Colors (magazine)

Colors (magazine)

Colors magazine is a multilingual quarterly magazine developed in Italy by Fabrica, Benetton's research center. There are three editions published: French/English, Italian/English, and Spanish/English. Each issue has a theme and covers the topic from an international perspective. The magazine is known for its photoessays and features a sardonic point of view (similar to Benetton advertising).

Tibor Kalman and Oliviero Toscani created the magazine in 1991, and it was produced at Kalman's design studio, M&Co, in New York City until 1993, when the magazine operations moved to Rome, Italy. For the first three years, the magazine was published in five editions: French/English, Spanish/English, Italian/English, German/English, and Japanese/English.

Issue 4 [1], released in spring 1993, covered the topic of race, and created an international uproar [2] by running full-page photos of the face of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain doctored to look like a black woman [3], filmmaker Spike Lee as a white man, Pope John Paul II as Asian, among others.

Issue 7 [4], released in early 1994, covered AIDS in a bluntly straightforward manner, something no other form of media had been willing to do until that time. It also caused a huge uproar because it featured a full-page photograph of the face of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan doctored to look like an emaciated AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions [5].

The magazine has produced two books of photography documenting collections of interesting objects and facts from around the world (1000 Extra/ordinary Objects and 1000 Signs book, both published by Taschen).

In 2007 Erik Ravelo, a Cuban designer, took over the creative direction of the magazine, while Benjamin Joffe-Walt became its editor. In 2009 Colors Magazine became the first design / photography focused magazine to use Augmented Reality technology to "augment" printed portraits through video content.

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