Drop Dead Interesting.-

 

I've just read an article which is got me the peak of inspiration for my work to proceed ; in Creative Review on 'CHANGING TIMES'
Back in those days when the colour magazine was king, the Sunday Times's only real rival for the crown as best newspaper magazine
in the world was the Sunday New York Times Magazine. There the story has turned out rather differently: The New York Times
Magazine is alive, award-winning and its magazine publishing expanding.

"The New York Times is not just for New Yorker," says British-born art director Luke Hayman "It's the largest metropolitan newspaper
in the United States and is often regarded as a national newspaper of record and an authoritative reference for current events. The
Times lives large in the world of its audience. Many are life-long readers with a strong affection for the publication. The newspaper
still remains an archaic and old fashioned design but the magazine is far more contemporary and graphically vibrant. The photography
in particular is progressive and at te forefront of US editorial art direction."

A key part of magazine's success is the role of Janet Froelich : creative director for the last three years, and art director of the
magazine for about 15 years before that. She's been the Times for more than 20 years, coming to design after an early period as a
fine artist and then becoming involved with a group of women artist producing a publication. "I discovered I loved working with type
and editors and photographers," she says. "I think of myself as a journalist. I think editorial design is a different discipline : you're
not selling anything. It's more intimate relationship with the reader. Alomost everything we do is about narrative and storytelling. And
as with most good stories, the route is circuitous and accomodates complex ideas, off-beat solutions, layers of meaning." Froelich is
unfailing in her acknowledgement that a magazine is also a team effort, crediting her colleagues, including editor Gerald Marzorati,
art director Arem Duplessis and photo editor Kathy Ryan, in our conversation. How do you produce such a good magazine?

"If you hire good people it's easy." she says.

"I've worked quite collaboratively with my editors : I've been blessed to work with some of the more visually sophisticated editors on
the planet. They have made me a much better art director and I am really grateful for that. Same goes for the photo team. With
readers, it's different. You don't really know them, but in some peculiar way, you feel you know them, and you learn to respect them.
It's a little dance you do, giving them a bit of clarity in exchange for the chance to push the envelope here and there."

With a near two-million Sunday print-run, it still feels like a classic newspaper magazine, with its large page size and printed on that
thin, shiny paper by the gravure process that makes the colour in the pictures look richer and deeper. Regular items are at the front
and back with a run of features in the centre. What distinguishes the magazine is the quality of its elements : writing, photography,
infographics and illustration. They are framed in simple, direct layouts that aren't afraid of text, or feel that articles must be broken
by a fact box every 250 words. There's a family of typefaces, based around the Cheltenham and Stymie fonts that have been used
by the main newspaper for decades....

"We're the only non-formatted weekly," says Froelich. "The others, like Time and Newsweek, need a rigid template for the type and
the pictures to get the thing out every week... here we don't do that. In a regular issue each article has, to a certain extent, to fight
for itself. In a special issue you can have a rhythm and interaciton between elements to tell a more complex story."

Covers are equally varied. "We have the good fortune not to sell on the newsstand -- the magazine just drops out of the paper. So
the design is not driven by newsstand sales. That said, our competition is still the rest of the paper, and simple graphics always
make the best cover. There is no formulaic cover solution because there are so many unique subjects. Though I wish we had more
faces on our covers -- and a few more women -- as they are more engaging, I respect the fact that it is the editor's decision about
what makes a cover story : he has pretty clear ideas on that. He is, however, always open to conversation about what makes a
strong cover image, and how to best convey the basic idea of the piece."

(Right to this line, here I found my inspiration became to pause with the selling approach of introducing the new thang :D)

Froelich's biggest innovation at The Times is to have taken the range of "Part II" magazines on subjects like fashion, design and
travel -- that the Sunday paper also published -- and transform them in 2004 into T : The New York Times Style Magazine. This new
magazine, published 15 times a year under editor Stefano Tonchi with David Sebbah as senior art director and Chris Martinez as art
director, is so popular with brands like Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana and Kate Spade that it's sometimes running at 300 perfect-
bound pages.

