For over 40 years Summit Magazine was a top periodical in its genre. “And its impact was—and continues to be felt—well beyond the climbing world, in large part due to the avant-garde aesthetic that Jean and Helen cultivated with the Summit‘s covers: sometimes chic, sometimes stark, sometimes playful,” says Michael Levy, its new publisher and editor-in-chief.

This spring, a refurbished Summit Journal (issue 320) was reborn as a print-only, biannual, oversized, coffee-table-quality magazine devoted to longform storytelling and large-format photography. The first issue came out in February, and the next is due in August. Previously, Levy spent five years working for two other outdoors magazines, Rock and Ice and Climbing. As has happened with so many other print properties in recent years, the print editions of those titles “went the way of the dodo.”

“As someone who loves print as a medium for longform storytelling, it seemed like the perfect time to take a crack at starting a new print magazine,” Levy says. “Rather than start a brand new magazine, though, I loved the idea of breathing new life into a historic title. Summit, in the climbing world, is as historic as it gets.” He acquired the rights in February 2023, and put out the first new issue in over 27 years.

Here he talks about his climb back up the summit, as well as some of the covers art directed by Kilness and Crenshaw, who have been unheralded in the history of magazine design.

Why have you revived the magazine as a journal in print only? Doesn’t that seem to be counter-intuitive?
On its face, there’s definitely something counterintuitive to being print only. But in another way, it seems exceptionally rational to me? That is, if you can get the material in the magazine online, doesn’t that decrease the perceived value of the print product?

My feeling is that with the glut of content online, there’s something to be said for a highly curated physical product. There’s so much out there on the internet that a lot of stuff, much of it quite good, just gets lost in the noise. But something tactile that you can feel between your fingers and read over a cup of coffee or a beer, that prioritizes longform … it might not reach as many people, but the people it does reach will be that much more invested. Print feels a bit like vinyl to me; what’s old is new again, and the collectability of it, the quality of the physical thing itself, is important. Just like vinyl isn’t going to replace Spotify, print isn’t going to replace digital, but there is a very real audience out there (and I’m in it) that likes analog media, and appreciates reading things that aren’t on a screen.

And building off that, print also felt like a more achievable business model, in a strange way. Though print has a higher bar to entry–the hard costs to get it off the ground were greater, and if I didn’t attract enough subscribers, the whole thing would have been dead on arrival–once cleared, the way forward felt much clearer. You can only fill a magazine with so many articles, after all. 

Of course, I’m a storyteller: What matters most to me is pursuing quality longform journalism. If the articles and image curation inside the magazine are no good, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But given what I think is the extremely high quality content we have managed to fill the magazine with, my feeling is that the exterior should match.

The magazine was founded by two committed climbers. Tell me a little about their goals and feats of magazine publishing.
Jean and Helen were trailblazers, plain and simple. … They were iconoclasts.

Jean and Helen were serious and eminently capable climbers. They lived in Big Bear, CA, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and would head out for adventures in the mountains, and climb at smaller cliffs close to home. Another fun story: Sometimes, so busy were they with their adventuring, they’d forget what issue number they were on, so there are a couple of the old ones that have the same month!

In the hundreds of issues they published, they were actively shaping the culture of the nascent sports of rock climbing and mountaineering in the U.S., pursuits that had a longer history in Europe. In addition to publishing the essays and accounts of cutting-edge ascents by the best climbers of the day—guys like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins, who are household names today—they also published trip reports by families out in the hills or on a fishing trip. They cultivated an egalitarian ethos with their magazine, in content and authorship, publishing an outsized number of women.

What do you think is or are the most significant graphic element(s) of the magazine in its original form and format?
Summit’s old covers are just so distinctive. Particularly in the 1960s, they had a really bold aesthetic, combining bright colors, illustration, playful geometric shapes and different media. Most of the covers are devoid of coverlines, and many have a very minimalist look, e.g., a single pinecone against a blue background, or a silhouetted climber on a cliff against a bright yellow background. My favorite cover is probably September 1967: a minimalist illustration of a lone figure silhouetted on a hill looking up at the night sky. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

They also used color in paradoxical ways—e.g., a mountaineering scene bathed in neon green or neon pink—and sometimes used ultra close-up shots—e.g., one section of a climbing rope.

One of the cool things in resurrecting the magazine has been to see how far its legacy extended beyond the fairly insular climbing world. I’ve had a whole host of people from the design world reach out to me to express their love and affinity for the old covers and their style.

What have you done to bring it valiantly into the 21st century?
One of the fun parts of reviving an old magazine versus starting one from scratch is that we can lean into the old stuff. The new Summit very much has one eye on the past, while also keeping one eye on the present and future. One example of this: For our debut issue in February, we had two covers. One was an illustration, one was a photo. The illustrated cover, by a great young French artist named Thomas Danthony, was very much an homage to Summit’s covers in the ’60s. The photo cover is very much a splashy, modern climbing photo, full of motion. The stories inside reflect this duality too: We publish both modern reportage, and stories about the history of climbing and climbing culture.

Physically, the magazine has also gotten a big overhaul. The new version is 10″ x 13″, so quite large. It’s printed on heavy stock, uncoated paper. It feels closer to a coffee table book than a newsstand magazine.

In terms of the aesthetic, the inside has what I’d consider a pretty modern look overall: Most of the imagery is displayed in full-page or spread format to really take advantage of the magazine’s size. My art director, Randy Levensaler, has been working on print magazines for decades, and has an incredible eye for effective yet eye-catching layouts

That being said, in terms of the text, we’re very much charting a classic look. I can’t tell you how much Randy stressed over the font choices, text size and spacing—and I think it shows.

We also retitled it as Summit Journal. For six years in the 1990s, after Jean and Helen sold the magazine, it was rebranded as Summit: The Mountain Journal. It closed up shop in 1996, and hasn’t been published since. So going with Summit Journal felt like a way to nod to both former iterations of the mag, yet once again signal that this is a new magazine for a new era.

Do you have to be a climber to be a reader?
Definitely not. I myself am a passionate climber, but at the end of the day my mission is to fill Summit Journal’s pages with quality journalism, photography and art.

The best piece in the first issue is by a brilliant young writer named Astra Lincoln, and it is about the advent of photographic surveying in the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, and how this a) led to a boom in mountaineering, and b) is also inextricably related to episodes of ethnic cleansing in the area. It’s masterful.

Some of what we publish is surely a bit lingo heavy, but most of it, I’d say, should be totally accessible to the non-climber.

What is your longterm goal for Summit?
To make a magazine that people want to keep on their shelf to read and flip through again and again over the years.

The Two Type System, like the studio’s other parametric typefaces, pushes the shapes and relationships of letters to the precise point where they obstruct or deny the reading process while still conforming to the conventional arrangements of language, illustrating the idea that form and content interconnect like muscle and bone.

Muir and McNeil see ideas as the results of discovery rather than invention and consider themselves graphic designers who create type, rather than traditional type designers. Using the options available through the mathematical algorithms of digital design, they continue historical typographic experimentation as has always existed, enabled by the technology of the moment. For instance, designers printing with metal type used multiple passes through the press to play with composition, layering, and legibility. When phototypesetting was introduced, everybody pulled and distorted the type negative as it was exposed to light to create weird, funky, one-of-a-kind effects. The 1990 typeface Beowulf, by Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, swapped the PostScript programming commands “lineto” and “curveto” with a new command “freakto,” to generate letterforms with spontaneously random outlines.

We prefer finding new forms and outputs by building extensive root-and-branch systems rather than working within the limits of short-term individual expressions. For us, the notion of individual creativity tends to emphasize the maker rather than the form.

Hamish Muir

What if … ? is one of the most powerful questions in design because it’s directed towards unknown possibilities. By systematically adjusting individual conditions within a defined design space—progressively resetting components, positions, colors, angles, and so forth—the designers exerted a sort of calibrated prescience to the process while embracing errors that led in unexpectedly fruitful directions. While many forms are highly abstract, others are completely legible; the Type Two System is not just a laboratory experiment. MuirMcNeil used it for the flexible but instantly recognizable identity for TypeCon2016, expressed in black and a stunning neon green, lending a future-forward look to the event.

The Two Type System’s systemic yet unexpected results require a willingness to cede control that can be scary for designers, especially if they feel their creative agency diminished. It’s difficult for many to let go of the decision-making so crucial to design and open themselves to chance. Still, trusting in the process can yield delightful and pleasing results. Muir says, “We prefer finding new forms and outputs by building extensive root-and-branch systems rather than working within the limits of short-term individual expressions. For us, the notion of individual creativity tends to emphasize the maker rather than the form.”

The saying “Printing is always a surprise” is a solid truth, in that unplanned (often unwanted) outcomes can and frequently do happen on press. System Process Form is a beautifully printed and thoughtfully planned volume using spot colors overlaid atop one another rather than the more typical four-color printing process. Print designers know that spot colors are impossible to preview accurately on monitors during the design process or even as prepress proofs, yet a vital component of the Two Type System’s DNA is the element of chance. This leads a viewer to wonder how the authors handled that aspect of the completed book in advance—were there any hitches in the print production? Was this, perhaps, the one place where surprises were not embraced but instead methodically eliminated? Surprisingly, no.

McNeil says, “We knew that overprinting three neon inks would be risky and early digital proof simulations proved to be uninformative. Test prints made on production offset-litho machines revealed a vivid new palette – in particular, a ‘neon eggplant’ color made by overprinting neon pink, yellow and blue. It was a totally unexpected result of the process and a very pleasing one.” An admirably bold move! Surprise for the win.

All photography © MuirMcNeil.

Nichols’ latest book, Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say, is a poignant exploration of human connection and empathy in times of struggle. Drawing from personal experiences and a desire to offer solace to those facing hardship, Nichols embarked on a heartfelt journey culminating in a collection of flower paintings paired with words for the often small, sometimes overlooked moments that accompany hardship and grief. Things like the nurses who so graciously tell us what’s happening as a loved one lay on a hospital bed (one of our favorites).

Tucker shared that “putting work out into the world is never straightforward. To go from making something for myself to sharing it with the public (via the postal service, on Instagram, or in a book) can be tricky, but it’s also deeply satisfying in its own way. At the end of the day, I make things for myself and then try to find how they might land for someone else. The images with captions work when they resonate with someone else’s reality. I fundamentally believe that our sense of separateness is a myth, that we all have fears and hopes and frustrations and joys that overlap more than they don’t.”

In this book, an underlying idea is that even when life reveals what feels like an isolating experience almost beyond words, we might find some comfort in knowing that others have been here before.

Tucker Nichols

I make things for myself and then try to find how they might land for someone else. The images with captions work when they resonate with someone else’s reality.

Tucker Nichols

The inspiration for the project stemmed from Nichols’ own battle with illness and the realization that sometimes, despite our best intentions, words fail to convey the depth of our emotions. Reflecting on his journey to remission, Nichols found solace in the support of a close-knit group of loved ones, underscoring the importance of genuine connection during times of adversity.

