Red Carpet: Doesn’t deserve for self!

Most pathetic publication released in recent few months (rather, in years) I have come across is – Red Carpet. This monthly magazine is launched late in the last year by owner, printer and publisher – Subodh Tyagi. It is priced at Rs.100 and is self acclaimed as world’s 1st new dimension film journal. But, it has no editorial focus and looks like a compilation only of a few substandard filmy gossips and photographs.

Content
Nothing that you can enjoy in this magazine... neither it is informative nor is entertaining. It has no editorial structure that could define the personality of this magazine. The issue I am going through is nothing but a collection of a few interviews, some gossips & tidbits… that’s all.

And top of that, Edit note of the same issue is talking about Colors TV channel while entire issue has not even a single story on TV programs nor about TV stars! This clearly shows the editorial has no guidelines what they want to present and how they want to position their product.

Design
Worse than its content…! Designers have no idea that how the entire magazine needs to be designed, layout or presented. Starting right from the cover, it is quite visible that its design is very immature and unprofessional. Very unlikely of filmy magazines, it has three stories only on the cover and even those are presented very badly.

Same substandard layout is done even for the inside pages of the magazine. There is no style sheet followed by the designer. No font families, no color definitions, no grids, no photographs style…everything is placed just like that… without following any rule or discipline. There are lots of design elements and effects are introduced unnecessarily throughout the magazine.

Photographs seem that they are taken either from stock or downloaded low resolution from various web sites. That is why most of the pictures are appearing poor.

Printing
As pathetic as content and design are! Prepress work is also substandard that is why a few photographs which could have been printed well, even they are spoiled.

Product
The only characteristic that stands out about this magazine is the orientation of the ‘Red Carpet’. This is a horizontal shaped (landscape) magazine but the poor paper quality doesn’t support this shape. This landscape shape is suitable for coffee-table books not for the magazines as magazines are meant to be read in comfortable posture.

Finally, I don’t see any value that you can get out of this highly priced magazine… neither information nor even eye-candy photographs of bollywood actor-actresses.

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