"T is a luxury magazine that caters to the reader who is interested in visual culture," says Froelich. "It accomplishes its mission by
commissioning extraordinary photography and publishing content focused on the intersection of art and style. And while a huge part
of the job at the weekly New York Times Magazine was to make inherently non-visual stories visual, the pleasure of designing the T
Magazine is that the content is the visual. It's almost a sinful pleasure to sink myself into these images, to tell stories in a purely visual
fashion. Typographically, the spirit of T is lighter and more stylish and also a bit ironic. But the two magazines are related and we have
kept a typographic family going, just landing differently in each of the magazines."

From the black letter T of the daily paper's titlepiece that became the magazine's logo (and reappears in a different form from lace to
chocolate cake in each issue as a section opener) to creating a magazine where the editorial stands apart from the world's most image
-conscious brands, T's art direction is a mix of appropiateness, wit, sheer beauty and clever page planning.

"When I redesigned the T magazine," Froelich continues, "I looked to European publications for inspiration. Many American magazines
had become over-designed, with too much decoration and too many competing elements on the page. I looked to French, Italian and

Scandinavian publications for ideas on how to make a powerful modern page."

As Froelich and I talk in the summer, the New York Times is in the process of moving a few blocks away from its historic but utilitarian
headquarters just off Times Square to a shining steel and glass tower designed by Renzo Piano : the move is sumbolic of a new strategy
too. The integration of print and online is the future for the orgazinisation : The Times website is already one of the best produced by
a newspaper.

(Mine too, we gotta fight for this hard-beating competition of edgeless field)

But T Magazine is in the process of developing its own, unique web presence. "We're all thinking about that now," says Froelich. "This is
a huge project with a delicated team and the promise of began to work on it in-house, now we're working with an outside company,
Createthegroup. Designing for the web involves a unique set of skills. I don't easily think in time and space, I think of something solid,
located on a piece of paper, so online is a new and fluid experience and I'm really enjoying this challenge."



It's clear the next task is not just to be the best newspaper magazine in print, but the best online too.....

Phew! Kinda relief to put all this stuff and stuff it in my blog :D Like the old man called himself everybody's Rich Dad said that
"Work to learn, not just work for money" Well, I've no problem to be in between of these two ; like managing is a basic instinct
of all human being.. isn't it?



Formless is another form,
MARRY CHRISTMAS EVERYDUCKY..

IF I WAS YOUR WOMAN AND YOU WERE MY MAN. YOU'D HAVE NO OTHER WOMAN, YOU'D BE WEAK AS A LAMP.
IF YOU HAD THE STRENGTH TO WALK OUT MY DOOR. MY LOVE WOULD OVER RULE MY SENSE AND I'D CALL YOU BACK FOR MORE ;)
SHE TEARS YOU DOWN DARLIN' SAYS YOU'RE NOTHING AT ALL BUT I WILL PICK YOU UP DARLIN' WHEN SHE LETS YOU FALL CAUSE
YOU'RE LIKE A DIAMOND BUT SHE TREATS YOU LIKE GLASS....

YET YOU BEG HER TO LOVE YOU BUT ME YOU WON'T ASK....

LIFE IS SO CRAZY AND LOVE IS UNKIND BECAUSE SHE WAS FIRST DARLIN'
WILL SHE HANG ON YOUR MIND?
YOU'RE PART OF ME BUT YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT,
I'M WHAT YOU NEED BUT I'M TOO AFRAID TO SHOW IT....

IF I WERE YOUR WOMAN,
IF I WAS YOUR WOMAN............................... HERE'S WHAT I'D DO ;





'I WOULD NEVER NEVER NEVER STOP LOVING YOU'

 

Well, honey it's just kinda state of mind anyway. People can go wild sometimes even you definitely sure you are honest in love,
yeah, person like me.. But I decide not to get any further on detail or anything, just in case, I need some preservation also because
ain't nothing wrong occur.. It's just ; I'm not able to keep it alone :D

Just a state of mind_____________________________________________________________________________________.-

NERD IS THE WORD,
IS THE WORD THAT YOU HEARD,
IT'S GOT A GROOVE, IT'S GOT A MEANING..::

NERD IS THE TIME, IS THE PLACE, IS THE MOTION,










NERD IS THE WAY WE ARE FEELING______________________________ 

On the very past weekend I found so many things to write about, to pass on the story of what's going on
with my entire week-in-week-out :D

It's like our mutual habit, between me and my nerdy boyfriend, to go out or find something interesting to do...