Initially starting as a small gesture of kindness, Nichols began sending flower paintings to sick individuals on behalf of their loved ones. The project gained momentum when it was featured on national television, prompting requests from people around the world grappling with various challenges, from illness to grief to everyday struggles.

“I make flower paintings throughout the day—over breakfast, at my studio, at the dentist’s office. Drawing and painting regularly—some might say constantly—is how I stay sane, and I can get grumpy if I don’t make some art every day. I usually make the flower paintings without an idea of what text might accompany them unless there’s a news event that I want to speak to, like someone dying or another mass shooting. They find their way into piles in my studio, and when it’s time to make captions, I spread out a few and see what comes to mind.”

—Tucker Nichols

In Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say, Nichols invites readers to contemplate the shared experiences that bind us together as human beings. Through his art, he reminds us that despite the complexities of life, we are never truly alone in our struggles. Each painting and accompanying caption serve as a reminder of humanity’s interconnectedness and the power of empathy to bridge the gaps between us.

Coffeehaus at COLLINS hosts a monthly communal gathering for people from all walks of life who share the goal of simply showing up to experience creative community. March’s event featured a conversation, book signing, cocktails, and treats with the illustrious Craig Frazier, who discussed his newly released book Drawn, a compendium of his illustrations for prominent publications and businesses around the globe.

An internationally renowned illustrator with a career spanning since 1978, Frazier’s illustrations are celebrated for their wit, optimism, and simplicity.

His creative contributions have appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Fortune, Bloomberg Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Frazier has an impressive roster of blue-chip clients, including Adobe, American Express, Boeing, Chevrolet, Deloitte, MasterCard, Mohawk Paper, Navigant, The Royal Mail, U.S. Postal Service, and United Airlines.

He has also designed eight postage stamps, including the beloved 2006 Love stamp and the commemorative Scouting stamps in 2010/11.

Frazier’s artistry goes beyond fulfilling client requests; he illustrates what he feels will make people stop, look, and think. Coffeehaus at COLLINS was a packed event, buzzing with creative energy from like-minded folks. I was fortunate to connect with Frazier at the event and followed up with some questions about his process and the importance of work that invites people in.

(Interview edited for clarity and length).

During your talk, you emphasized the importance of creating an approachable book with meaningful stories rather than just a visually striking but weighty coffee table book. What is the significance of incorporating narrative elements, and how does this approach enhance the reader’s experience? Additionally, how did you strike a balance between narrative and visuals?

It’s not unlike my work. You must invite people in and make them feel welcome. Physically, I wanted the book to have weight yet a manageable footprint. I wanted it to be functional on a desk, in your lap, or on a plane (thus the slightly smaller dimension than many monographs). I wanted it to feel useable, not monumental. There is something intimidating about an oeuvre of someone’s lifetime of work—so I wanted to soften the barrier. The scale of the book, the use of Garamond, and the size and pacing of each illustration contribute to its approachability. My amberliths, sketches, and sketchbooks demystify the process and invite the reader backstage. The idea of narratives woven throughout the book breaks the rhythm and reminds the reader that the illustrations are the products of a greater effort—both conceptually and professionally.

My life experience and my choices inform my work—the two are inextricably connected. I have found the result immeasurably rewarding and hope the work reflects that. This is the part of work life that I wanted to reveal. Things happen. We can’t control everything, but we can lend a guiding hand.  

This book is for the curious. Whether you are a designer or not, revealing the ‘whys’ of my work will alter your understanding of it. My intention is to allow people to see parallels to their own lives and careers, regardless of their profession. We all make choices that shape how we feel about our jobs. I’m curious how creative people make their work and connect their life stories to it. Asking those questions leads to a deeper appreciation and a chance to learn something. I want that experience available to the readers of Drawn.

It is predominantly a visual book, no question. One can enjoy it on that level alone. The written content is micro-dosed to not compete with the visuals but complement and contribute depth.

I draw elements that support the story, not decorate it.

Your work is celebrated for its visual riddles and graphic wit, often embodying both simplicity and depth. How do you balance clarity and complexity in your work, especially when dealing with abstract concepts or visual puzzles?

Simplicity is a guiding principle in all of my work—design or illustration. I subscribe to both the aesthetic and conceptual orientation, so it’s easy to abide by. It works—simplicity serves comprehension in its elegance and functionality. Simplicity is necessary now more than ever when we are all operating at the edge of our visual threshold—it becomes an attractor because it asks less of us. When we overload our messaging (or visuals), it’s at the risk of getting passed by. I stick with singular messaging, which makes for singular illustrations. I draw elements that support the story, not decorate it. Simplicity equals clarity. The more abstract, the simpler the equation must be. If done right, there is beauty in simplicity. Embedding riddles and wit in the illustration brings a smile to the mind. The illustration’s depth is in the reader’s mind—it’s the place the illustration takes them.

When discussing your creative process, you mentioned taking something to the brink and then stepping it back. How do you recognize when you’ve reached that edge, and what factors influence your decision to pull back or further refine your idea?

This question is challenging because I don’t have a specific formula for it—it’s intuitive. The best way to describe it is to say that when I think I have found an angle to tell the story—I then attempt to regulate how the reader discovers the answer within. It’s a matter of leaving breadcrumbs rather than the whole loaf. It’s always a matter of leaving room for a reader to invest time (often only seconds) and mental energy to understand the message. Breadcrumbs also leave room for interpretation, crucial in talking to a larger audience. I’ve learned that people are smarter than we often give them credit for. Clients always want to make sure their readers get it, but in doing so, they often eliminate the fun by over-explaining it. It’s a delicate balance, and I stand my ground with clients. I’ve got a good instinct for it by now.

There is a lot of attention to creativity, how we do it, and the secrets to turning it on. I’ve never paid much attention to that and tried to develop good habits and a problem-solving discipline. If you sign up to be a designer, your job can’t wait until the muse shows up.

Drawn delves into curiosity, self-doubt, and confidence, all of which are common experiences for creatives. How have these themes influenced your journey as a creative? Can you share any personal anecdotes or pivotal moments where you’ve grappled with self-doubt and how you overcame it to push your creative boundaries?

Curiosity is key. We must be curious about what others make and how to inform and inspire our own creativity. We also must be curious about the oddities around us. These are the fuel for ideas. Self-doubt and confidence are opposites, yet both motivate us. Both are necessary to keep the other in check. Self-doubt—however uncomfortable it is—is critical to doing good work and growing. The better our judgment, the easier it is to become complacent and make safe work. I find my own self-doubt to be often an indicator that I’m breaking new ground. We all experience self-doubt because creativity isn’t science—it’s experimental by design. The good news is that with experience, self-doubt wanes and gives way to confidence, and if we are lucky, humility lies right in between both—the most essential element of personal growth.

I frequently have doubts about my work particularly when I’m sketching on assignment. When I give it a little time to breathe and look at the work with fresh eyes, the doubt often subsides. I remind myself that new is often uncomfortable and these are the chances we must take.

There is a lot of attention to creativity, how we do it, and the secrets to turning it on. I’ve never paid much attention to that and tried to develop good habits and a problem-solving discipline. If you sign up to be a designer, your job can’t wait until the muse shows up. Though she does make appearances, we must operate in an ‘always go’ position.

As it relates to ideas, my solution is to keep sketching. It is the cheapest and fastest prototyping method out there. It is a discipline that I have practiced my entire career, and it never fails. Every sketch I make is an experience of seeing something and understanding it better. I have far more unsuccessful sketches than successful ones, but they are not mutually exclusive. You must turn over rocks until you find what you are looking for. I have a confidence in process—the more you produce, the better the chances are of arriving at something new—it’s that simple.

Your work has inspired many aspiring illustrators and designers. You offered the valuable insight that “style comes just as much from your deficiencies as well as your expertise.” Could you elaborate on this concept and explain how embracing one’s shortcomings can contribute to the development of a unique artistic style?

Understanding what we each ‘have to offer’ is an endeavor you can’t suddenly take on one day. It’s an understanding that comes over time and practice. We never fully understand it, but we must move toward it and often get out of its way. That said, we work to develop personally and professionally, and the goal is to find where we can each put a spin on things. Our fingerprints on our work are the characteristics reflective of both our strengths and weaknesses. Our ability to accept both of those—our deficiencies being the toughest—is where our individuality and point of view reside. The world is full of people—and companies—trying to create a mass consumable perception. But—as practitioners—we shouldn’t take that approach. The baseline is to be a good problem-solver. However, the expression and articulation of those solutions can be personal and unique to each of us. Herein lies the risk and the satisfaction. One reason this works is that it is honest and defendable. It’s easier to stand up for our own ideas than it is for others. The second reason is that unique work stands the best chance of being novel in the eyes of the public. As designers, we don’t have to have thousands of clients. We must have enough to support the economy of our practice. I have found that making what I can make and searching for audiences that appreciate my sensibilities is much easier—and more satisfying—than working in the inverse. Differentiation serves the competitive nature of our job.

As designers, we don’t have to have thousands of clients. We must have enough to support the economy of our practice … making what I can make and searching for audiences that appreciate my sensibilities is much easier—and more satisfying—than working in the inverse.

If you want to get your hands on Drawn, which I highly recommend — it’s fantastic; you can order his book here.

The first festival was funded by Laura Ashley Foundation, and as part of the activities, “We visited six different communities around Cardiff and gave free print workshops. [Now, we’ve] upped the workshops to 15 and are funded by the Arts Council Wales.”

I’ve spoken to Saunders before about his traveling shows, and here he is again for another year of ink and paper and print.

How has the public’s response been to your Printed Festival?
Fantastic! The whole weekend was swarming with visitors from all over! We designed the festival to be a festival of participation rather than just an arts market. Because of this there was a palpable creative buzz in the air, with seasoned printmakers to complete novices trying their hands at linocuts, screenprint, rubber stamping and risograph printing. 

Is your audience mostly artists and designers, or civilians with a love for handcrafts?
A perfect mix; we don’t want to just preach to the converted and show print fanatics lovely artwork. Our main aim is to reach out to “civilians” and show how printmaking is accessible as a means to access their creativity. 

How and where do you organize these fetes?
I teamed up with the Printhaus, an amazing print studio in the heart of Cardiff, and we started talking about the need of a print festival in Wales that can service the community. We get together and ask ourselves what in an ideal world we would like to see in a print festival, and we try our best to make it happen. Free activities, artist talks and lots of hand-printed swag. It’s a printed dream factory. 

What kind of attendance do you get?
We were so swept up, and it being an open space we didn’t have a chance to count, but everyone who held a have-a-go print activity was swept off their feet with no respite for five hours straight. The venue inside serving food ran out of forks. 

What happens to the work?
People take it home and hopefully cherish it! More importantly, hopefully people can take the prints home, realize their creative potential and hopefully get bitten by the printing bug.

