PINKY – Super Girls Magazine!

Morning Pep

I usually see this hour (5:39a.m.) from the other side. So I thought I’d add a little perk to my morning brew by visiting the site for Japanese women’s fashion mag, PINKY.

Part of Shuiesha’s (one of Japan’s top cats in the publishing lark) stable of monthlies, PINKY is aimed at fashion conscious twenty-something gals. PINKY launched in 2004 as a sister magazine to the Japanese version of Seventeen, with several staff moving to help set up the newer title.

To my untrained eye, the magazine’s target readership is fresh, cute and girly-graduating-to-feminine, with aspirations of style and sophistication. Earlier this year one of PINKY’s free gift giveaways was a Betsey Johnson x Hello Kitty pouch.

(My two yen on Japanese magazines after the jump)

I’m a big fan of Japanese magazines. I think their design and attention to detail is often fantastic: the graphic side of the written word is really pushed to the foreground. Of course, I’ve fallen hard for Japanese design in general.

My suspicion is that the Japanese language promotes this on two fronts. First, basics of typography are interwoven into the learning of written characters. They are treated as visual, even artistic, forms from a young age through compulsory calligraphy classes in school. Such an education tends to be sorely lacking in the West.

Second, Japanese can be written and read left-to-right as well as top-to-bottom. This frees up designers considerably. For example, one can make use of thin, narrow spaces for copy, titles or captions which would be unsightly using Latin script (although compression from the needs of digital media, especially mobile platforms, has, I think made English readers more receptive to small line widths, vertical text cannot be of great length). A mixture of horizontal and vertical copy can help to create a more dynamic layout.

Anyway, more of that another time. I just wanted to look at all the pretty girls in their summer finery.

. . .

for Miss Élysées. In NYC yet?