Design Magazine Critique

So, I'm stuck here at work and I forgot the assignment sheet. (Of course I would do that.) But I'm just going to try and post from what I remeber and then update later with (probably much needed) improvements.
I chose an issue of STEP Into Design magazine to critique. I actually just started picking it up off the newsstand this semester, though not frequently b/c it is kind of expensive. I actually posted once already on the mag.
I think the first question is who the magazine is for. As someone who is still really new to design, I enjoy looking at the magazine to gather ideas, however I think a lot of the designs are very advanced and really push the envelope, so designers in all stages of their career can benefit from seeing the work of others. I also really enjoy how the magazine covers all aspects of design, not just print design. For example, in a few of the pictures above, the stories are about how great design has started to pervade all aspects and stages of life i.e. baby/kid products. It also covers more conceptual design, like an article about an aerospace engineer who is creating futuristic furniture for your ... airplane ... home? But it looks cool anyway.
Ok, the other question I remember was about the grid and how a magazine about design designs said grid to show off said design ... whew! What I noticed was how orderly STEP is. I think it is a great compliment to have such order within an otherwise visually distracting (though not in a negative sense) magazine. I noticed that there were some pages that used the 12 column grid to show a sort of step-by-step process or elements of a larger product, which covered the whole top of the grid. I also noticed that for the most part, besides the whole step-by-step feature, elements took up larger portions of the grid. So, for example, even though the grid was a twelve column grid, it was rare that an element of the page took up less than three columns. most the time columns of actual content took up 1/3 or 1/2 of the page. I think it is pretty safe to presume that this was a conscious decision so that as much detail of the designs can be seen.
As a bit of a side note, one of the images I posted above shows what I thought to be a pretty creative way to show off print design within a print publication. What they did was to have an actual photo of the magazine opened to the page of the design spread they were highlighting. But even those images fell in line with the grid! I also noticed that there are a lot of full page images, which is basically still working within the grid, right? It's just taking up the whole darn thing. The only time I really noticed a disregard for the grid was in the story about baby design (see images above), in which the images of block and balls kind of take over the spread in a slightly more chaotic (though still aesthetically pleasing) way, which I thought seemed really content driven, reflecting the messy lives kidlets lead. In terms of typeface, I noticed that there were sporadic paragraphs where the type size was quite large, which is obviously meant to help the important parts of a story/writing to stand out within such a visual-heavy publication. It makes sense content-wise, but I didn't think that it looked very visually appealing, which was odd coming from a magazine about design. The final image I posted is half of a really cool (typographic?) spread. I thought it was a great solution and really stood out from the rest of the grid-centric pages.