Saturday, April 27, 2013

Robert Miles Runyan Christmas keepsake



A lovely little Christmas keepsake from the Robert Miles Runyan design studio in Los Angeles.  I think I saw it in CA Magazine in the early 1960s and asked the studio for a copy.  Twenty-eight pages and printed in six colors on a medium weight colored stock, the size is 7 by 4.75 inches.  The only production credits are in a hardly noticeable five point colored type on the bottom of the last page.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 







Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Picturegoer 1938 and 1955


Two issues, seventeen years apart, of what was the best-selling film fan magazine in Britain.  Originally it was monthly started in 1913 and changed to a weekly in the twenties and finally gave up in 1960.  The editorial was entirely based on promoting the latest films and the stars though in the late fifties it was forced to take account of the new medium: television.  
    The format in these issues hasn’t changed much over the years and there was a non-existent art budget because all the photos were free PR handouts.  The down-market busy page look was created using newspaper techniques of hand-lettered headlines, cut-outs, boxes, tone-panels, irregular shaped color panels and typographic style of serif and sans faces, drop caps, blobs, stars, and copy in various line lengths, crossheads and more.  
    Strangely, ragged right is nowhere to be seen in either issue.  An essential feature for this sort of fan publication was the whole page star portraits (the cut out and keep style) and two appear in the 1938 copy but oddly none in the 1955 one.