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Right now designing a magazine is my chief job. That along with everything out a young man has to take care of in his life. So I can’t help but notice, when 2 monoliths of the mens magazine world make pretty much the same product. What makes me want to buy GQ over Esquire? They both have neon spot colour oranges for their “feature” colour, big faces of well respected male actors and different logotypes. I choose Esquire because I like their editorial voice and writing team, but apart from that I’d have a lot of trouble picking one over the other. It’s like coke and pepsi; out of their containers they are both basically the same product (I can hear cries of disgust already), but they are! Caramel flavoured fizzy water! But packaged in their respective cans, they vastly differ. Different ad agencies handling their advertising, and one is red and the other is blue.
And then Sports & Style comes and lazily copies them both! WTF! Please we need originality in covers. The last good Esquire cover was the one where they drew all over in my opinion one of the hottest models standing on this earth (Bar Refaeli), and it was a statement! Well, a good use of their “wall of type” feature.
But then they stopped and tried to directly compete with the big man face thing that GQ was doing, and I think that was a mistake.