Eye Magazine

Recently I have gotten into loving finding out about Graphic Design magazines and if it comes to this topic, Eye Magazine is certainly one of the biggest contemporary influences in this area. With it's recent #85 issue (that you can actually see page by page shown here), colourful design and interesting articles it is also one of the best references and study material a Graphic Design student can find. I also have a soft spot for traditional, real prints and not just internet magazines. But to continue about the Eye magazine...

According to Wikipedia, Eye magazine is
Eye magazine, the international review of graphic design, is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture.
It was first published in 1990 and it's founder is no-one else than Rick Poynor who is also the editor of the first 24 issues. He also contributes to the magazine and on its website you can find a part called 'Critique' which contains short articles by Poynor on various different topics. Straight away, the first one is very worth reading as is called Words and Pictures talking.

(...I mean, seriously, how can you not like a magazine who has this statement on its pages)

In the case of Eye magazine there is not much to say about its history, the most interesting thing (in my opinion) the covers and content speaks for themselves and have to be discovered by a curious reader. Therefore I've decided to find out a bit more about its contributors.

Let's start with Rick Poynor himself. Rick Poynor is not a Graphic Designer himself but he is more of a glue and initiator of everything that goes around this topic. His main profession is a writer who focuses mostly on visual culture. 

His major works are No more rules, Typography Now: The Next Wave, Typographica and More Dark Than Shark. He was a co-ordinator of First things first 2000 Manifesto initiated by AdBusters and is also a co-founder of Designobserver.com. As well as Eye Magazine he is also a columnist in Print, another of a very high quality reading for designers. 

 Another famous contributor to the Eye Magazine is Stefan Sagmeister who's name you probably could not missed at it is regularly mentioned in those circles. Sagmeister is an Austrian Graphic Designer and Typographer, co-founder of Sagmeister and Walsh. His works contain designing album covers for Lou Reed, Rolling Stones, OK Go, Aerosmith or David Byrne. 

His motto is  "Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution."

Other of his clients include Guggenheim Museum, HBO and Time Warner.

And now to the best bit, these are some covers of the Eye Magazine.