Since its founding, National Geographic, or NatGeo for short, has evolved into a multifaceted platform spanning print, digital, television, and more, exploring science, geography, history, and culture. NatGeo seeks to inspire curiosity, foster understanding, and champion conservation efforts worldwide through its articles, documentaries, educational initiatives, and photography.

The globally recognized magazine, which has over 84 million monthly readers, unveiled a significant design refresh this month. This transformation, revealed in the March issue, marks the debut under Editor-in-Chief Nathan Lump and Creative Director Paul Martinez, who assumed their roles in 2022. With Lump’s rich editorial background, including publications like TIME and The New York Times, alongside Martinez’s creative expertise at Travel + Leisure, the duo brings a bedrock of experience to the publication.

The key design and content highlights include:

• New sections, including “In Focus,” a selection of full-page images from National Geographic’s photographers in the field, amplify the focus on photography and visual storytelling.
• Short-form content is now interspersed with in-depth features to create a more varied and dynamic reading experience.
• A larger typeface for an easier read – an intentional update taking reader feedback into account.
• And a subscriber-only cover that features more artful, intimate visuals.

I reached out to Lump and Martinez, eager to discuss the driving forces behind this redesign and their plans for holding 130+ years of tradition, while addressing the evolving needs of print and digital audiences. Our conversation (condensed for length and clarity), is below.

The redesign marks a significant shift in National Geographic‘s visual identity and content structure. What was the inspiration behind deciding to introduce new sections like “In Focus” and the added emphasis on visual storytelling?

NL: We’ve had an emphasis on visual storytelling in our pages for many decades, so while I don’t see our recent adjustments as a particular shift in that direction, we are continually looking for ways to heighten for the reader what is special about what we do. The core of our mission is helping readers to discover and better understand the wonder of our world, and for me, a lot of what I wanted to accomplish with this refresh was to showcase the true diversity of the subjects we cover and what we’re learning about them – from animal behavior to science to history and more. Our new recurring story types are designed to do just that. “In Focus,” a handful of pages at the start of the book, is in many ways a microcosm of that wider approach: we are fortunate to have relationships with great photographers around the globe who are always at work, and this column brings readers a selection of their recent images from out in the field, across the full spectrum of topics of interest to our readers. 

PM: A segment such as “In Focus” truly emphasizes one of our strengths: photography. Placing this at the forefront is not just about captivating the reader with compelling images but also about swiftly propelling them into the heart of the magazine. This seamless transition leads directly into our initial main feature, where we aim for readers to immerse themselves in a deeper narrative.

How do you balance honoring the magazine’s rich heritage of storytelling, particularly through its iconic photography, while also pushing boundaries in today’s media landscape? In what ways does the redesign reflect the evolution of storytelling mediums and audience preferences?

NL: I am extremely conscious of our legacy and of the incredibly loyal, devoted readership we are fortunate to have, and of course that makes you be very deliberate and thoughtful when you make changes. But legacy can also lead you to be too conservative and hold you back from making genuine improvements in the service of your audience. My feeling is that as long as you retain your commitment to telling meaningful stories that align with your brand and meet your reader’s expectations of quality, you have permission to adjust as long as you are putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and thinking about what will serve them best. I thought a lot about what it means to innovate in print as we approached this work and tried to ask myself whether traditional conventions still held true. Years of working on digital content and products have grounded me in UX thinking and research, and I drew on that in this process. Our decision to radically simplify the book structure—essentially, almost the entire magazine is one unnamed “section” that consists of shorter and longer stories mixed together—stems from an understanding that digital and social environments have conditioned us to consume content in more free-flowing and serendipitous way. The story selection and flow are still highly curated, as any great magazine should be, but it allows for more variation and surprise that we think makes the overall experience more pleasurable and engaging.

Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content.

Paul Martinez, Creative Director

The decision to incorporate more short-form content alongside in-depth features is interesting. How do you navigate maintaining depth and substance while catering to shorter attention spans in today’s digital age?

PM: Many of our decisions revolved around the concept of pacing. Our strategy involved interspersing shorter stories among the longer ones to create a dynamic flow of peaks and valleys for the reader. We discovered that grouping all the longer features together risked reader fatigue, so placing shorter pieces between them offers readers a chance to engage swiftly with the content.

From a design standpoint, we aimed to signal to the reader when they were transitioning from a longer feature to a shorter story. To achieve this, we developed a consistent template for the shorter stories, facilitating a smooth exit from and entrance into the longer features. Additionally, we sought to engage the typographer more in introducing the features to signify the beginning of a substantial story.

Typography plays a crucial role in readability and accessibility, and your decision to introduce a larger typeface reflects a commitment to improving the reader experience. How did you approach this aspect of the redesign, particularly in response to reader feedback?

PM: Ensuring readability is a constant and top priority. Design plays a significant role in ensuring that readers do not encounter difficulty with the content. Moreover, from an aesthetic perspective, we aimed to provide sufficient space for the increased type size in the body copy and captions to breathe. By augmenting the white space in the layouts, we were able to strike that delicate balance and hopefully improve the reader experience.

The subscriber-only cover featuring more artful and intimate visuals is a bold move, especially in an era where digital content often takes precedence. What motivated this decision, and how do you see it contributing to the magazine’s relationship with its most loyal readers?

NL: I am conscious that our relationship with subscribers is a personal one—they’ve invited us into their homes—and that the experience of receiving a printed magazine in the mail and diving into it on your sofa is quite particular relative to other ways that you encounter content in other environments and platforms. On a traditional newsstand, you need to shout, as it were, to gain a potential reader’s attention. In digital, it’s much the same—you have milliseconds in someone’s scrolling to grab their attention. When they’ve subscribed, they’ve already indicated an interest in your content and a willingness to engage. That’s not to say that the cover doesn’t need to provoke engagement, but when you hold a magazine in your hands at home, you are quite literally up close and personal with it. That allows us, I think, to showcase artistry and to be quieter in our choice of image when it’s appropriate, and we deliberately went minimal with type, in a nod to the old National Geographics with type-only covers that essentially served as a table of contents. Our goal is still to intrigue or to move the reader in some way, but we can take a different approach that we hope delivers something tailored to the subscriber’s mindset now that they’re ready to sit down and read.

How do you navigate the preferences and consumption habits of print readers versus digital consumers, and what lessons can other content creators learn from your experience? Any advice for media companies looking to strengthen connections with their audiences in an increasingly digital landscape?

NL: Like many publishers, we know that our print and digital audiences are quite distinct, and while they share some common affinities, they are not mirror images of each other. For many years, at other titles, I tried to achieve nearly total platform convergence—with all content designed to flow seamlessly between platforms—but I no longer think that’s the best approach. Increasingly, we take a fluid approach to our content creation, with some stories designed specifically to satisfy the needs of either print or digital (or social) audiences, and then selectively, those stories migrate to other platforms, often with modifications and sometimes in a different medium. It’s more bespoke and requires more care, but if you build the intention into your production process from the outset, you can ensure you’re generating the right type of material and minimize the effort required after the fact. This is an essential part of being responsive to audience preferences. What will work for a certain type of reader or user in one place will not necessarily work for another reader or user somewhere else. My goal with all our storytelling is to maximize the reach and impact of our work, and the way that works is by recognizing how preferences and behaviors vary based on where someone is and their mindset. The through line, of course, is quality – personally, I find this thinking and the process it informs so much more creatively energizing than when I started my career, although it is undoubtedly more complicated. You can’t do everything all the time, so it’s also important to be mindful of who you are most focused on reaching and strategically what you are trying to get out of building that relationship. I think that today, in digital environments, in particular, success is a lot about super-serving more specific audiences and interests. In some ways, we’ve always done this with our printed magazines, so we’re well positioned to thrive wherever we may be because we think consumer-first, fundamentally, and build that into everything we do.

What inspired you to reveal your Emotions in this printed zine?
When I was invited to be an artist-in-residence at SVA’s RISO lab, I had to come up with an idea for a zine. My first idea was called The Atlas of Imaginary Places. Why? Because living in this time, when so many people are so disenchanted with The-Way-Things-Are, I thought it would be interesting to create whacked-out Dr. Seuss meets Dr. Escher cityscapes and landscapes based on the kind of places we’d actually like to live in. But when I started sketching out some of these ideas—The City of Dreams, The Garden of Fallen Egos, Heavy Metal Mountain and Tequila Fields—I just wasn’t, you know, feeling them.  Then I thought, OK, Josh, maybe if you could infuse these landscapes with emotion—you know, create places like the Lagoon of Lust, the Valley of Tears and the Laughing Forest—then maybe you’ll be more excited to draw them. But then I weirdly felt like I was serving two masters: the Landscapes and the emotions. And I wasn’t doing justice to either one of them. It dawned on me then that what I really cared about was the emotions. I mean, come on, everyone lives in a world of emotions, both their own emotions and the emotions of the people around them, so it’s a subject absolutely everyone can relate to. I said goodbye to the concept of the Landscape and hitched my star to the Emotions.

You did retain the idea of the atlas. Why an atlas?
The purpose of an atlas is to map out the world and make it known. So why not do that for emotions? Emotions are, of course, not an outer landscape, but an inner landscape of feelings that can tower over us like mountains, swell up like rivers, blow like balmy breezes or erupt like volcanoes. How cool would it be to try and depict emotions—the big ones, such as love, pleasure and pain, as well as the more obscure ones such as wanderlust, curiosity and inspiration—in a way that could, even for a split second, encourage a reader to see, feel and understand that emotion, and maybe even marinate in the sense of that emotion for a spell. Now I had an idea that excited me. 

You often have a gritty approach to your work. How is this different?
I’ve done many portraits of people. And with every portrait I always ask myself the same question: In their dreams, how would this subject like to be represented? I asked this same question of these emotions. Hey, Love (or Disgust or Loneliness), if I made art about you, how would you like to be represented? 

It seemed some emotions wanted to be depicted simply, subtly and cleanly, others chaotically or colorfully or in your face, and some, like love, just wanted to be represented with type, hold the images please. 

Asking this question had the surprising effect upon me of releasing me and restraining me from my typically over-the-top, leave-no-white-space-untouched depictions of things. After all, who am I to question what Pleasure or Pain wants?

Tell me what it feels like working on the RISO printer? 
At SVA’s RISO lab, I fell in love! My crush was 3′ 6″ tall, 57 inches wide and weighed 250 pounds. She (or he, if you prefer) was called RISO. She’s a Japanese printer. Although she is a somewhat homely, box-like contraption, she became for me a most passionate and capricious lover.

The stuff that RISO could do! The rich textures she could create were both majestic and gritty; the color combos she could make evoked everything from glorious sunsets to mystifying fog banks to garish products on supermarket shelves.  

