Offscreen comes to mind.

I’ve been looking for a magazine about design for a long time now, and nothing has satisfied me. I’m hoping someone mentions something in the comments.

I find two main things lacking in the majority of design publications:

1. They look inward at the world of design too much. Design always exists as part of, and is impacted by, the world at large. I can’t understand why so few design publications make this a priority.

2. They rarely seem to use their position as print publications to explore what that means in today’s digital landscape, or even to explore the new ideas at the intersection of their content and the presentation of that content.

That said, while I’ve never found anything 100% satisfying, a few have stood out.

• Colors – While it’s rarely about design, it’s published by Fabrica and each issue’s topic is approached from something like a design aesthetic, and they really aren’t afraid to use the variety of tools print offers to present their content.

• Slanted – Ostensibly about typography, each issue looks at a broad topic, and looks at typography through the different lenses related to it. Perhaps a little too high concept at times, but overall solid.

• Idea – One of the old old guard of design magazines, from Japan. As such, it tends to be very inward looking, but it generally makes up for that with good quality writing and ideas, and is still reasonably exploratory with its own design. Mind you, I don’t often find the cost/value ratio worthwhile enough to make the purchase.

It’s the nature of these magazines to shift and change with the times, though – so there’s a lot I could be missing out on. I haven’t looked at Eye in years, for instance, and it looks somewhat promising again.

http://idnworld.com/

A discontinued magazine, but I think it belongs here: Emigre

Graphis hast been around forever, I've been a subscriber since the early 80's: http://www.graphis.com. They're originally based in Switzerland but moved to NYC later, still ship internationally though (I'm in Hamburg, Germany).

Communication Arts is good, too, especially the annuals.

Thanks for the detailed responses everyone! I am going to take a further look in IdNMagazine, Process journal and Eye magazine. They somehow appeal the most to me.

So much to choose from, so little time to read it all :(

checkout the novum, www.novumnet.de dual language, german and english

I'd recommend Threaded, which I recently discovered. It's more of a showcase of great design(ers), but the mag in itself is a piece of art.

Fun fact: it initially started out as a side project during the creator's studies.

Printed Pages by It's Nice That

Process Journal by Made Publishers

Creative Review

Computer Arts

Design Week

All available to order online. All ship worldwide.

Communication Arts - http://www.commarts.com

Been around a long time and may still be the best. (imo)

haven't read them since uni, but Eye and Grafik were both excellent.

http://www.eyemagazine.com/

Grafik stopped publishing a few years ago but I guess most design school libraries will have the archives of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafik_(magazine)