The story of print culture shows that new media technologies do not replace older ones. The development of new technologies instead sets up an environment in which technologies and cultural practices are continually redefined. Contemporary typographic practice in print magazines is experiencing an ‘evolution’ that reflects the widespread integration of digital technologies into society, most notably computers.
Computers have enabled the simplistic production of typographic texts that are loaded with expressiveness, dynamism and meaning, far beyond being any simple transparent carrier of the word. Such practices are common in magazines like - Wired, Ray Gun, Rolling Stone, Cream, Mu, The Face, Émigré, Speak and Blah Blah Blah. The growing importance of typographic design in these magazines, and their appropriation by more established publications and advertising, is a sign of a culture that is becoming increasingly literate in complex, high speed, fluid, multimodal digital media technologies.
The current shift in magazine typographic design therefore is from a linear structured presentation of one-thing-at-a-time, to multi-layered, fragmented and dynamic visual-verbal enhanced presentations common to computers, television and video games. Rick Poynor argues that what was radical about the design of Ray Gun was "the transportation of a televisual atmosphere to the static medium of print, as print struggles franatically to catch up with and compete with the computer and TV screen."(1) Integrating signifying practices from digital-electronic and print environments is a move that is considerably underpinned by the commercial magazine’s economic agenda to seduce and sustain audiences when ‘new’ digital entertainment and communications technologies are swaying audiences from print media. Recently many print magazines have developed digital versions on the Internet.(2) The vast majority of these however, are generally mere teasers or advertisements for the printed product rather than taking on the role as the digital replacement for the printed magazine.
The development and emergence of print magazine typographic designs that reflect the signifying practices of dynamic digital media has helped to sustain the life of print in an increasingly technologically immersed culture. These changes in typographic practice are also subsequently influencing a reorientation of the nature of reading, writing, communication and meaning-making, in a manner that reflects this contemporary technologically integrated culture.
1) R.Poynor, ‘Alternative By Design,’ Ray Gun, Out of Control, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997, p.233.
2) Some print magazines that have online digital versions are:
Ray Gun www.raygun.com
Wired - www.hotwired.com
Emigré – www.émigré.com
Speak – www.speakmag.com
Mu – http://hedgehog.highway1.com.au/~mu/