But on the other hand, the trials RISO could put you through! It turns out RISO is one temperamental #$@&%*! You spend your printing time shoving ink drums shaped liked small torpedoes in and out of the machine and talking to her through the buttons of her control panel. But there are days when she decides to jam your papers, smear your images, disobey your requests, or just refuses to even play with you and shuts down like that and stops talking to you. 

Fortunately the SVA RISO lab is run by an incredible crew of cool-headed, RISO-wise artist/technicians who know how to sweet talk the machine to get you back in her good favor. Without the help of Sarula Bao, Aidan Fitzgerald, Sabii Borno and the director of the Lab, Panayiotis Terzis, there would be no Atlas of Emotions. 

The lab itself is an artistic beehive. In the two small rooms you’ll find SVA students, continuing ed students and artists churning out zines, prints and whatnots on the four RISO machines that clatter rhythmically like Industrial Age mechanical devices. Other artists are spread around folding, stapling and using a giant cutter to trim their work. And it’s all offline, existing in that old-fashioned analog world, which was, once upon a time, as you know, where everything used to happen. 

Is there a follow up to this in the works? If so, what?
The challenge of depicting emotions was artistically and creatively invigorating and the response has been so overwhelming that I hope to keep going, depicting more and more emotions. After all, even though I called this zine The Atlas of Emotions, I only depicted 12 emotions. There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of emotions inside of us—some that don’t even have words in the English language to describe them—so it’s a project that could engage me and stay fresh for years. I’d love to create more zines (which is why I called this “Volume One”), as well as turn the concept into a coffee-table type book. (Hello? Are there any publishers out there?)

Traditionally filled with money and given as tokens of good wishes, red packets are integral to Chinese New Year celebrations. The Year of the Dragon holds special significance, symbolizing success, honor, and dignity — believed to bring growth, progress, and abundance.

The Secret Little Agency created the Long Bao to celebrate this auspicious year. A play on words, the name is derived from the pronunciation of the Chinese character for dragon, which is ‘lóng’ or ‘loong.’

This dragon year, we decided to extend the red packet and make it long-er.

The Secret Little Agency

Nodding to a rich tradition, The Long Bao also serves up some humor and a contemporary aesthetic, making the symbol of good fortune a unique gift.

This limited edition creation captures the Chinese New Year’s essence and exemplifies The Secret Little Agency’s commitment to creativity and innovation. Founded in 2009, The Secret Little Agency remains the only creative agency in Singapore to be named both Independent and Creative Agency of the Year multiple times in the last decade.

With only 1000 pieces available in this exclusive run, the agency plans to distribute them to friends and partners in Singapore and worldwide. Intrigued? Request your own Long Bao with an email to The Secret Little Agency.

To maximize the impact of the new identity, Repslabel orchestrated a comprehensive campaign that works across various elements, including digital publications and promotions. The conceptual campaign pays homage to Baroque composers, utilizing graffiti to shroud their identities in secrecy, infusing Les Boréades with an enigmatic quality that focuses squarely on the music itself. This strategic approach enhances the ensemble’s artistic presence and showcases the adaptability and creativity embedded in their revitalized visual branding.

The newly crafted identity is flexible and designed to adapt seamlessly across various media over time. The typographic approach carries a distinct personality, communicating information with clarity and impact. The grid structure provides versatility, accommodating different visual and typographic elements based on the integrated content. A simple yet powerful color palette adds sophistication and allows for harmonization with diverse graphic styles.

Repslabel’s ‘Go for Baroque’ approach, combining contemporary graffiti in contrast with the highly ornate and elaborate style of Baroque, is music to my ears.

BREAD, a free, limited-edition zine, uses design to tell stories and educate readers in a relatable and accessible way. As a brand extension for Cash App, the zine bridges financial literacy and culture, using design and storytelling to make complex financial concepts more accessible and engaging. The inaugural issue focuses on Bitcoin, offering readers a fresh, inclusive perspective on the digital currency.

Cash App’s vision for BREAD extends beyond just information sharing; it aims to transform how people perceive financial education. In a world where discussions about money can be daunting or exclusive, BREAD seeks to make learning about finances more accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

What sets BREAD apart is the collaborative effort of influential artists, designers, and writers, including Allison P. Davis, Richard Turley, and DAISUKE. Their diverse contributions explore various topics, from Bitcoin mining to rebranding the cryptocurrency and unveiling the enigma surrounding its creator.

The BREAD Bitcoin Issue is available in select stores across major US cities. Readers can also access the zine online to order a free print copy.

BREAD Contributor Highlights:

Writers: Allison P Davis, Collier Meyerson, Emilia Petrarca, Margaret Rhodes, Elise Craig

Designers & Illustrations: DAISUKE, Richard Turley, Porto Rocha, FRKO, Cevallos Bros, Stephanie Specht, Steven Montinar

Raul Lopez (LUAR Founder) 

Jeremy Leslie, the London-based founder of magCulture, is on a mission to cover and discover the world of print-on-paper magazines that continue to publish despite the major obstacles in producing them. On Nov. 16, Vitsœ will host magCulture Live London, a 10th-anniversary event showcasing the best creative editorial projects, with guests from across the industry spectrum. Speakers include Debra Bishop, design director of The New York Times for Kids; Neville Brody, formerly of The Face, Arena and City Limits; Maya Moumne, co-founder of Journal Safar and Al Hayya magazines; Charles Baker, editor of The Fence; Oyinkansola Dada, founder of Dada magazine; James Gallacher, editor-on-chief of Ton; Linda Nubling, publisher of Gurlz with Curlz; and more. If you read the MagCulture Journal, you’ll have a sense of the scope and focus of the fete.

With the event only a few weeks away, I asked Leslie about his dedication to print journals and the new entries in the field.

Why are magazines so important to you, especially in this fungible publishing environment?
Several reasons; first, I can’t avoid the fact that we grew up during a period where magazines simply were culturally important, a central element of our media diet. In particular, my teenage obsession with music was fed by weekly print such as New Musical Express.

But it’s more than nostalgia. Magazines and the way they are created and produced are time capsules for the period they are/were made. In terms of content obviously—that story, that person, that idea—but also in terms of photographic style, illustration style, language, typography, the way design and content interact, etc. They absorb subconscious influence from every person involved in the production to reflect so many aspects of a given time. And the result is baked into a tangible thing. A print magazine cannot be corrected or altered. It is stuck in itself and can be examined and critiqued from a future context, and learned from. Whether naive or hugely professional, a magazine reveals much that wasn’t intended.

By contrast, digital channels are mutable. From a cultural standpoint, the text may remain intact but its presentation may at best change, or worse become unreadable or lost. What we gain in immediacy and easy access online we lose in the reduced value of bespoke design and art direction. By their nature, websites are about function and UX and not about a designed response to the meaning of the text. Everything online is flatly efficient and smooth rather than special.

And in a broader sense, humans want actual things. We see this every day at our London shop—a growing minority of people who want to interact with a physical magazine.

Is there a real chance that magazines will be an extinguished species, or is the digital era a thinning of the herd?
I believe we’ll come to look back at the post-second world war consumer boom and the advertising-based rise of the mainstream magazine as the outlier. I can remember major magazine publishers launching new titles just to mop up the advertising they were being offered! That species of magazine is long dead. And although those magazines were a reflection of their time like any mag, do we really miss them? Sure, some were great, but the majority were average. Those middle market titles are dead.

Before they became such huge money-makers, magazines were a useful form of communication shared between communities of like-minded people. They were a club for people sharing the same interest/hobby/obsession. We’re heading back that way, with publishers building tight relationships with small devoted readerships rather than encouraging the late 20th-century promiscuous get-as-many-readers-as-you-can model.

You produce live events. This is refreshing, especially since online venues are at best disembodied. Why do you do real-time, real-life activities?
As a design student, the best teachers were the working designers who visited once a week to run projects. They brought real life and all its ups and downs with them. Since then, I’ve always been interested to hear people talk IRL about what they know.

When I came to launch my 2013 book The Modern Magazine, I wanted to bring together the interviewees from the book to bring their words to life. That was our first big, live event. And it hit a nerve. Most magazine publishing events are based around the business of publishing—ours was unique in highlighting the creativity of the form. Simply, it’s inspiring hearing people’s stories laid out live in front of you in real life. During the pandemic we moved online but the novelty factor soon faded. It worked but the experience wasn’t as powerful.

Magazine-making can be a lonely activity: lots of time alone on your laptop. Come out and meet your fellow print lovers! Get together in a room and talk! Compare and contrast!

What will be your focus in the forthcoming London event?
As with our New York event in July this year, the focus is “Format.” Reminding people how print media can be any scale/size, produced to any schedule, and operate its own frame of reference. And to highlight the technological aspect of print: a well-produced print mag is a brilliant piece of engineering. Quite different to an iPhone or whatever, but still a piece of technology.

Have you seen your audiences grow, shrink or remain the same?
Our online audience is larger than ever, via online posts, Instagram and podcasts. The event audiences took a tumble over the COVID lockdowns but are building back now.

Are magazines ultimately sustainable? And does that matter?
This year’s magCulture Live London marks our 10th anniversary, and as part of the planning I’ve been looking back over those 10 years and further back. I noted that in my 2001 book Issues I discussed the prevailing idea of the end of print. And I spoke at our first conference in 2013 about the same thing. Today we are no longer pondering the end of print, but celebrating its continual reinvention. magCulture is inundated with brand-new magazines and new issues of existing magazines. Are their makers running hugely successful businesses? Generally not (though some are). But there’s a creative imperative behind every one. People feel compelled to make another issue.

Perhaps a useful analogy is the wider world of the arts. Do you produce a movie to make money? Do you paint to earn a living? Can you live on your ambition to write a novel? Not everyone can be, or wants to be, Spielberg, Hirst, Grisham.

Judging by the design, journalism and other students I meet, the desire to make magazines doesn’t look like fading any time soon. And since the pandemic we’ve seen a significant uptick in new indie launches and people buying them—both supply and demand has increased.

Field Notes’ 59th edition in their quarterly series was just unveiled for the summer, featuring silver hot-foil stamped on indigo blue covers. Say hello to the Foiled Again Field Notes, with illustrations designed by Field Notes cofounder Aaron Draplin and perfectly executed foil-stamping by Studio on Fire of St. Paul, MN. 

Draplin’s intricate artwork illustrates the manufacturing process behind the jacket design of these Field Notes, which is hot-stamped onto shimmering Neenah Pearl “Indigo” 110# cover stock. The notebooks come in packs of three, with each containing 48 pages of 60# Finch Opaque text stock, ruled with silver ink, and bound with three staples. The trio of 3.5″ × 5.5″ notebooks are packaged in a tuck box featuring the cover art in reversed colors: blue foil on Neenah Pearl “Sterling” stock. The packs are being sold for $14.95 a piece. 

Limited Edition Quarterly Subscribers will receive these silver and blue beauties in addition to notebooks in an additional colorway: gold foil on “Poppy” stock, packed in a red-foil-on-“Bright Gold” box. This iteration of Foiled Again is available exclusively for quarter edition subscribers, so be sure to subscribe now! USA shipping is free for subscription shipments, and active subscribers save 10% whenever they shop on the Field Notes site. 

