Dean Dickinson as a two-pager). You can see the photo of Dean in my original post from the day after the shoot here as well. That’s one of my favorite photos I’ve shot in a while, so I’m glad it’s getting around. The other photo is of Chet Blacksmith, on the green rails on Burnside in Portland. Thanks to Brian Tunney for sending these out.

If you rode freestyle BMX in the late 80s and then the early 90s, Freestylin‘ magazine and later Go were your bibles (I’ve written about them previously here). When Go folded in the early 90s, a void was left in the freestyle community. Young BMXers/entreprenuer’s Hal Brindley and Steve Buddendeck were doing a line of t-shirts called 2B Homecooked Garments at the time, and the brand was picking up in popularity. Hal saw an opportunity and the need to fill the void, and with the help of Happy Zine maker Jimmy Deaton, produced one issue of The Cookbook. The Cookbook was a black and white, offset printed publication with a DIY aesthetic.

Hal put up $5000 of his own money (Print costs have decreased since those days. Now publications skip many of the expensive pre-press phases and go direct to plate.) to produce 10,000 copies of The Cookbook, which he mailed out for free. In return he requested that anyone who liked the ‘zine send a dollar. Anyone who liked it and wanted to recieve the next one, send another dollar. I sent two dollars, and Hal deserved it.

About a year later the first issue of Brad McDonald’s Ride BMX Magazine came out. Issue Two of The Cookbook never surfaced. Ultimately it was the Cookbook that made me realize producing a magazine on your own was attainable, and led to me working in the publishing/media industry, and even producing a few of my own magazines (here and here). After the jump are some details of the first and only issue of The Cookbook that I shot with my iPhone.

Jordan Hufnagel: Custom Bike Builder from Souney Media on Vimeo.

Above is the video with bike builder Jordan Hufnagel I made for Level Mag a couple weeks ago and mentioned in a previous post. I’ve been holding off posting it here so people would check it out at the Level site. Now I’m putting it here for the sake of my own archives, but if you’ve not checked out the feature on Level you should, there is a photo gallery as well which I was pretty happy with.

Chris Noble is relaunching Level Mag tomorrow has relaunched Level Mag in online form. Level was one of my favorite print magazines a few years back (I wrote about it here). Level was a UK based magazine about “All Things Good” and inspired a few modern titles like Anthem and Monster Children to get their publications going. Unfortunately they shelved Level after 11 issues, but Chris kept the rights to the name when they sold 4130 Publishing a few years back. Now living up here in Portland, Chris is relaunching Level online. I contributed a photo gallery and video feature on Portland custom bike builder Jordan Hufnagel (seen above). Pretty happy with how that one turned out. The Hufnagel Photo Gallery is here and the video is here.

I’ve also got an iPhone photo feature up on Defgrip today, so check that out.