Vanity Fair October 2018 : Felicity Jones by Mark Seliger

[axiomatic]

Got this in the mail today. 172 pages.

"Vanity Fair's Best-Dressed List"
P: Terry Tsiolis
S: Samira Nasr
Original portraits of Tracee Ellis Ross, Louise Neri, Lakeith Stanfield, Troye Sivan, Hailey Gates, Jeff Goldblum. Plus 37 others with stock photos

Articles about the Murphy Brown reboot, Parkland activists, Academie Francaise, Mimi Leder, the DeVos family, Jill Messick, Hemingway and his Miro painting, a Mississippi crime story

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Terrible issue, the page count says it all! She will not last if she keeps putting out such horrible issues, the entire magazine looks so try hard, and unappealing. You are not the Newsweek.etc this is NOT what I want from VF!! What are those fools over at CN thinking?!! I guess it will be another magazine they might fold, or take to digital only!

 

[tigerrouge]

This magazine has employed the same formula for decades. Cheesy Hollywood glamour is how you sucker people into buying the issue, and then you make the more serious stuff palatable by getting a celebrity writer to cover it.

Yes, the magazine did like to promote one-note obsessions, but on the page, people like Christopher Hitchens and Dominick Dunne made those issues compelling. If you didn't agree with them, you still read on.

And how many features in the magazine eventually found their way onto the big screen? More than you imagine.

For Vanity Fair to survive, the new team have to put their own spin on the formula. Yes, bring us new cover stars - but make them compelling. Yes, you have a greatly reduced budget - but there's no shortage of hungry talent out there, wanting their moment to shine.

This magazine currently feels like the printed embodiment of a new start in the office, who turns up wearing a starchy suit in neutral colours, trying to sound intellectual, because they want to be taken seriously. This magazine is trying too hard to be a "good girl".

I'm subscribed until November 2019, so they've already got my money, and my support where it counts (those all-important numbers). Now, what am I going to get out of this deal?

 

[YohjiAddict]

The typography is very "free magazine at airplane", so very dated but I'll take it over the sans-serif ones they've used before.

 

[tigerrouge]

I finally received my subscription copy today - the UK version is 146 pgs.

This issue comes with the On Time watch supplement, which has been going for years and remains as dull as ever. If magazines are on their way out, then a magazine about an item that a lot of people don't wear any more is hardly going to be a big inducement for sales on the newsstand. But I suppose watches are like handbags, there are always going to be people willing to pay thousands to be seen with the 'right' one.

Flicking through it, the page design is still an eyesore, with too much going on. You don't need five different sizes of the same font on each page.

They also have a terrible habit of adding lines in really unnecessary ways. They have an article nicely spaced in three columns - and then they run a line down the white space between them.

Even worse, they don't stick to the same type of line - in one article, it's a skinny line, then it's a thick black marker line, and in another article, the lines are suddenly in blue. STOP LITTERING THE PAGES WITH LINES. The white space between columns is not an unmarked highway that needs traffic directions painted on it.

When it comes to page design, if you're consistent with the basic elements, it signals confidence about the contents, and the overall purpose of the magazine.