Who cares if your notebook stack just got a little bit taller? Beautiful tools beget beautiful ideas, and that’s just the facts.

I hope that some of these magazines will be familiar to you, and that there might be some new recommendations in there too. Remember– even if you’ve come across them before, these are the sort of titles that are worth revisiting to see how they’ve evolved. If you want to keep up with my favorite independent magazines, subscribe to my surprise magazine club and we’ll deliver a different publication to your door every month.

MacGuffin
A new issue of MacGuffin is a reassurance. You’re in safe hands, because whichever under-appreciated object they’ve decided to focus on, you know that editors-in-chief Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven are going to use it to spin a fascinating selection of stories, producing a beautiful and affecting magazine. Take, for example, their latest issue, dedicated to ‘The Log’, and Ernst’s editor’s letter, which begins, “I never knew my dad; he died when I was two years old. But I could log into 150 days of his life through the logbook he kept while aboard a codfish trawler, the Kvitfjell, off the west coast of Greenland in the Arctic Ocean from July to December 1961.”

The logbook points to a personal fascination with one type of log, and he goes on to describe how his parents restored, “a so-called knubb hus, a tiny worker’s home made from leftover scraps of wood from the many sawmills along the Glomma river”. This detail is then expanded across a series of three articles complete with fantastic archive photography, telling the stories of the log drivers who worked on the Glomma, floating logs from the north of Norway down to the saw mills in the south. It’s dramatic and captivating, and that’s just for starters – there are also totem poles, woodworm, toothpicks, an Ode to the Log Lady, and lots more log-inspired ramblings in this great magazine.

macguffinmagazine.com

Eye
“The urge to make static artwork that depicts or creates movement has long been a human preoccupation”, writes Eye editor John L Walters in the introduction to the current issue, before letting rip with a dazzling array of examples across the following 100-odd pages. Eye’s issues aren’t always themed, but they do always range far and wide, the self-proclaimed International Review of Graphic Design demonstrating time and again its ability to cover a whole world of graphic design and present its issues as a coherent and authoritative digest.

In this issue that includes photographer, graphic designer, painter, film-maker and art director Peter Knapp, whose work art directing Elle in the 1960s, “revolutionised the magazine through typography and, above all, photography, pioneering informal and dynamic fashion shoots.” The archive magazine spreads selected for the story demonstrate this sense of movement on the printed page, in contrast to the work selected for Jump Cuts, a round up of motion graphics that doesn’t convey any sense of movement on the printed page, and instead is made to be read with YouTube close at hand.

eyemagazine.com

Dirty Furniture
Launched on Kickstarter in September 2014, Dirty Furniture is interested in what happens, ‘When design leaves the showroom’, exploring the messy, unintended stuff that’s thrown up when people start actually using designed objects. Originally conceived as a biannual publication that would run for three years across six issues, editors Anna Bates and Elizabeth Glickfeld have stuck to the original concept but extended it across a much longer timeframe, with the series finally due to come to a conclusion at the end of this year.

The fifth issue pictured above is dedicated to the telephone, and it would have been a very different magazine if it had been published on its original schedule, some time around 2016. As they note in their introduction, when they started work on this issue in early 2020 the phone was a cause of popular concern, with widespread anxiety about device addiction and the need for ‘digital wellness’. And then the pandemic hit. “Suddenly these maligned objects became our lifelines. While many aspects of life passed through our phones previously, now absolutely everything did. How then could we distil the meaning of the phone into a magazine?” Thoughtful and playful, this fifth issue was one of my favourite magazines of 2021, and I’m expecting issue six to be a fittingly impressive finale to the project.

dirty-furniture.com

Delayed Gratification
The magazine that’s proud to say it’s last to breaking news, Delayed Gratification looks back on the world from a careful remove, revisiting events after the dust has settled to present its uniquely considered perspective. The current issue is their 50th, and it covers the period from January to March this year – that means stories on major events like Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters storming the Brazilian government buildings, the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. But you’ll also find stories on the plummeting popularity of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, as Harry’s book was released, and every UK and US hit by Burt Bacharach, who passed away in February.

Delayed Gratification has become renowned for its infographics, which crunch enormous amounts of data in order to show the stories within the stories, and indeed the cover of this latest issue is an infographic that visualises the different types of stories they’ve published across the 50 issues so far (scroll right on the gallery above to see a more detailed image with legend and notes). It’s a huge undertaking, the pages packed with rigorously researched information, and it’s great to see this slow news magazine going from strength to strength.

slow-journalism.com

Lost
A beautifully simple magazine, Lost publishes first-person travel tales from around the world. It’s based in Shanghai, and all the stories are printed in both English and Mandarin, the balanced layouts running the two languages alongside lovely photography. Lost started in 2015 and the magazine has hardly changed since that first issue, testament to the simplicity of the concept and the quality of the production. The strapline is ‘Self-Discovery Through Travel’, and as they tell their stories the authors reveal their different motivations for leaving home behind, and their unique impressions of the strange worlds they find. The exposed spine allows the magazine to open completely flat, allowing readers to properly appreciate every spread as they travel from Japan to Croatia to the Malaysian rainforest, creating a peaceful and reflective piece of print.

lostmagazine.org

Safar
Published in Beirut, Safar is a mix of several influences. It’s interested in design, and it tells stories that revolve around design and visual culture as seen from Lebanon and the wider Middle East. But you’d never call this simply a design magazine. It also has a strong interest in protest and social justice, and this current issue, published last year, is its most political and radical so far, featuring stories on the protests for democracy in Hong Kong, the oppression of people in Palestine, and the history of civil rights protest in the US.

But for all the heaviness of these subjects, which it engages with seriously and sincerely, it also retains a sly smile, for example in its dual front covers: the magazine is published in both English and Arabic, with the English running from left to right and the Arabic from right to left, giving it in effect two front covers. This latest issue features Adele Kareh, from Lebanese currency exchange Im el Dollar, photographed surrounded by virtually worthless Lebanese lira to comment on the catastrophic collapse of the country’s currency and banking system. On one cover she is angry and uncompromising, on the other laughing as if at the absurdity of the situation, and there’s a sense that Safar is balancing the same mix of emotions.

journalsafar.com

Racquet
I’m not really a tennis fan, but I love Racquet. Zooming in on tennis, it manages to tell stories about a whole world of experiences, from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat, to the sore knees and elbows that come from knocking about on your local court. They have some access to the stars of the sport, but that’s not really the point of Racquet – Andrea Petkovic is an occasional columnist and a previous issue included the story of what happened when the Williams sisters dropped in to sing karaoke, but you’d never expect to see a safe, PR-approved interview with Novak Djokovic on these pages.

Instead they tell unexpected stories of the sport, which this issue includes a profile of diminutive legend and Filipino champion Felicisimo Ampon, followed by a dusty, grubby investigation of where the earth comes from for the world’s clay courts. They luxuriate in art inspired by tennis, like Charlotte Keates’s paintings of tennis courts and clubs, and they even sent photographer Karl Hab up in a helicopter to capture the crisp, secluded lines of tennis courts scattered across the Côte D’Azur.

racquetmag.com

Zweikommasieben
A magazine of contemporary music and sound art, Zweikommasieben recently published its 27th issue, and it remains just as experimental and energetic as the artists featured on its pages. Zweikommasieben is based in Lucerne, and that helps to frame the picture it paints, with a recurring theme of outsiders coming together and creating an alternative to their quiet, conservative surroundings. For example dancehall queen Lateena Plummer is this issue’s first interviewee, and she talks about how moving from Jamaica to Switzerland gave her greater freedom of expression, as well as rapid notoriety: “Being a dancehall queen in Switzerland means getting a lot of attention because the scene is very small. I’m more or less the only trans person from Jamaica who does dancehall in Switzerland, if not the only one.”

But the most striking feature of this issue is its playful approach to text, which it runs in short sections across the tops of the pages, elongating the editors’ letter and article introductions, and leading readers on disorienting and faintly ridiculous journeys through the stories. As the introduction says (by this point at the top of page 52) “if you’ve read this editorial all the way through, you’ve already made it very far into the magazine, even though, this is only the beginning.”

zweikommasieben.ch

Apartamento
These days Apartamento is something of a publishing empire, with a huge range of art books, cook books, and merchandise available to buy via the site and in stylish retailers worldwide. But the ‘everyday life interiors magazine’ that started it all is still doing pretty much the same thing it always has, interviewing interesting people in their homes and studios, and giving a sense of what their lives might actually look like. That longevity is testament to the simplicity of the concept – the idea that, of course, it’s much more enticing to see a slightly messy, ‘real’ home, rather than a beautifully pristine show home that has been fastidiously staged and tidied. But that doesn’t quite cover what they do so well, because while there have been plenty of imitators along the way, there’s still nobody that does it quite as well as Apartamento, which is why, 15 years on, this eclectic magazine is still going strong.

apartamentomagazine.com

Vestoj
Hands down my favourite fashion magazine, Vestoj isn’t interested in the latest trends or runway looks, instead concerning itself with what fashion means more broadly, and what it means when we choose to wear what we wear. The result is fascinating and timeless, which is just as well, because the issue pictured above (issue 10, ‘On Doubt’) has now been superseded by issue 11, ‘On Everyday Life’, but I haven’t been able to lay my hands on that one yet.

Reading from the Vestoj site, “Vestoj ‘On Everyday Life’ is an exploration of routines, rituals and repetitions, the many ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, how ‘common people’ reappropriate and subvert material culture to suit their own interests and rules, and a lyrical and critical exploration of generic, inexpensive and mass produced objects.” I can’t wait to get hold of it, and that’s one of the great things about these independent magazines – no matter how many you have on your shelves, there’s always another issue coming just around the corner.

vestoj.com

This article was originally published by Stack, the organization that searches out the world’s best independent magazines and delivers them to thousands of readers around the world every month.

One of the most effective (and often underappreciated) of those tools is the contents page. On the simplest level it’s a quick and easy way of jumping to the bits you want to read first, but for some magazines the contents page performs a more abstract role, becoming a distillation of the essence of the publication, rather than a practical way of showing what the stories are and where to find them. The following is a collection of interesting and experimental contents pages, and what they say about their magazines as a whole.

Year Zero

Published in Istanbul and designed in Berlin, Year Zero presented a hugely varied selection of underground music, fashion, art and more. This issue is themed around ‘process’, deconstructing the concept and breaking it into six stages that are visualized on the contents page as a sort of lunatic Venn diagram, showing the places where the processes overlap one another. It’s surely not an accident that the interlinking ellipses are themselves suggestive of big zeros sprawling across the pages, and the message here is clear: There is no beginning and there is no end; there is just the process, so surrender yourself to it and see where it takes you. (In a further break from boring old front-to-back linear reading, each article finishes with a ‘choose your own adventure’ A/B selection, encouraging the reader to pick their way through the magazine, flipping forwards and back to jump from story to story.)

