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Wednesday, October 01, 2008

RANDOM... it should be titled- RARE (if u r lookin 4 humor ;-)

Publishers of this magazine themselves claim that RANDOM is launched to fill the vacuum created by MAD magazine. Trust me, it is a big disappointment. Tagline of 'India's longest running humor magazine' also shows their overconfidence. RANDOM is recently launched as bi-monthly comic magazine at cover price of Rs.25.

Content
Absolutely Humorless. Either the editor Jatin Varma can challenge the laughter-blaster Siddhu (who can laugh on even a news headline) or I have a good sense of humor who cant find even a single bit to laugh in entire issue. Concept & more importantly, illustrations, cartoons & caricatures are the core strength of this kind of magazines, but RANDOM is failed at every corner. Poor concept, childish cartoons & very unprofessional caricatures gives you a complete disappointment. I think editorial team has no clue nor they have any guideline to bring out the issue, and that is why very conveniently they have named it RANDOM (which exactly suits to their way of generating content). Most of the ideas (concepts!) seems as picked from any of college canteens gossips only. Few of columns & articles are stretched across multiple pages unnecessarily as those could be presented as tit-bits like MAD used to carry it. Overall, content per issue looks very less & shallow in quantity (and also in quality).

Design
Very unprofessional as I said earlier…! Cartoon, Illustrations & caricatures; which are the pillars of these kind of genre, are done immaturely. Presentation of content is also unplanned and put in a random(!) way. Its ok, if designer wants to be creative and wants to go with the name (Random) but still he needs to be consistent very intelligently. Layout of few pages is equally horrible, starting right from the content page up to the last page of magazine.

Printing
Since this magazine has very less scope of photographs to include but it requires good printing quality to show vibrant colors used in illustrations & drawings. And that is the area where RANDOM is fairly OK.

Product
RANDOM looks very thin, ooops… it is very thin as it is a 34 pager magazine only. paper quality is ok but at the cover price of Rs.25 it’s not cheap as they put it on the cover itself- 'Rs.25 Cheap like crazy!'.

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Content ......................: ◐○○○○
Design & Layout .........: ●○○○○
Printing .......................: ●●◐○○
Product .......................: ●◐○○○
Value for Money ..........: ●○○○○
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‘VIRDI’CT .....................: ●○○○○
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How to use ‘VIRDI’CT..??
●○○○○ Browse & leave it
●●○○○ Borrow & Read it
●●●○○ Buy it occasionally
●●●●○ Buy regularly
●●●●● Subscribe it now!!!

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