In this kinda process, simply but not simpler, when we spent our times more and more together. Like we practised
thinking and feeling about things together. Things that happened to either of us individually we now strive to deal with
together as something that belonged to both of us.

Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. But we enjoyed the fresh, new process of trial and error. And even violent
collisions we could forget about in each other's arms. Like all the music festival that we've been through this little long weekend,
three in a row ; but what got me the most is ..

This FRESHtival___________________________________________________________________ and ...
My favourite music band got a live performance also, the venue is incredibly stand out on the way of foot
-path, give me that fresh element of feeling. Not just sa-bai sa-bai excuse-thai-style ;) We're barely know
much about this event until my friend ; khun issara spelled it to me after a disappointed moment from
Khao-Yai, yeah I cannot be there but he said hey! your talkless gonna be there. Then why not going ;)



FRESH themselves are a group of student in art school from the Deapartment of Communication Design of the
School of Architecture and Design, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, in collaboration with
Bangkok CODE. FRESH, from what I can recall is not the first-time-held on 2007, it's an international festival of
contemporary video art and short film. The festival features recent work that is fresh from the artist studio.
The works to be shown present a variety of styles and ideas.

I like many ideas from their short films, somehow this group of youngster got not only talent but a mind to tell the
story. Like talking to someone, and the more you talk, you fallen in love :)

And I went to the last day on Saturday, I also like the way of DJing by WRONG DISCO, without alcohol I felt like
artistic hormones from someone can really pass on to me definitely :)

But Talkess got me breathless...
I like the concept of being this shut-up-kinda-kind from the beginning and the appreciation growing more through a lot of times
listening to their record. This Talkless band drawn me from the lead singer who shared the same interest on Murakami's work.
She's kinda weird like she always says but 'Fon' to me, is a lively kind of girl when I listen to her voice but yeah weird!
She's also like a little lost sputnik at the same times.

From SO ON DRY FLOWER, a very interesting minority of music community on their own, this electroacoustic plus experimental style
create a profound sound to me...

even we called it dot dot dot...








It's like quiet maybe a new cool loud ;)

What am I?
A music jerk!

Sometimes ten minutes is not ten minutes. It can stretch and shrink.
That was something I did know for sure___________________ Yuck!

Is it possible for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person,
but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves
that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

I started thinking seriously about such things a week after I finished my deadline (again).
Never until then - but never in a whole course of my life - had I grappled with questions like this.
And why not? Perhaps because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to
think about myself.

Something trivial got me started, just as most important things in the world have small beginnings.
He met her again, right in front of me, the girl that he's been expecting to see as a girlfriend (This is
what he told me when we were getting together and I needed to know anything about him, opinion
towards also) They got a little talking, a little laughing, a little frustration and she got a one track mind
to see me ; because I've ever told her that we should be friend and ACT LIKE FRIEND.

OK I told myself, stay cool, keep it simple and low-key natural. Don't get excited. As they were talking
not too far from me who hang with my pals and about to go somewhere else, they still keep going on
conversation ; they'd never met for so long, this is understandable to me :D

She came to me and said 'hi' that a very obvious to him; me a devil and she an angel. You can tell by
looking at me :D I said hi back as casually as I could. And in fact, I wasn't feeling bad about it. I had
had the same experience any number of times. To think about him, this situation can be tough, he knew
I don't like this kind of situation... Not only meeting, but to know one remains in one's heart is too much
for me. Not something sweet and peaceful like picking the prettiest rose in your garden for your sick
grandmother and spending the day with her, before I go way too far. I did bad to him that day, and
he forgive me :D

FORGIVE ME, FORGIVE YOU...We two always end that way, I found this kind of life refreshing. This is
nothingness that may increase for some sakes. It would have end sometimes, but until it did I was
determined to enjoy it...........

Let me break the news for you, all the yellowish people, I feel nothingness increase ;
But can nothingness increase?

The king we respect, more and more each day, I feel like why we left out the person we love... As a prey ; to propaganda or
a child game. It's like we are blessing the empty shell to have long live, to be our insurance in the world of globalization.

After watching the fireworks in the sky at night, I pray that the prey I love will live as long as it gets. Morover, after the long
hours of his speech, all I can hear is the line that he kept saying to Thai people that.....











"I DON'T KNOW WHAT I CAN SAVE YOU FROM..."