Delayed Gratification

A magazine that looks back at the news after the dust has settled, Delayed Gratification orders its pages chronologically, allowing readers to flip through three months of stories each issue. So it makes perfect sense that the contents page is also arranged chronologically, but this is Delayed Gratification, so it doesn’t stop there. Because this slow journalism magazine is also renowned for its data visualizations, so as well as showing when the stories took place and where to find them, the contents page also gives readers an at-a-glance overview of how long the stories are, and how serious they are. I’m not sure whether anyone would really use that information to decide what they’re going to read, but it makes for a fantastic expression of the magazine’s obsessive interpretation of the news.
slow-journalism.com

University District Seattle

A one-off photo magazine, University District Seattle was created by photographer Casey Jacobson when she lived in the area at the end of 2019. The magazine takes readers around the streets of the University District, as she interviews locals and photographs the scenes she finds along the way, creating an image of a messy, chaotic but characterful neighborhood. By contrast the contents page uses the clean, clear grid layout of the streets themselves to show where photographs were taken, giving the reader an extra layer of context and also emphasizing the difference between looking at a neat map, and being lost in the landscape itself.
caseyjacobson.bigcartel.com

Interview

A magazine that has always been about big names, Interview’s contents page opts for a simple alphabetical order that means you can jump straight to the star interviewee or interviewer of your choice. Of course this isn’t all about straight-up practicality, though, and alongside the parade of famous and cool people is a sprinkling of funny and characterful additions, like Lucy the Owl, from Donald Glover’s cover shoot; Shoes, Big (page 48); and Shoes, Pointy (page 86).
interviewmagazine.com

Colors

When I was pulling together magazines for this list I was sure I remembered Colors doing fun things with its content pages, but the only one I have that really fits the bill is the ‘Football’ issue, which displays the stories and teams featured in the magazine, arranged in eight groups as if facing off against each other in a tournament. It’s a smart idea that perfectly reflects the magazine’s combination of playfulness and fastidious attention to detail – every story and team is given its own club crest, presumably created by art director Ramon Pez and his designers, which is used both on the contents page and on the articles themselves.
colorsmagazine.com

Migrant Journal

World maps are a common way for magazines to organize their contents pages, especially when they’re trying to show at a glance that their stories are gathered from all around the globe. Too often, though, those maps actually end up revealing the places that are not covered, with large blank spaces unintentionally showing how difficult it is to produce a genuinely global magazine. Migrant Journal played with this convention by splitting the world map up according to the regions and sub-regions of the United Nations geoscheme system. It means that readers of the final issue could see the magazine included stories from Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southern Africa, for example, and also that there was nothing from North America, Central Asia and South America. But just as importantly, it allowed the magazine to repeat the note from the creators of the geoscheme; “the assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories.” The same message appeared at the start of every issue, neatly establishing the magazine’s project of looking again at the existence of borders and what it means to travel across them.
migrantjournal.com

Nice Outfit

The self-described “publication on fashion criticism, body politics and experimental fiction”, Nice Outfit takes a playful and provocative approach to the fashion world, or as editor Felix Choong puts it in his foreword: “Fashion, like the people producing and wearing it, is hysterical and within this hysteria we arguably make our clearest assertions and most astute gestures towards the worlds we find ourselves thrust into.” Existing within the madness of fashion, the magazine is both intellectually rigorous and aware of its own ridiculousness, a contradiction that seems to be summed up by the unwieldy silliness of rendering the contents in the shape of a boot.
felixchoong.com

Good Sport

A sports magazine like no other, this fifth issue of Good Sport shuns page numbers in favor of an alphabetical order for stories. Sometimes the significance of the letter is obvious, like ‘E’, a photo story about people who get up ‘Early, Very Early’ to play sport. Other times the association is less clear, like ‘M’, a series of interviews with boxers at Finchley Boxing Club in London, who reflect on themselves and their sport, leading me to guess that the ‘M’ is for ‘mirror’? As a result the contents page looks sort of like a subway guide, with all the letters crowding together, and while it would technically be possible to navigate the magazine from there, the main method of wayfinding in the magazine is its tabbed pages, which encourage readers to jump forwards and backwards, rather than starting at the front and reading all the way to the back.
goodsportmagazine.com

This article was originally published by Stack, the organization that searches out the world’s best independent magazines and delivers them to thousands of readers around the world every month.

Eggers’s most recent title, The Eyes and The Impossible, is far from your typical paperback. Eggers has written and designed a book for all ages that comes in a deluxe wood-bound hardcover edition, courtesy of his nonprofit publishing house McSweeney’s. Knopf Books for Young Readers is simultaneously publishing a traditional version for middle-grade readers, making The Eyes & the Impossible the first-ever book to be published in two editions, for two readerships, and from two publishers.

This first-of-its-kind publishing model isn’t the only standout aspect of the book— a real bamboo die-cut cover and gold gilt pages makes the physical wooden edition a thing of beauty unlike any book I’ve ever encountered. As someone enamored by innovative book design and the world of book arts, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with Eggers directly about the book’s design and his creative process to get there. His thoughtful reflections are below.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

Where did your idea for publishing a wooden, die-cut book come from? 

I began thinking about what this book might look like almost three years ago. I began doing some sketches which I usually start with, and then I was at the US Post Office one day out here in San Francisco, and I came across a greeting card that had been made of bamboo. It was a mass-produced greeting card that was probably $5 or $6. I’d never seen it done on that scale before, but it made sense that laser-cutting technology has gotten to the point of affordability and efficiency. So we sent that card to our printer and said, Hey, can you do something like this? And they said, Well, sure. That became a two-and-a-half year process.

While I was finishing the book and going through editing, we were going back and forth with the printer. I think we had seven different prototypes. First, it was an example of what the bamboo would look like; they made it much thicker than the greeting card I sent, for durability’s sake. Then we did an early die cut and realized they could do that very efficiently and make a really clean cut in the bamboo. 

We had a little bit of freedom in terms of timeline, and for any designer, when you have that much time, you can fine tune and troubleshoot every last thing and make sure that there’s no surprises. Usually when you get something back from the printer, there’s at least a few gambles you’ve made. But this is one of these rare occasions that maybe 14 months ago, we had this exact book in our hands. It’s really nice to see it finally making its way into the world. We think it’s the first wooden book!

You just never know how everything will come together. We’ve been in business 25 years, and you always look at a book object with certain reservations or certain things you would change, but this one, I can’t get enough of it.

This book features so many lovely design elements in addition to the bamboo covers, from the gold gilt pages to the red cloth spine to the rounded corners. What informed these choices?

The gilt edges, I’ve always wanted to do, and I don’t know if we’ve done it before. I did some sketches at home of the colors together: the red, gold, and brown. I have a lot of old books that have leather covers and gold foil stamp lettering and red end paper, so I always knew that that combination worked well. The old Heritage Dictionary is always that red leather with gold stamping, so it’s kind of a tried and true palette.

But it was also just what was going to work. We tried a black type on the spine, we tried a green spine, but I liked the boldness of the red against the 17th-century landscape imagery. Back then, all of the frames for those landscapes used to be so elaborate; eight-inch gold frames that nobody uses anymore. In that era, the frame was just as ornate as the landscape within. So there’s a little bit of the book that harkens back to that era of the ornate gilt frame.

What was the collaboration like between you and the book’s illustrator, Shawn Harris?

Shawn did all the artwork on the cover and inside. We’d worked together many times, so I went to him three years ago and said Let’s try to make the most beautiful thing either one of us has ever held, and I think Shawn really did that. We have a totally intuitive way to work together. He’s the most versatile, talented artist I think I know. He can just adapt his style to the needs of that particular project.  

I don’t know whose idea it was to use these old Dutch and Flemish paintings to paint the dog into. Originally, I tried to approximate the paintings and do them myself, but I couldn’t get it right. So we ended up using these open-copyright paintings, then he made the dog in each one of them look totally of that period and of that style; it’s remarkable. There’s no way you would be able to tell at first glance that that dog was not original to each one of those pieces of artwork. He managed to make it totally seamless.

Why are you drawn to these unique and non-traditional materials for the books you’re designing and publishing at McSweeney’s?

The materials will do so much work for you if you choose them right. The weight of this wood, and how the grain is totally different on each one of them since it’s real bamboo— you can do so much when you have that kind of tactile quality and you’re moving beyond just paper.

We work as much as possible with real materials. I’ve never been a faux-finish person. Whenever we’ve done anything, it’s always got to be the real material because I think that we really connect with objects. We have a tactile, chemical connection when we feel something that’s real, whether it’s real wood, or well-made paper, or nice leather, or you can feel that foil stamp, or the linen of a nice case wrap. All of that really matters, especially in obvious contrast to all of the digital stuff that we’re surrounded with. We realized how much we miss it. A heavy, well-made object gives us that bone-deep connection. Somehow that feels right.

I didn’t realize how heavy this book would be until we got it back and I was like, this feels like five pounds or something. It feels so good! 

The physical book really does affect your reading experience so significantly, and how you engage with the story itself. Even just carrying the book around in your tote bag or having it on your coffee table, it becomes a much more powerful or exciting experience when the book is this beautiful object.

We put so much time into these books when we write them— this, for me, is the culmination of decades of thought about this voice and this character, so you might as well spend a little bit of time on the vessel that it’s contained in. That’s always been our philosophy here at McSweeney’s. These authors are putting everything they have into these books. Books are souls. Each one of them is a soul vessel. It contains everything that the author feels. So that vessel, that container, should elevate, dignify, and exalt the work inside.

Our art director here at McSweeney’s, Sunra Thompson, and I sit here looking through materials and prototypes and try to do something that we haven’t done before, and try to elevate a book through the form that we put it in. It’s also a way to keep it new. We’ve been at it for 25 years; what would be worse than to be lucky enough to work in this business and then just do the same thing over and over again? What a waste of a gift. 

Do you think it’s possible for more publishers to innovate when it comes to book forms and materials? 

There’s something here called the San Francisco Center for the Book and they celebrate the book arts, and I would say many of the most beautiful books their artists have made as one-offs could be mass-produced in some form if you were to show it to the right printer. Then it’s just a matter of being accepting of a slightly different unit cost. I think so much could be done.

There are beautiful books made every day, but if you have a little bit of flexibility, you could make totally unprecedented book object every time around. A lot of times, it’s just taking inspiration from those one-off artists’ books and saying, Oh, wow, I think we could find a way to adapt this.

Is it hard to find printers and manufacturers who appreciate and understand bringing your visions to fruition? 

Our first printer was right outside of Reykjavik. I used to go to Iceland with an idea, and they wanted to experiment just as much as we did. Then we ended up printing at a place called Thomson-Shore outside of Detroit, and I got to know all the people on their press, and just seeing how happy it made everybody in the company to do something different was really invigorating. We realized that the printers take pride in having created something unusual and beautiful. When the designer has fun, the art director has fun, and the printer has fun, ideally that is felt by the reader too.

