TU CIUDAD ES MI CIUDAD
You can take the Latina out of L.A., but you can’t take L.A. out of the Latina, or so hopes Jaime Gamboa, publisher of Tu Ciudad (Your City), a highend pop culture magazine aimed at Los Angeles’ Latino community, printed in English. Gamboa, a 31-year-old former ad salesman for People en Espanol, hopes to eventually reach the 400,000 households with annual incomes $65,000+ in the greater Los Angeles area. But the first issue ( June/July 2005) is available only on newsstands.

The cover coup of Hollywood hottie Eva Mendes is stimulating sales, together with the conscientiously middlebrow design of art director Tom O’Quinn. The magazine’s colorful spreads are clearly influenced by the familiar pages of Entertainment Weekly, TimeOut, and Esquire. According to Canadian-born O’Quinn, who recently worked on the redesign of Out magazine: “We wanted the design to be inviting and accessible to everyone, not just Latinos.” Ciudad positions the amalgamated culture in a refreshing light—and just in time for the arrival of the city’s first Hispanic mayor since 1872, Antonio Villaraigosa.

BACKSTAGE WITH MICROSOFT
Last May, movie stars and rock stars alike strolled down the “green carpet” in Los Angeles before attending the exclusive MTV party to preview Microsoft’s latest game console, Xbox 360. Elijah Wood of The Lord of the Rings emceed, and the post-punk band, The Killers, jammed like bitter hobbits on a grill. Yet the highly anticipated Xbox 360 won’t begin driving parents of spoiled children crazy until November. Microsoft, however, knows to feed frenzy and it’s already splurging to entice players with its forthcoming design. The slick new silver console is the work of San Francisco-based Astro Studios and Japanese design house Hers Experimental Design Laboratory. Non-celebrity gamers who weren’t blinging or singing at the MTV party were able to play with a prototype at the industry tradeshow, E3, held simultaneously at the L.A. Convention Center.

Ron Caruso of Purepartner by design installed the unconventional tradeshow site, “Greenspace,” a 35,000-square-foot oasis dedicated to the new brand of Xbox 360. Caruso erected a porous portal for loyal gamers to convene and play in: a den of furniture resembling Nautilus equipment, which wouldn’t be a bad idea considering the apparent link between computer gaming and the obesity epidemic among teenagers.

SURVEY SAYS
The Dallas/Fort Worth metro area seems to be a gold mine for the self-employed designer. According to the AIGA/Aquent Survey of Design Salaries 2005, the median salary for a “solo designer” is $72,500: outranking New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. All three of those notoriously higher-cost-of-living cities reported $60K medians. Some analysis, however, regarding the data would be helpful. Before you hightail it to Texas you might wonder, for instance: Is the median salary in the Dallas/ Fort Worth area an increase from previous years, is it a fluke, or is the demand of design in the Texan metropolises so fervent that salaries should be on the rise for years to come?

The compensation data may be helpful for a design professional ready to ask for a raise—use it!—but the well-meaning research overall fails to provide “strategies for success” as it claims in its introduction. Maybe next year AIGA will include stronger analysis of the data and truly educate its readers about specific industry growth by region. Amy Unikewicz of Connecticut (New England median salary: $59K) designed the printed piece, which echoes the survey’s light-hearted approach. The photographs of dollar signs are from her private collection.