IN THE WORLD OF MAGAZINE DESIGN, UGLY IS THE NEW COOL.
By Bernie Martin

If you fancy telling the story of style, one of the easiest ways to do it would be to chart the changing design of magazines. Not all of them of course, just the ones that set the agenda for their particular era. Think of how, in the late 1970's ripped & Torn, Sniffin Glue and other British punk fanzines trashed design convention by mixing amateurish type and dodgily photocopied images. 

Then, in the early 80's, came The Face, whose art director, Neville Brody, created the editorial equivalent of postmodernist architecture by mixing historic and contemporary typefaces and blowing them up into sumptuous, often illegible images.
A decade later, David Carson captured the cynical spirit of grunge in Ray Gun, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based music magazine. He splattered its pages with cacophonies of fonts and once printed an interview with Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats, a typeface consisting of incomprehensible (to most of us) symbols, because he thought it too boring for anyone to bother reading.

The last few years have seen the reign of what we "I will call the Super-purist Style." That's the refined aesthetic of cool European magazines, like fantastic Man in Amsterdam and purple Fashion in Paris, with elegant serif type face (the old-fashioned sort with squiggles at the ends of the letters) floating gracefully in lots, of white space, like a graphic take on Apple's iPod or Prada's chic men's cardigans.

But now everything's changing again. For those of you who've quietly enjoyed those tasteful serifs, the change may not be entirely welcome.
 
Why? The latest school of style magazine design is called "The new Ugly".  The name was coined last fall by Patrick Burgoyne, the editor of the British design magazine. Creative reviews to describe the latest issues of "Super Super" in London and 032c in Berlin. "Super Super" sets out to be the print equivalent of MySpace and the vintage looks of New Ravers: an explosion of Day-Glo colors and dramatically stretched type. Graphic buffs have tut-tutted its vulgarity, but not too strongly.  That's because: a) "Super Super" is aimed at teens and early-20-somethings, whom said buffs neither understand nor take seriously; and b) its creative director, Steve Slocombe, whose last job was designing a marginally less garish style mag, Sleazenation, can be written off as an outsider, given that he's self-taught in graphic design.

"032c" is harder to dismiss.  For one thing, it's among the more earnest Euro style magazines, with swotty essays on geopolitics published alongside Hedi Slimane fashion shoots.  For another, it was a founding member of the super-purist style, at least until its redesign last summer. And for a third, the architect of its uglification was once a high priest of super-purism, the Germany-based art director Mike Meire, who proved that the words beautiful, German and business magazine, aren't mutually contradictory by designing the beautiful German business magazine Brand Eins.

Yet the last two issues of "032c" are just as ugly as "Super Super"; if anything, they're even uglier, because they lack the teenage fizz of Slocombe's title.  Stretched type jarring color contrasts.  Oddly cropped images they're all there, all knowingly breaking the rules that Meire and his former fans learned at design school.

If you saw the layouts from "Super Super" or "032c" in a newsletter from the local Association of Bricklayers or in a "What's going on in Asbury Park this weekend" Flyer, you wouldn't think twice, says Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. 

I can abide almost all of it except the stretched typography.  It's hard to explain to a civilian as graphic designers call the rest of us. What a taboo this is in the profession.

Bloggers who cover graphics have been more than blunt in their critiques. 
But there's more to. The "New Ugly" than rattling the design establishment.  "Super Super" isn't just inspired stylistically by MySpace; it's an attempt to make print more appealing to an audience that's grown up grazing the Web for nuggets of information and random images.  Similarly, "032c's" redesign can be seen both as a challenge to the tasteful blandness of global branding and a graphic parallel to the visual whirlwind of touch technology: the images that whiz on and off the screens of our iPhones, and the graphic sophistication of games like Mass Effect.

Meire himself groans at the "New Ugly Label" It's a big misunderstanding, he says. There are different kinds of beauty. 

It's scary how limited these designers can be, "032c's" Editor Jorg Koch, doesn't seem troubled by it at all. The new ugly Collateral damage, he says with a laugh. Never complain!