Your wooden die-cut version of The Eyes & the Impossible is intended for all ages. What is it like writing and designing a book meant for such a vast audience range? 

I love the all ages category. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the other categories— I think it can create unnecessary stigma. The books that I remember reading when I was younger didn’t have a designation on the back. They didn’t say this is for this age group or that age group. I don’t remember Charlotte’s Web or The Hobbit or so many other books having that kind of delineation.

I like the idea of books where it doesn’t really matter. I certainly didn’t write this for any one age group, and I would hope that adults could get just as much entertainment out of it as a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old. 

The Eyes & The Impossible book form does seem to combine design elements of very different kinds of book categories. The color palette and gold gilt pages feel very classic and academic, but the thick wooden cover, the almost-square shape of the book, and the rounded corners remind me of those puffy cardboard books geared toward toddlers. To me, this all drives home the un-categorizable nature of your book.

We also wanted to make it look a little outside of time. In the way that Shawn has taken these old, 17th-century paintings and put the dog into it, I wanted it to look timeless so that if you were to pick this up and somebody said it was made in 1732, it wouldn’t be totally unrealistic. Maybe some old German company used to make books out of wood or something— it has that old-world look, but then we forgot about wooden books for 300 years, and here they are again.

Are there any other book forms or materials that you’re interested in using next?

More and more, I’m trying to think of ways to make something that’s so apart from design trends, so apart from materials trends, and even lean into the weird. Sunra and I were looking at some prototypes and some materials today that were truly weird— weird slipcases that interact with each other in a way that comes from a strange place. Then you’re not really beholden to any era. You never really know— was this made in 2023 or 1892? I love those sorts of artworks and designs.

Sometimes, we’ll have a prototype for years without knowing what to apply it to. So it’s a little bit of a laboratory, where Sunra will fiddle with something and then three, four years down the road, we realize that it might work with a certain book or a certain issue. The prototypes are a source of unending joy.

It’s our 25th anniversary later this year, so we’re putting out a special issue that’s going to be really weird— we’re using metal. It’ll be our first metal object. I’ve also always wanted to make a glass book. We haven’t been able to get a prototype that’s durable, but we’re still working on it. It’s been 15 years or so, and every so often we’ll go back and try to get somebody to see if it’ll work.

I love going to the bookstore and finding somebody that created something I’ve never seen before, in some format that I didn’t know was quite possible. 

I was reading an interview with designer and paper magician Kelli Anderson in the first issue of Tangram, and she talked about how valuable analog experiences remain, even in the face of digital, well, everything.

“We’re physical creatures that have evolved to interact with the world and think about the world in a physical way,” she says. “You hear car mechanics or engineers or artists say that they’re tinkering with something. Well, what does that mean? They have a physical thing they’re fooling with, and they’re doing all these little cause-and-effect calculations by taking their fingers and poking at it in different ways. It’s a very primal way that human beings explore the world.”

And that quote genuinely gets at the heart of what design journal Tangram is trying to do— they’re tinkering. But they’re tinkering with play and wonder. Which I suppose you could say is the essence of all tinkering. There’s joy in the act of doing. 

I would share more from that interview— or the interviews with Oscar Ukoni and his hyperreal portraits made using only a blue ballpoint pen or Kensuke Koike and his surreal cut-up found photography or Polly Morgan and her immensely nontraditional but eerily enchanting taxidermy—but you’re really just going to have to buy your own copy. Because this is not only something you want to have on a bookshelf, it’s something you genuinely want to hold, flip through, and play with.

Founded by brothers Dan and Dave Buck of Art of Play, writer Adam Rubin, puzzle-maker Matthew Stein, and writer and magician Alexander Hansford, Tangram is a testament to discovery and digging deeper into our innate curiosities. But it’s also a journal for people who love puzzles but don’t yet realize it. Instead of finding a word jumble or a crossword in the final pages of a magazine, puzzles are weaved into the entire journal, creating a playfully immersive experience for readers that celebrates a philosophy of play as art.

Across four stunningly designed issues, Tangram pushes the limit of your imagination and will frustrate you— in a genuinely good way— with brain teasers that I am still trying to solve. But all the while, you will in fact be tinkering, and it beats living in your phone or scrolling through Netflix for something to watch. Essentially, it’s a digest for anyone that is curious or looking for joy or discovery. If you believe epiphanies are lurking around every corner or clues that tease out the connection between seemingly unrelated ideas or things, then you might want to get on board before they publish their fifth issue.

I spoke with Tangram’s founders about the magazine’s origins, “going into wonder,” and allowing their readers to feel like a “genius treasure hunter.”

So what kickstarted the idea for Tangram?

Tangram: The initial inspiration grew out of a desire to share our passion for wonder. The more practical approach would have been to start a blog, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. Plus, we all have fond nostalgia for beautifully crafted analog objects, so a printed journal seemed like a more exciting option to explore. 

It also gives us an excuse to learn more about a wide variety of esoteric subjects like taxidermy, origami, physics toys, architecture, and fine art. Those fields might seem unrelated at first, but each has the ability to tickle your brain. We wanted to show how wonder can weave its way into almost anything, that includes the physical act of reading a magazine. Since the beginning, we’ve incorporated optical illusions, paper engineering, puzzles, and even toys into the pages. 

The goal was for the reader’s experience with the journal to be as playful and surprising as the content in the articles.

Who is this for? What audience are you really going after here? 

Tangram: We took an “if you build it, they will come” approach, which is probably the exact opposite of how most periodicals get published. 

But the thing is, there’s nothing like Tangram out there, and yet, from our earliest conversations, we could all picture it so clearly in our minds. The fact that the vision was so easily shared by our closest collaborators and friends made us realize we were onto something. Basically, we wanted this dream to exist, so we had to bring it to life ourselves.

What kind of stories do you want to tell? And who is the ideal designer you want to profile in any given issue? 

Tangram: We want to tell stories of people who add magic to the world. Not only artists, but scientists, tinkerers, designers, and anyone who does things that spark wonder. Maybe what they create is awe-inspiring in and of itself, or maybe what they create provides a framework through which the things we normally take for granted suddenly seem amazing.

“Epiphanies await the curious mind. There is always more mystery.” That’s what greets readers with the first issue, and you pepper them with a lot of talk about wonder, curiosity, and magic. What is that for all of you, and how do you bring that to Tangram? 

Tangram: Anyone who has had a hallucinogenic experience can relate to the idea that perspective is the only thing that separates the mundane from the miraculous. But you don’t need drugs to find a flower wonderful, only curiosity. When you pay close enough attention to nearly anything, it can become amazing. That is how children experience the world. Some artists or experiences help us to wave away the cynicism of adulthood and reconnect with that pure childlike wonder. The goal for Tangram is to share that feeling. Maybe it’s discovering an obscure subject you didn’t know existed or solving a beautifully constructed puzzle that makes you feel like a genius treasure hunter. 

There are many different ways to achieve a moment of astonishment, and eventually, we hope to represent them all within the pages of our journal.

Puzzles are obviously pretty integral to the magazine—typically, you’ll find all of the puzzles gathered at the back of a mag or newspaper, but you’ve weaved them throughout the pages and into some of the content. Why did you guys decide to do that? 

Tangram: When most people think of puzzles, they think of crosswords, sudoku, or maybe jigsaws. But those puzzles all fit within the constraints of a two-dimensional box. There is a vast universe of artistic and brilliant puzzles out there. The variety is mind-boggling. Some are mechanical objects, and some are immersive and theatrical, but one thing they all have in common is that they offer an invitation to epiphany. That “aha” feeling might be the height of human consciousness. There is such primal satisfaction in the discovery of a solution to a problem. 

The puzzles in Tangram offer a richness and depth to that “solving” experience that will be new to most people. They are all conceived by Matthew Stein, one of the most clever young puzzle designers in the world.

How would you define a good puzzle? And what’s your process for creating them in every issue?

Matthew Stein: A good puzzle guides the solver through meaningful shifts in perception that lead them to see the world with heightened wonder, curiosity, and attention to detail. A puzzle— in the style presented in Tangram— is a highly dynamic experience contained within a static artifact. What may appear to be a series of words, numbers, or images can prompt the solver to venture down deep research rabbit holes, to transcend and physically transform the printed page, or even to find hidden treasure. The best puzzles have more layers than first meet the eye, with intricately constrained internal architectures that provide intermediate confirmation to assure the solver that, yes, they’re still on the right track. And when they reach the final answer, that endpoint should—like in many a magic routine—feel elegant and inevitable.

When designing the puzzles in Tangram, I always start from the end: how can the meta structure augment each volume’s core themes, how do I take solvers on an exhilarating journey that starts in their homes and then continues out into the real world in unexpected ways, and, most importantly, how do I want the solver to feel by the time the final pieces click together? From there, the metapuzzle establishes some constraints for any number of “feeder puzzles,” which contribute their answers (and sometimes more) to the meta. In creating each puzzle, I pull inspiration from the mediums and methods of the featured artists in each volume, sometimes even creating new puzzle artwork directly in their styles. I present a wide variety of puzzle mechanics and techniques that establish a shared language with solvers, bolstering their puzzling abilities across volumes while subverting their expectations at every turn.

.

Who did the editorial design for the magazine? How did you envision it, and what did you want it to say? 

Tangram: The editorial design was done by Alex Hansford, with the intention of being bold but immediately friendly and engaging. Alex also suggested the exposed spine binding so the journals could lay completely flat. This way, the pages could be designed as individual pages or as entire spreads. Since the pages open fully, no details get lost in the spine, and titles often spread across both pages inviting a new way of interacting with the journal, an experience not common to publications of this type and price point. The physical and editorial design was created to push people to interact with the journal as an object, not just as another book.

What’s the creative process when you’re getting an issue together? 

Tangram: Each issue starts with a pitch meeting where we discuss artists, subjects, or experiences we are interested in covering. Often, a theme will emerge as we investigate and develop the stories. That loose theme will help us to generate further ideas for what we might want to explore for that issue. The concept that unites the articles will also inform the graphic design for that issue as well as the design of the puzzles and visual ephemera that weave throughout the journal.

The challenge with any literary or design magazine is just getting it into people’s hands. I’ll always argue that folks want something physical they can hold and connect with—and selling them on wonder and play and puzzles is certainly attractive bait for any audience. But how are you courting a readership? 

Tangram: Our new idea is to make a sort of Tangram discus machine that flings the journals through the air. If we place a few of these machines on top of buildings in crowded downtown areas, it could help us reach people in a whole new way. But really, our readers are our best evangelists, and they have introduced the journal to many of their friends. We’re trying to figure out novel ways to help them share the love. The nice thing is that none of the issues are topical, so the content won’t seem stale if you discover volume 1 after reading volume 4.

