CMYK Magazine

GRA 110

Essay Assignment

NaRyung Kim

CMYK

CMYK magazine is one of the famous graphic design magazines for those people who are interested in graphic design. This magazine is released every three months. The first volume was published in 1996. I am going to use the 45^th volume, which is the newest, published on Oct 2009.Since the magazine is named CMYK, this magazine uses only cmyk color for the text.

The cover is filled with 25 images taken of its inside contents. It could be looked on as grunge but it still maintains a neat and crisp quality because all of the images are ordered within a rectangular grid. The end of the magazine has an interview with Christoph Niemann, the designer and illustrator and Yossi Lemel wrote a remembrance of Shigeo Fukuda who was a remarkable designer and who died on Jan 11 of this year. CMYK magazine is divided into four sections with four cmyk colors; advertising with cyan, design with magenta, photography with yellow and illustration with key, the black.

There are 20 advertising images in the advertising section. The judge of the advertising section was Kiumars “Q” Gourki, the principal at animal creative. He says that he congratulates the students for their excellent work and he wants students to keep the good ideas coming. Most of the advertisements are for magazine ads, but there are also street advertising, outdoor advertising and ambient advertising too. Each advertising image is numbered in cyan color and each one has a little descriptive information such as client and art director or copywriter. In my personal opinion, I chose the second advertising image on page 19 as the most creative and successful work. The client is Seventh Generation (Cleaning product). It is a billboard with cut-outs of Seventh Generation product shapes so that people can see the sky behind the billboard through the product shape. It works very well and leaves a strong impression because this advertising is titled Natural Solution. Even though there are still nice works on the section, overall of this advertising section is just fine and normal. It still needs more unique-idea advertising work to get people’s attention.

The next section is Design. This section’s color is magenta and the judge is Andy Hayes. He leaves the five things a design student should remember. The five things are concern yourself with being good but even more with being interesting, always stay away from the expected solution, any experience is valuable, always be aware of who the best is, and beware the trap that is your pride. In the showcase, 28 pieces of work are collected. Not only is there flat printing design such as posters, logo design and page layout but also there is three-dimensional design such as package design, book design, business card and envelope. The branding and logo design on page 32 is very clean and neat. This is a redesign of Burt’s Bees by Ah Young Kim, the designer. She rebrands and breaks everything of the original Burt’s Bees style. She says that her mission is harmony between people and nature. So she chooses the honeycomb for the logo because it represents the Burt’s Bees interrelated and interconnected global community. Moreover, she changes original Burt’s Bee’s old-fashioned yellow color scheme to warming light green to express the feeling of nature. For overall, this design part is much more successful than the advertising part.

Though the design section is turning out well, the photography part, which has image numbers in yellow, is the most successful part in this magazine. Sarah Wilmer, the judge of photography, says, “Voting on the work was really difficult.” It means there are lots of impressive pieces. She also tells the design student to approach everything with a positive and curious attitude. There are 25 photographs in this section. Even though the judge chooses the “Winnie in Pond” by Sarah Zemunski on page 44 for first place, my choice is the one on page 51 “Rd. 41” by Michael Furman. He photographs an old-abandoned wooden house with some weeds in the lower foreground to express the emptiness and desolation of places and objects that have been left and forgotten.

The last section of this magazine is an illustration. All texts of this section are black so it makes for a little bit of boring. However, the 26 images of illustrations, which are chosen by judge Victor Juhasz, are not boring at all. There are various illustration styles depending on the illustrator but these illustrations have a very strong mood. There is one piece that really I like on page 59 and is Ben Jelter’s “Red Head Extinction.” He did this work after he heard of the article that said red hair is a recessive gene and it eventually will be extinct. In his illustration, there is one red haired woman is surrounded by golden and black haired people looking off. The red haired woman is looking straight at the viewer that makes her a focal point in her glance as well as her hair. This section makes for more of a reaction in me than the design of the other sections overall.

In sum, this magazine is well structured with its title CMYK. The limited color of CMYK, simple but well organized images and layout, and the fact that there isn’t much commercial advertising makes me as the reader concentrate on its contents. The price of this magazine is fairly inexpensive. Its real price is less than ten dollars but the value of this magazine is much more than that. In addition, it is true that there is not enough detail information for each piece so it could be difficult for design beginners to fully utilize. However, the readers should know this magazine and design both are to be loved more than to be understood.