The magazine is a commercial precedent for the postmodern text: literary critics have heralded such features as fragmentation, equivocality, spurious visual effects, and the free mixture of high and low cultural references as hallmarks of a new voice in literature that rejects the formal autonomy of the traditional work of art. The magazine genre has always incorporated the principle of mixed speech.

In 1992 Harper's Bazaar was redesigned by Fabien Baron, a French-born graphic designer who had startled the fashion world with his design of Italian Vogue in the 1980s.

Another magazine that reinvented itself during the past decade by reclaiming its heritage was Rolling Stone.

Spy took the entire genre of the magazine as a point of departure and an object of relentless parody.

Intellectuals and artists have often discussed the battle between words and pictures in modern culture.

Typographic pyrotechnics found an explosive outlet in the work of David Carson, whose designs for the California magazines Beach Culture and Ray Gun have been widely publicized, making Carson one of the few designers to become a pop culture hero.

Numerous publications target the interests of particular subcultures.

A fanzine is a sporadically issued periodical that eschews formal systems of distribution in favor of underground networks and word-of-mouth.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum