magazine crazy

I have a bit of an obsession with magazines. Just yesterday, I opened my mailbox to find three huge magazines (AND a new J.Crew catalog!). My dream job was to work for a high profile magazine as layout and design editor, or creative director. In high school I subscribed to 8 magazines at one time and now I still subscribe to 3 or 4 and am constantly buying them off news stands. It's a little ridiculous.

Unfortunately I didn't grow up in NYC and most magazine internships are in manhattan and are unpaid, so doing a summer internship at a magazine never really worked out logistically for me. Sad. I went after a few magazine jobs during the job search in college, but nothing ever seemed to fit. A little while ago I was considering going after a job at Martha Stewart Living magazine in Manhattan. I always liked the magazine, but after researching the job, I became a little obsessed and felt the need to devour every issue I could.

How could I do this? A great little thing called ebay. I went on ebay and bought back issues of Martha Stewart Living...and maybe I got a little carried away, because in about three days I went from having one issue of MS Living to having almost three years worth. Yay for ebay!!

This is just some of the magazines I've recently acquired from ebay. There are stacks and stacks of magazines elsewhere in the apartment. Don't even get me started on my obsession with wedding magazines!

One of the things I love most about magazines is the way the photographs, fonts, and layouts intertwine to create this beautiful aesthetic that conveys the subject and evokes emotion. Or simply put: the pretty perfect pictures grab my attention. I am constantly cutting things out of magazines--be it fonts, words, pictures, quotes, logos--and have an endless collection of snippets and clippings.

The other week I actually did something with some of them. I created my first "inspiration board" although it only really inspires me to daydream about this luxurious european summer that I probably won't have. I love it anyways, and I can switch out the clippings whenever I want to change the mood or feeling of the collage.