From an interview with Coupe and (former) Ray Gun editors (more than one speaker, intermingled):
My boredom with [Monocle (q.v.)] lies in its very nice design. The look is so grid-based, so thorough, so devoid of spontaneity[, so overformatted] that after four or five issues of the same, the desire to fork over $12 for Issue Six just isn’t very strong. I think editors and publishers need to remember that people like spontaneity, and surprise in their lives — and in their magazines. Basically, editors need to accept the fact that… design has become content. Readers look for it and should expect design content change from issue to issue beyond new photos and spot illustrations. […]
If design is content, if fonts convey emotions and if synergy between word and image are true, and we know they are, this resistance from the people who could gain the most from strutting their stuff substantively is mystifying to me.
It may be the one place, oddly, where you see no 1990s nostalgia. Someone showed me a young adult book called So Yesterday that had a lead character, a girl who wanted, to the amazement of her friends, to work in magazines. She talked about a magazine that was clearly Ray Gun, and how it had crazy fonts and messed with things. Her friends thought she was kidding, but she just shrugged off their reactions, saying that people back then thought it was cool. It has made me want to come up with a start up that would hit the same mark today that Ray Gun did then, just to see what the response would be like.
Did you know I actually wrote for Ray Gun back dans la journée?