magazines

Before planning your next trip, be sure to review the newly crowned winners of the Travel + Leisure Design Awards, which will be featured in the magazine’s March issue (on newsstands next Friday). The 2012 winners range from the Zaha Hadid-designed Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi to the ultimate in travel-friendly apparel (the 1964 by Scott James blazer and Issey Miyake‘s eminently packable origami folding clothing). Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including the city-friendly Fiat 500 (best car) and Leica’s drool-worthy D-Lux 5 Titanium Set (best camera). Preston Scott Cohen‘s smart and sculptural Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art got the nod for best museum (edging out the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum, alas), and two NYC destinations—Jane’s Carousel Pavilion in Brooklyn and the Freitag Store—won for best public space and best retail space, respectively. Meanwhile, 2012 T+L Design Champion H.E. Mubarak Hamad Al Muhairi, the driving force behind Abu Dhabi’s transformation and evolution as a cultural and design capital, joins past honorees such as ubercollector Micky Wolfson, André Balazs, and Amanda Burden. Tasked with choosing “the best new examples of design” in 20 categories was a jury moderated by Chee Pearlman that included architect Billie Tsien, fashion designer Derek Lam, High Line pioneer Robert Hammond, and artist Michele Oka Doner. Keep reading for the full list of winners.
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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Brad Goreski wasn’t always the beacon of style he is today. In our Media Beat interview, the star of It’s a Brad, Brad World revealed that he had to overcome a lack of access (he’s originally from a tiny town in Canada) and the doubts of others to climb to the top. One college career counselor, in particular, was quite taken aback by a young Goreski’s outsize ambition.

“She’s like, ‘Okay, so what do you wanna do?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get an internship at Vogue in New York.’ And she was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get an internship at Vogue. Is that possible for me to get credit and go to New York?’ And she was like, ‘If you get the internship…’ And I was like, ‘Okay!’” Goreski told us. “And I came back later with all my paperwork, and she was like, ‘Are you really going to New York?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! I’m going to work at Vogue!’”

Now, with a hit show on Bravo and Born to Be Brad: My Life in Style So Far due in bookstores in March, the taste maker credits those early work experiences for his success.

“Internships are so instrumental but, not only do you need to get them, you need to work at them,” he said.

Part 1: Breakout Styling Star Brad Goreski Takes Us Inside His Brad, Brad World
Part 2: Brad Goreski Sets the Record Straight on His Relationship with Rachel Zoe

One of the main design minds behind the sharp-looking and widely lauded pages of GQ is headed for New York. Thomas Alberty has been named design director of the weekly, which lost Chris Dixon to Vanity Fair in September. The appointment is another boon for the art side of New York‘s masthead, following the recent appointment of Christopher Anderson as the inaugural photographer-in-residence.

“Tom is a hugely talented designer and maybe more importantly a very smart one, and I am thrilled he has accepted our invitation to become the next design director of New York,” said editor-in-chief Adam Moss in a statement issued Friday. “There is a long history of big design talents at this magazine’s helm, and I feel confident that tradition will continue.” Alberty has been with GQ since 2004, most recently as art director, and previously worked at New York, Travel + Leisure, and Men’s Journal. He begins in his new post on February 6 and will join art director Randy Minor, photography director Jody Quon, and the rest of the magazine’s visual team to create what Moss describes as “the next, exciting incarnation of New York.”

New year, new masthead additions! Over at Fortune, Emily Kehe (pictured) has been doing the heavy lifting on the art side since August, when creative director John Korpics left the Time Inc. title to get sporty, as vice president and creative director for print and digital media for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. Kehe jumped into designing Fortune covers and layouts, overseeing the iPad edition, and managing the department, according to managing editor Andy Serwer. “So much so that when it came time to find a permanent replacement for John, and while we did consider other candidates, I really needed to look no further than a few doors down to Emily’s office,” he wrote in an e-mail announcing Kehe’s appointment as design director. A native of Colorado, she studied publication design and photography at the University of Miami School of Communication before working at publications including The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe. Kehe began her career at Fortune as a freelancer in 2008 and later returned to help Korpics with the magazine’s 2010 redesign.

And over at New York, editor-in-chief Adam Moss and photography director Jody Quon have tapped Christoper Anderson as the magazine’s first photographer-in-residence, a position created both to showcase his work and deepen New York’s commitment to original photography. “We thought that we could be the ideal outlet for Chris to explore his painter’s palette of image-making,” said Quon in a statement issued Monday by the magazine. “Chris’s commitment to journalism combined with his range of artistry makes him the perfect partner for the magazine.” Anderson, an acclaimed photographer and member of Magnum Photos, will shoot editorial work exclusively for New York on an array of subjects in a full range of styles, from photojournalism to portraiture to conceptual work. His photography will appear regularly beginning with this week’s issue, which features Anderson’s surveillance-style photos in its “Classifieds” cover story.

Remember Time Style & Design? Time launched the targeted quarterly in 2003 as an oversized glossy and pulled the plug on it in September 2009, blaming the dismal economy for what was described as a “suspension” rather than a shuttering. Now comes word that Time Style & Design will return in 2012, with sleek spring (March) and fall (September) issues that “will explore the most intriguing ideas and most influential players in the fields of fashion, art, architecture, music, travel, technology, and more” (a minimalist mock cover featuring actress Vera Farmiga is pictured at right). With a U.S. rate base of 500,000, the publication is being pitched to prospective advertisers as “impeccably crafted, with vibrant design, gorgeous photography, and smart, cogent writing.” And while the fall issue’s publication will be timed to coincide with New York Fashion Week, expect a more broad-based dose of design, style, and cultural coverage. “The previous iteration of it was probably more focused on fashion than this one will be,” Time managing editor Richard Stengel told Adweek. “In that sense, this represents the kinds of things I’m more interested in, the things I think the Time reader is more interested in.” Meanwhile, watch this space for new Style & Design online offerings.

