Thought I’d pop my head around to share a sneak-peak of the LWL overhaul. Neatness all-round!

First it was I.D. and now it’s Grafik. Grafik’s publisher, Adventures in Publishing, have decided to liquidate the company, so sadly Grafik won’t be able to print their magazine anytime soon. Fingers crossed. Hopefully they come back.

Colorcubic is a multidisciplinary creative studio founded by Michael John and Christy Lai. There are sneak peeks of a great deal of eclecticism going on here, but I’d been led to hear of them from seeing a post they did on this totally compelling publication – Intelligence in Lifestyle (featured here – check out that mast head for starters!). I was a bit gutted to discover their website is still under construction, but you can see more of their work on their Behance page here. So credit where credit is due, it turns out the magazine’s rich aesthetic is the brainchild of a one Francesco Franchi, who’s further delights you can see here on the Flickr stream.

With Modern Publicty just gone live, amongst other recent sightings, I thought it none the more apt to throw in a reiterance of the achievements of Ken Leung – the founding art director of one of my all-time favourite publications. A true purveyor of structure and simplicity over style, with a sensible and well-informed design philosophy to match; he’s been a very busy boy since fleeing the nest. GraphicHug has been an avid follower of his work for some time and we continue that trait, with just as much enthusiasm as when fingers first touched Monocle’s multi-substrate pages.

With the future of editorial design being somewhat in question lately, many predications have come to light concerning how magazine designers foresee the future of editorial design in general. Add the wintry economic climate to the rise in popularity of blogs and online publishing and right there; designers have a motivation to start thinking more carefully about the quality of their magazines – both in content and format. To quote Nicolas Bourquin – founder and creative director of onlab, who are responsible for the vastly popular Domus publication – ‘We are experiencing a fascinating epoch. its a hard time for magazines, but a fabulous time for editorial design.’ A paradox, you might think.

So it comes as a delight and by no means surprise that this April’s Creative Review has undergone a complete redesign. Looking better and demonstrating in many ways how it now performs better, without attempting to ‘outdo’ it’s online counter-part. Being an editorial design enthusiast and lover of all things in print, I look forward to seeing how other popular publications adapt in this way and what alterations and improvements they implement, to swerve the so-called inevitable ‘death of print’.