I’ve written about magazine stores before, about how the overflowing amount of titles on display, the remarkably specific nature of all of them, and the feeling of library anxiety that greets me when I think about all these people publishing all these magazines every month. How do any of them sell? How do any of these things make money?

In fact it’s becoming rather clear that a lot of print isn’t making so much money at all. The book industry is in some sort of crisis, newspapers are dying, and magazines aren’t having a great go of it at all, either.

So it’s encouraging to hear about new magazine shops opening up, ones devoted entirely to the idea of reading and buying those magazines that make the format worth it in the first place. It’s even better when the focus of these stores is largely on design and art magazines, which are some of the best and most tangible reasons to still be picking up print-based… well, anything. A well-curated magazine will still provide you with more solid information in one sitting than most of our hyperactive, ADD-inspired internet surfing can in a few hours.

A new Berlin shop has just launched with exactly this idea in mind. Called Do You Read Me,and definitely not just another overflowing magazine store, this is a highly curated shop designed with you in mind. Go there, browse, sit, read, explore, and then buy.

It was recently featured on one of the New York Times’s many blogs, and has me on the lookout for something even close to this nice here in Rome. Some of the shop’s better features include Eames chairs for lounging while you read, and no shrink-wrap to speak of. You’re free to browse and read all you want before buying.

There’s a lot to be said for specialization, in my opinion. Going into a massive bookstore and finding its massive magazine section doesn’t lead me in any direction, and doesn’t help me find what I want to find. The shelves are bursting, and somehow the inherent value of each title is diminished through the very overstocking of that particular section. That’s why the layout of this store is so appealing: minimalist shelves with great spacing, and wooden tables featuring mouth-watering stacks of what are surely interesting titles. It’s reason number 4,058 to book a flight for Berlin.

From the shop itself: “We provide a subjective selection of beautiful, sapiently written, well crafted magazines in the scope of art, culture, fashion, photography, design, architecture, literature, music, theatre, society, politics and business. We look forward to compiling, together with our clients, the most beautiful, most interesting and most innovative magazines available from around the globe.”

The 151-year old American magazine The Atlantic just had a redesign. Since that very magazine employs quite a few political bloggers that I read every day, and since their posts tend to be peppered with links to new Atlantic ad campaigns and various articles, including some about the redesign, I couldn’t escape it.

I love seeing how magazines are put together. We get the issue and it seems as though it’s always existed, that the typesetting and layout has never really changed, just because of the combined weight of all the issues before it. So when a magazine (even one I don’t read on paper like The Atlantic) changes its design and shows us exactly how it was done, I’m fascinated.

Instead of just a simple layout refresh, the magazine went all out and hired Pentagram for the design and Havas (well, a subsidiary of international agency Havas) for some eye-catching promotional work.

What I love about seeing this process is that we get some rejected design ideas. While I initially thought the new cover was a bit too busy (it looks like a wordle diagram), future issues will feature photography, and the idea of the first one was to push the flow of ideas that emenate from the magazine’s writers. Look at the rejected idea on the left: although I like the design, I think it’s too backward looking and sits in the realm of “we are a prestigious magazine”, which is a design I believe the Atlantic’s editors were trying to escape from. The New Yorker’s already got that aesthetic side of the market sewn up. Plus the design on the right seems a touch too contemporary–there’s no acknowledgement whatsoever of the “timelessness” of the Atlantic Brand. Here’s lead graphic designer Michael Bierut:

The Atlantic, we discovered, demands a careful balance between intellectual engagement and entertainment. In a magazine of ideas, writers depend on words to build their arguments, but we didn’t want The Atlantic’s pages to look like homework. Nor did we want to diminish the gravitas that its subjects demand by larding the book with graphic tricks that could be rightly dismissed as eye candy.

One of the main examples is this site here, called Think Again, which is (sort of) also called The Atlantic Project. It contains a series of great photography–neon signs that ask specific questions, which then open up to show a video, a blog post full of comments, and of course, a relevant Atlantic article that generated the idea.

Some innovative ideas were brought to the marketing, as well: The Atlantic is advertising on an entirely new surface: muffin tops. They’re also planning restaurant menus and drugstore shampoo shelves. The point is to reach people where they “eat, buy takeout food, and shop,” which is “where people’s brains are most at rest.” The idea is to create a jolt: small and subtle advertising about “big ideas” where you’d least expect it.

Francesco Franchi is a Milan-based designer whose work we first picked up through a link to some of his recent work. I was most impressed by the shots of thesis, called Il Re Designer, which is generously exhibited all over his site.

A word about Italian University: here, a lot of work is put into the ceremonial presentation of theses. Graduation is a very big, formal deal (check out this excellent post on how far this tradition goes back). As a result, even the measliest little print shop stuck in the back of an alley and cluelessly selling DVD-Rs for 5 euros each, will bind your thesis in full, glorious hardcover style. They’ll even take your messy, unorganized word .doc and sort it all out for you, too.

This means when you’re doing a masters at a big-time Milanese University, and this masters is in communication design, and you fancy yourself an Italian designer–you had better make that thesis damn beautiful.

The title is a play on words: “il redesigner” means simply “the redesigner”, but when you separate the word “re”, as he’s done, it becomes “the king designer”. Something like “the designer as king” makes more sense in English, which fits in with his argument that the design of a newspaper is fundamental to its meaning, and should be integrated into the publishing philosophy as an crucial part, rather than simply compartmentalized as the aesthetic presentation of content.

Beyond academia, Franchi has also co-designed the layout for the less-business-y insert to Milano’s big time business paper, Il Sole 24 Ore. It plays with the beginning article from the newspaper’s title (it just means ‘the’), creating an acronym for Intelligence in Lifestyle. I don’t tend to give much time to business papers here in Italy, but maybe I’ll start picking this one up on Fridays and see just what Intelligence in Lifestyle actually means.