Just a couple of years after his then-ubiquitous and not-yet controversial poster of President Obama made the cover, Shepard Fairey is back at it again for Time‘s Person of the Year edition. The artist has designed the cover for the annual issue, wherein this time they picked “The Protestor”, once again skipping an individual person and instead focus more of a concept. If you’re familiar with Fairey’s work, you’ll of course recognize it immediately, with his familiar propaganda-esque illustration and coloring. Christopher Knight at the LA Times thinks the match between Fairey and Time is a perfect fit, though not at all in a good way, calling the Fairey a “designer dissident” and the only artist who “is really suitable for the job of creating the publication’s inevitably ironic cover.” Knight gets more critical from there. Here’s a bit:

The style oozes cozy, collectible nostalgia. On the cover of Time, the schmaltzy result trivializes the portentous power — and authentic potential — of the “Arab spring,” Occupy Wall Street and whatever might-or-might-not be breaking now in Russia. Questioning authority never looked more corporate and conventional.

Criticism aside, let’s just hope Fairey made sure to get the photo rights behind the illustration more squared away this time around.

This just in: Dwell is a wrapping up a busy 2011 with two new hires. The San Francisco- and New York-based shelter magazine—turned burgeoning media empire—has poached its new photo director, Anna Alexander (at top right) from Conde Nast’s Wired, while senior editor Kelsey Keith (at bottom right) will bring her experience as the founding editor-in-chief of Architizer and New York editor of Curbed.com to Dwell‘s front-of-the-book section, In The Modern World, and to features for the magazine. Other recent additions to the Dwell masthead include publisher Brenda Saget and art director Alejandro Chavetta, hired from San Francisco Magazine. Look for the freshly renovated team to hit the ground running in 2012.

A high-profile controversy has bubbled up late this week in a fairly surprising place: game design. Earlier in the week, Wired conducted an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo designer responsible for titles like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda. Therein, the magazine seemed to grab a red hot exclusive in learning that Miyamoto was planning to retire, leaving Nintendo to go work on his own, perhaps start something like a new game company on his own. However, by yesterday, the game company was on serious damage control, adamantly denying, as their shares on the stock market fell because of the news, that there was any truth to it whatsoever. Turns out, it was perhaps all just a mix of a fairly devious headline on Wired‘s part (“Nintendo’s Miyamoto Stepping Down, Working on Smaller Games”), and an audience who perhaps didn’t read beyond it, or didn’t quite get what he was trying to say in the rest of the piece. In it, Miyamoto fairly clearly states that he’s merely using threats of retirement to encourage younger developers to realize he won’t always be there and they’ll need to start doing some innovating of their own. “The reason why I’m stressing that is that unless I say that I’m retiring, I cannot nurture the young developers,” he tells the magazine. So while he might be making a move within Nintendo, the designer, unless he’s pulling a Will Alsop-style bait and switch, isn’t moving away just yet.

From left, David Kleinberg, George Beylerian, Nada Andric, and Patricia Urquiola.

The Interior Design Hall of Fame has welcomed four new members to its storied ranks: interiors whiz Nada Andric of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, importer and curator George Beylerian (founder of Material ConneXion and Culture & Commerce), interior designer David Kleinberg, and Patricia Urquiola, whose Milan-based design studio focuses on product design, architecture, and interiors. Interior Design honored the inductees last night at its 27th annual Hall of Fame awards gala, held at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Meanwhile, tonight the magazine moves down to Hall of Famer Frank Gehry‘s IAC building for its Best of Year Awards. Among the products and projects up for the honor are Andre Kikoski‘s warehouse-to-retail Wyckoff Exchange, the Rockwell Group-designed Untitled restaurant at the Whitney Museum, Karim Rashid‘s “Woopy” chair, and a pendant light from Yellow Goat Designs known as “Fat Fuzzy Thing.” Look for a full list of winners in the December issue of Interior Design.

Rina Stone loves a design challenge. Before taking the creative helm of InStyle in 2007, the Boston University grad held a series of positions that had redesigns as their initial focus, from helping GQ freshen up its look and reimagining US Magazine as a weekly to defining the visual identity of Tina Brown‘s smart yet short-lived Talk and finally, updating People. “That was as much a design challenge as it was reimagining a workflow that could allow for more breaking news without sacrificing quality in design and photography,” says Stone, for whom InStyle was a natural next step. “My previous experience had been celebrity-focused, but fashion is truly where my heart is,” she explains. “It was a perfect place to blend the two.” Read on as Stone offers a peek into life at the glam monthly, outlines a design dream project, and shares what it was like working with a couture-clad Miss Piggy for this month’s issue.

1. The look of InStyle has evolved but maintained a clean and bold yet glamorous aesthetic that has spawned many imitators. How would you describe the visual identity of the magazine at this point in time?
InStyle is playful, luxurious and clear. We deliver content with ease and authority. The reader should feel inspired to try something new after reading an issue.

2. What do you consider your greatest challenge as creative director of InStyle?
With a circulation as large as ours, it’s important to be able to create a widely appealing look that is inspiring to many women and a mix of ages, backgrounds, and styles. It’s also crucial to deliver at least one WOW in every issue.

3. What is your greatest graphic design/publication design pet peeve?
Snapping to the grid.

4. Was was your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
Shooting Miss Piggy. A definite highlight. What a diva! She refused to remove her pearl necklace and who knew she always must wear gloves? Raiding her glove wardrobe was a blast.
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