Tell me you follow Terry Richardson’s tumbler/photo blog. What?! What’s wrong with you?! Go here now.

I love the photography of Carlos Nunez. He’s got that whole ’70s rock’n'roll sex thing going on. See more at his website www.carlosnunezphotography.com and blog ohsnapscarlos.blogspot.com NSFW but not in a straight-up porny way.

There is a better life. And it looks a little something like this. A thought to conjure with on a cold, snowy/icy/slushy night in London in January. For more of the same, see my new favourite oversized coffee table book Poolside With Slim Aarons. Genius.

I love magazines. I should do. I’ve spent most of my adult life writing for them. Increasingly though, magazines are becoming hard to like, let alone love. Grown bloated on d-list celebrities, fad diets, watches, cars, tits, cellulite, empty sound bites and hot air, they’re just another noisy distraction designed to entertain the shortest of attention spans. Of course, you could say that for something more substantial there are always books, and as someone who writes those too I certainly wouldn’t argue with their value. But it’s not the same. Books are about words sparking the imagination; a writer and a reader, alone in a space sharing a thought. Magazines are about words and pictures and how the two interact. They’re about a designer’s interpretation of an attitude, a photographer’s understanding of a subject, a writer’s assessment of the situation and an art director’s idea of how all three can best come alive on the page. Or at least that’s the way I think of them – exciting explosions of ideas, unexpected stories that grab the attention and suck you in.

The truth is that mainstream consumer magazines aren’t like that anymore. And it’s a recent change. In the last 10 years word counts have plummeted, the pictures are bigger (although, sadly, not better) and the imagination, the vocabulary and the subject choice have become so constrained that it’s hard to tell one men’s magazine from the next and all the celeb gossip weeklies from each other. I could blame Loaded or Heat or everyone else who’s helped cheapen the format, but the real point is not to blame others but to do something about it – which is why I’m currently trying to get a cool, quality, pop culture quarterly off the ground. More of that in another post.

Away from the mainstream though, the magazine is very much alive and well and lovable. Independent publishers are doing all the things which used to make me buy magazines by the armful. They’re spilling imagination all over the page, exciting with indescribably sexy images and delivering rock’n'roll in print, and making all of it so exciting you could just reach in and touch it.

I know this because I recently bought two amazing books. We Love Magazines is a celebration of the magazine as an art form, focusing on 10 stunning publications from around the world, as well as reliving the greatest moments in magazine history and providing an extensive directory of the coolest magazines in the world – or most of them, there were a couple missing. My other purchase was the equally incredible follow-up, We Make Magazines : Inside the Independents, a celebration of the people and the passion behind the most influential independent magaiznes in production – as well as a tribute to those great titles long since departed.

Both books are beautifully executed with the same imagination and attitude as the titles they’re examining, so while bloody expensive, they’re worth every penny. It’s enough to make you want to put pen to paper and start dreaming up your very own super cool title… oh, wait a minute…

Maybe it’s because I work at home, alone, with no one to talk to, that I have a strange obsession with other people’s offices. Call it Office Envy if you like. But thankfully the internet provides satisfaction for every fetish imaginable and my office fetish is no exception. Welcome to OfficeSnapshots.com, one of my favourite websties. I’ve spent/wasted/enjoyed many a long afternoon starring longingly at the monitors, desks and chairs that others take for granted. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Again, you’re welcome.

*the picture above is of the office of brand development agency The Wonderfactory. I like the shelves. I have a thing for shelves. I like putting things on shelves. I know. I’ll stop.

Not since Bobby Kennedy ran for the democratic nomination in ’68 has the idea of a particular individual being elected President stirred so many – particularly in the jaded world of creative media – into action. From the primaries to the inauguration, graphic design and photography have been at the centre of capturing, distilling and expressing the Obama feeling. The posters, the photographs and the graffiti, as much as all the viral videos and Twitter feeds, were key to making him larger than life, aspirational and look like a president in waiting even before he’d won the nomination. Where photographs of John McCain made him look folksy, those of Obama made him seem almost god like. The notion of Obama – not just the colour of his skin but his young, dynamic approach – spoke of revolution while the other candidate looked like more of the same. Those looking for a claim on history sensed the opportunity to take their Kennedy pictures, write their Kennedy stories, to design button badges and posters which just like Kennedy’s would tell future generations that it was the most exciting of times. Obama inspired the best and the most talented and they literally made him history.

See for yourself here, here and here.

Making the chav’s favourite cool again. Keith Richards for LV.