Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Magazine madness . . .


Yesterday I went into Glasgow to sort out a few things - I had an hour to spare while the shop tried to fix our i-pod battery so went to Borders magazine department.

Ah, fatal - all the imports were just in (its work you know!) - and I am a sucker for nice photos and 101 ways with ric-rac.

Actually the aesthetic of most of the US magazines is a bit too frilly and pristine for me but in some ways that is ideal for inspiration as I can't accidentally slide into full on plagiarism (see Gigibird for an interesting post on this). The uppermost magazine is new to me - an Australian production though with Abigail Ahern's house and also somewhere very very nice and calm in the Netherlands.

Getting this bag bursting lot took 5 minutes so I went for a coffee at the hyper stylish Fifi and Ally.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link to Gigibird. Love it when you say you headed to Glasgow. We have a town called Glasgow 30 minutes from us in Bowling Green, Kentucky, US...

Gigibird said...

Yvonne of Yvestown (www.yvestown.com) has just written a post about interior magazines and how often the same houses seem continually featured.
I can’t remember who it was (sorry) did a recent post about how CL regurgitates photos – with photographic proof! (I shall surf and try and find it)
I love buying French and Belgium interior magazines when I’m on holiday over there – there are some things they do very well – gardens and conservatories.

Jane said...

The recycled images is a big issue - amongst the pile are the British magazines Period Living, Period House and Country Homes and Interiors - they all had images that I had already got cut out and pasted into my cuttings books.

I suppose that the sheer expense of photoshoots must make this inevitable - and presumably only detectable by people who read lots of magazines and have a good visual memory. I remember the post about CL - was it Nostalgia? In that case they were recycling their own photos, very very lazy - I think they do a lot of recycling within the National Magazines group. I always get a bit of a shock when I see our gaggle of chickens (originally photographed in 2004 and now inside Mr Fox's tummy) popping up in various magazines.

J
x

alice c said...

My sister has been featured a couple of times in Country Living and she is always grateful for the publicity even if the photos are recycled. You have to remember that not everyone started reading the magazine when it began - there are new readers - and customers who have never heard of you - out there waiting to be delighted!

Jane said...

Unfortunately my chickens are usually pretending to be Francine Raymond's, so no extra publicity for me.

I think it is probably only magazine junkies that notice. The CL recycling highlighted by Nostaligia (I think - still haven't checked) was that they just reprinted all the photos of a particular house with a couple of years gap and just changed the text. I do think that is a bit lazy as many people buy for the images of houses.

What is it your sister does Alice?

J
x