Emcee Studios – stylized as emcee – is a lifestyle and fashion platform built for discovery. Their mission statement is “social commerce powered by people”. The branding was designed with Richard Turley and Echo Wu of FOOD. Focal Maxi was originally commissioned as the workhorse typeface in their new brand system, across web and app and some in store. Focal Maxi works along a custom headline typeface based off the logo that is sparsely used. 

Interview magazine (originally styled “inter/VIEW”) was started in 1969 by artist Andy Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock. Poet Gerard Malanga and avant-garde film director Paul Morrissey were also listed on the original masthead. The magazine, in its first few years, was a film critique journal subtitled “A Monthly Film Journal”. Rumor has it that the magazine was no more than an excuse for Warhol and friends to get free tickets to the New York Film Festival.

After a time, the main topic would turn to pop culture, nicknaming itself, ‘The Crystal Ball of Pop’. Interviews during this period were printed in a loose, pure transcript form and questions were often comical and off-the-wall. For nearly 20 years, Richard Bernstein painted the covers under Warhol's supervision. Since Warhol's death in 1987, Peter Brant and his heirs have had ownership of the magazine. Ingrid Sischy oversaw as Editor-In-Chief from 1989 until 2008, to great success.

In September 2018, shortly after filing for bankruptcy, the magazine returned. This time with Mel Ottenberg (Rihanna’s Creative Director) and editorial director Richard Turley (of Bloomberg Businessweek and MTV fame). Gracing the inaugural relaunch cover was issue-one subject Agnès Varda (from the film journal days). The typography uses a recent digitization of Ionic, Caslon Ionic by Commercial Classics throughout — from headlines to body copy and webfonts, all text is set in Caslon Ionic’s Regular and Italic. For some reason, the website menu uses Old Standard and Roboto. Art Director Kurt Woerpel has some more spreads on his website.

Richard Turley’s move from Bloomberg Businessweek to MTV had the design press busy for a while last year. We can finally see the new work he has been producing in his new position at the channel. Turley continues his signature “ironic” style that seems to fit perfectly well with MTV’s corporate language, and as usual we can see a steady use of Commercial Type’s fonts. A mish mash of ironic humour, pop culture irreverence, visual pastiche and kitschy internet era visuals, Turley may very well bring MTV back to its glory days of the 80s but for a new generation.

Images here are screenshots from this video (embedded below).

Cover by Jungyeon Roh

From Creative Review:

Two hundred and eighty eight editions of the new American Illustration Annual have handmade covers, created by 45 different artists and illustrators. Overseen by creative director Richard Turley, the project saw much ink, a lot of paint and several naked men...

The base design of the cover is set very simply in black centered Optima on a white background. The team of illustrators customized the books by hand over the course of a single weekend.

There is a short video documenting the project.

Cover by Marcellus Hall

Cover by Matt Dorfman

Cover by Al Murphy

Monica Ramos, below, adds detail to one of her copies.

Cover by Chris Feczko

Cover by Ellen Weinstein

Cover by Serge Bloch

Cover by Deanne Cheuk

Cover by Serge Bloch

Cover by Edel Rodriquez

Cover by Franca Barone

Cover by Franca Barone

Cover by Matt Dorfman

Cover by Jenn Steffey

Cover by Richard Turley

Cover by Judy Chung

Cover by Pablo Delcan

Cover by You Byun

Cover by Jordan Awan

Under the direction of Richard Turley, the new Bloomberg Businessweek is having a pretty good run, winning the hearts of designers with their direct typography and inventive infographics. The magazine takes a lot of design chances, especially noticeable as it’s sitting on the shelf next to much more conservative financial titles. Turley talked about this in an interview with Business Insider last year:

We have this thing when we’re talking called “noble failure”, where we really try and kind of press an idea and not be pissed off if it doesn’t make it. We experiment and just see if it happens, and I guess 50–60% of the time that ends up in the magazine.

This cover must be the result of one of those bold experiments. While the country is reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Turley takes the opportunity to simply declare what everyone else is hemming and hawing about: “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING, STUPID.”

Because I am maladjusted, the first thing I thought when I saw it was, “Hey, why such a tiny wordspace between IT’S and GLOBAL? Next to the gap created by the apostrophe it almost makes the two words read as one. Was it sacrificed merely to make the type as large as possible? Or maybe it’s all supposed to look as raw and unfinessed as possible — pounding you over the head with a plain fact.”

Of course, I was thinking too much. It doesn’t matter to normal readers, who will only see the statement: bare and brash. It’s a perfect cover. How can you see anything else on the newsstand with this brutal truth staring you in the face?

The type is Bloomberg’s staple Neue Haas Grotesk, the revised Helvetica that goes back to its roots and offers warmer readability in the Text fonts and cleaner precision in the Display. One of NHG’s distinguishers is a straight-legged ‘R’ that was once available in the metal Helvetica but lost in digital releases. Businessweek normally uses this alternate but it opted for the curved leg here, presumably because it’s more like the “default” Helvetica, adding to the raw, undesigned effect.

A nice finishing touch: the “p6” acts as a period while leading you directly to the story.

As expected, the article is illustrated with one of Businessweek’s signature charts. This one by Jennifer Daniel illustrates the financial cost of increasingly expensive natural disasters in the U.S. since 1996. You can see it bigger at the Tumblr blog generously provided by the magazine’s design department where they often add some insight about their process.

Bloomberg Businessweek, May 28 – June 3, 2012

“The People vs. The IRS”

Cover of Bloomberg Businessweek April 9 – April 15 2012

I experienced a range of emotions when I came across the first issues of Bloomberg Businessweek’s redesign in early 2010: admiration, envy, and even a little anger. How dare creative director Richard Turley reinvent the venerable publication in such a Euro-perfect way, using Helvetica no less? And how gloriously Swiss (by way of London) it is: tight-but-not touching heads, buttery-smooth sidebar text, with the entire design informed (but not bound) by grids and rules.

Except that it turns out that the type I was admiring wasn’t really Helvetica, but a new digital version of its original incarnation, Neue Haas Grotesk. Type designer Christian Schwartz describes the project as a restoration, “bringing [Helvetica designer Max] Miedinger’s original Neue Haas Grotesk back to life with as much fidelity to his original shapes and spacing as possible.” The redrawn shapes, impeccable spacing, and revival of an alternate straight-legged ‘R’ position Neue Haas Grotesk as a contemporary sans serif, without a whiff of the nostalgia and irony that can saddle Helvetica.

Oh, and did I mention that the magazine’s covers are consistently inventive and smart? It looks like the arrival of the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek will continue to be an emotional event.