I figured I wouldn’t be writing anymore this year, but I just couldn’t let this go by unnoticed.

Being a graphic artist and a photographer I read (or page) through a lot of magazines and photographs (hence my interest in the National Geographic contest, and e.g. (little) projects in Photoshop and Lightroom).

So… The past days in between all the courses of food during the christmas holidays I was reading through the Esquire (American edition). Great magazine, for most part.
When I came to the end of the January issue I ran into this spread:

Esquire, January 2009 issue

For those of you who don’t know what a spread is: it’s a left and right page in a magazine. So whenever you open a magazine, whatever you have in front of you is a spread.
Don’t mind the quality of the scan (the guy looking like a freak isn’t due to the bad scan, he really looks like a freak 😉 ).

Now, I always thought that a quality magazine has quality graphics, quality editors and people who are able to produce graphically pleasing and responsible images. And usually this is the case in Esquire. However, this time… I don’t know if it was the stress to get everything out and mailed before Christmas or what, but what you see here is a plain awful butcher job. A very poorly executed example of copy-paste-rotate.
And they even took the head from the same spread. If anything in the graphic editing land is a big no-no, it’s that.
I’m sure the photographer shot 1000 pictures on this shoot and sure, that particular head on the left version of Adam Rapp  may have looked a bit funny, but the mask could’ve been at least turned so that it looks as believable as on the right page.
And the person who did that, and the poor masking / cutting / pasting job, should get a boot up his behind.

Oh, and happy holidays once again!