Now that you’re four issues deep, what’s next?

Tangram: Volume 5, of course. We have a big buildup that will take us through to volume 9, but along the way, we will be experimenting with format and playing with new approaches for how Tangram can bring wonder and beauty to as many people as possible.

Learn More about Tangram on their website.

I think the universality of food plays a part— we all need to eat and drink, and most of us enjoy it most of the time, so that gives a solid foundation for publishers to build upon. But more than that, food gives us a way to talk about ourselves, while apparently talking about something else.

Flicking through the magazines below reveals all sorts of personal food and drink recollections; whether it’s childhood memories of standing by a grandmother’s side while she cooks, or recalling an amazing meal out with friends, food slices through to the core of human experience and communicates something essential about who we are. Of course these magazines are all very different from each other and set about their task in very different ways, but they all go beyond simply writing about food and drink to touch something a bit deeper than their readers’ stomachs.

Swill — Sydney, Australia

This big, beautiful magazine from Sydney landed on my desk at the start of the year, and when I first wrote about it for the Stack blog I focused on the sense of fun that jumps off its pages. It reads like it was created by a bunch of friends who had an amazing time making it, and I totally want to be the sort of person who would hang out with them in one of their bars or restaurants. (I am aware that’s probably not my life, but that just makes the vicarious taste of it all the more intoxicating.) Take a look at that previous post to see some of Swill’s sample editorial pages, because for this short mention I want to focus on its adverts. I don’t think I’ve ever written about liking a magazine’s adverts before, but the group of brands that Swill has gathered around this first issue do a brilliant job of accentuating that feeling of being part of the club. I’ve never heard of most of them before, but I genuinely want to try The Grifter Brewing Co’s ‘Exquisite Piss,’ or drop into P&V Wine + Liquor. Swill is selling a very specific Australian lifestyle, and I want a piece of it.

Sandwich — London, England

A magazine dedicated to the art of putting tasty things between slices of bread, each issue of Sandwich takes a theme that allows it to expand beyond lunchtime basics. The latest issue is themed ‘Leftovers’, and it was perfectly timed to come out in time for Christmas last year, featuring chef and food writer Gizzi Erskine photographed on the cover with her “Muffuletta-style” sandwich. An entire loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with gorgeous-looking Christmas dinner leftovers, it’s a towering, oozing, slab of a sandwich that looks as delicious as it is impossible to eat. Elsewhere in the issue the theme is broadened out to include economist Ha-Joon Chang explaining why Singapore is the economic equivalent of a leftovers sandwich; chef Tom Kerridge picking his football team of Christmas leftovers; and photographer Matt Hass reporting from London’s massive Padworth IVC waste food processing plant. (The smell was apparently so bad, and so persistent, that he had to shave off his mustache afterwards.)

Cake Zine — New York, NY

A clever, playful magazine that uses cake as a way to explore some of our baser instincts, Cake launched in Spring 2022 and was an instant sensation, selling out in two weeks and picking up mainstream coverage in places like Vogue and Vanity Fair. That first issue was themed ‘Sexy Cake,’ and it was followed by Wicked Cake, released just in time for Halloween. I gobbled it up in one sitting, totally absorbed by stories that skip from Inside Sylvia Plath’s Oven, to baking with pig’s blood, to the surprising history of murder by cake. There’s also a short but very beautiful photo story featuring Very Wicked Cakes, which boast names like ‘Black Widow’ and ‘Spirit Summoner’ (served on a ouija board, of course.) The next issue sounds like it will see a change of tone, and a shift in baked goods, away from cakes and onto the Humble Pie issue. I can’t wait.

Farta — Porto, Portugal

Not so much a food magazine as a passionate love letter to Portuguese culture, one dish at a time, Farta dedicates each entire issue to a single menu item. Issue one explores the ‘francesinha,’ the obscure and completely mouth-watering sandwich created in Porto in 1952, and which is now served in many variations across the entire country. The classic francesinha is apparently adapted from the croque monsieur, with a filling of roast beef, pork sausage and linguiça (a sort of chorizo), covered in cheese and hot sauce. These days it’s common to also add an egg and fries, and I loved reading the individual accounts of cooks who proudly stand by their own unique constructions, created according to traditions that have been passed down through the generations. Part of the joy of this magazine is the deep respect it pays to a humble dish served in bars and cafes across Portugal, but which remains virtually unknown outside its home country. Issue two will devote the same lavish attention to the more famous Portuguese export of peri-peri chicken, and it will be interesting to see the difference that international reputation will make.

Guzzle — Dublin, Ireland

A new Irish food title, this first issue of Guzzle is themed ‘Mementoes of Food’, and it asks its contributors, “to relate their food memories while thinking about the significance of eating on both happy and sad occasions.” It leans into its Irishness, with contributions like Lara Hanlon’s memories of living in New York and being unable to find potatoes that lived up to, “the fluffy, golden Irish spud.” Or Ian Ryan’s review of A Pint of Guinness in Crouch End on a Sunny Monday Afternoon, for which he visited McCafferty’s, finding the beer, “solid and creamy throughout with a solidly domed head”. But of course there’s lots more on offer here too, including milky tea, toasties, burrata, and Ode to an Onion, and I particularly enjoyed Irish-Brazilian artist Rudy De Souza’s photography, including the cover photo of a bag of shopping turned into an impromptu still life.

Food& —Berlin, Germany

Always reliably the strangest food magazine on the shelves, Food& also turns to themes to give its issues direction, smashing food into weird pairings like Food& Aliens, Food& Bathrooms, and Food& Gravity. The latest one is Food& Spectacle, which takes big bites of philosophy and critical theory and chews them up to turn them into wider reflections on food. So for example we get Freshness as Spectacle, in which the apparent freshness of food and its provenance can be used to illuminate inequality around the world. Or there’s an essay on food for the eyes, and the significance of preparing food that looks good rather than tasting good. And since this is Food&, there’s also a load of other stuff that seems much less rational and harder to understand, but which has all apparently been incited by the spectacular theme.

Kitchen Table — Portland, OR

Reflecting cutting-edge food culture across the US and beyond, Kitchen Table is all about the people, ingredients, traditions and innovations that are shaping the way people eat. The fifth issue is the first one I’ve seen, but its theme of ‘Roots’ seems to fit the magazine perfectly, allowing it to dig deep into personal and culinary histories, like the story of Rodrigo Huerta and Mary Hatz, who serve fresh Mexican food from their truck Comida Kin. The article details how the two of them met; how they moved together to Portland and started cooking together; how they bought their truck in 2019; and how they’re now using it to help foster community across Washington County. It’s just one story of many in the magazine that emphasises the importance of the relationships that grow up around food, and the many ways in which producing, cooking and eating food is about much more than physical sustenance.

Midnite Snack — Los Angeles, CA

Displaying the most wide-ranging editorial approach in this selection of magazines, Midnite Snack is equally at home with a sexy shoot showing a deconstructed meringue, or a nostalgic trip back to see grandparents in Ukraine that remembers long summers filled with fresh food and hearty feasts. This second issue is loosely themed ‘Multi-Use,’ which allows the team to consider the different ways we experience food, or as editor-in-chief Lyudmila Zotova puts it in her introductory note, the magazine itself is intended to be multi-use: “A companion when you’re lonely; a quick thrill when you flip through and gaze at the photos and illustrations; a deep text when you spend some time with the essays and interviews; a reference and a tool when you cook its recipes.”

Eaten — Cambridge, England

A magazine of food history, each issue of Eaten takes a different theme as a way of digging down into subjects like ‘Salty’, ‘Processed’, and ‘Breakfast’. The latest one focuses on ‘Spicy’, with stories on the fieriness of chilis, and the British origins of curry powder, but my favorite article in the magazine considers the history of paprika and includes the theory that, “the entirety of Dracula is just an elaborate nightmare caused by a British person tasting one (1) spice”. The theory revolves around Jonathan Harker arriving in Transylvania and eating a spicy chicken dish before falling into, “a restless sleep full of ‘queer dreams’ that he blames on the spiciness of the meal.” Of course the theory doesn’t do much to elaborate on Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, but it’s full of fascinating reflections on the creation of paprika and its uses over the years. One of my favorite things about Eaten is its use of vintage illustrations and artworks throughout, with collaged photographs, paintings, drawings and etchings used alongside its historical musings.

This article was originally published by Stack, the organization that searches out the world’s best independent magazines and delivers them to thousands of readers around the world every month.

Do you love independent magazines? Sign up for Stack’s subscription and they’ll deliver a surprise title to your door every month from just £8 / €15 / $17.

Among its roster of scabrous cartoonists are the prolific surrealist Roland Topor (cover) and Siné (known for simple linear wit in the French satiric periodical Charlie Hebdo). The dictionary features artifacts of criminal life, from mugshots of the Camorristica (mafia) hierarchy to sketches from a criminal museum in Rome.

Of course this reassurance only lasts until it starts to irritate and offend, and there was widespread jubilation when Apple switched to its ‘flat’ design with iOS7. But there’s also a more playful version of skeuomorphic design that can be used to provide a sort of creative dissonance rather than fake familiarity, and it doesn’t suffer from the same short shelf life.

This version of skeuomorphism evokes the characteristics of something else in order to draw upon that object’s meanings and associations, and there’s a small and strange collection of magazines that parade themselves as other things. Carefully dressed up as cassette tapes, vinyl records or fashion accessories, they undergo a sort of shamanic transference of powers, assuming the significance of the objects they invoke, but undercut with the obviously ridiculous joke of a magazine that thinks it’s a bag or a back pocket. I wanted to take a closer look at this odd phenomenon in action, so I pulled some examples from the Stack archives to see the different ways these magazines present themselves to the world.

Viscose

The most adventurous shape-shifting magazine in our collection is Viscose. A critical fashion title based in Ribe, Denmark, it looks closely at themes running through the fashion world, and is published with a sly sense of humour and a love for punning and wordplay. The first issue was presented as the “bagazine”, with a leather-effect cover and a handle cut out of the cover stock, while the third issue was the self-titled, “world’s first actual fan-zine”, with its fan-shaped case alluding to the theme of ‘Asias’, examining different notions of Asian style and fashion.

These production flourishes help the magazine to stand out on the newsstand (can you imagine how awkward it must have been to display the fan issue on a shelf?) but they also encapsulate something of the magazine itself. All three of the issues are interested in understanding fashion as the object that is produced, fetishised and sold, and I think it’s significant that they mirrored that process in creating the magazine itself. The punning joke also works well with the tone of the magazine, which reads as serious and carefully considered throughout, while also acknowledging the ridiculous superficiality that runs through so much of the fashion world.

Day + Night

“Liner notes for a New York City mixtape”, Day + Night is made to fit inside a cassette tape case, and presents seven songs for daytime and seven songs for nighttime in the city. Each song is selected by a different contributor, and everyone gets a few pages to explain their choice or provide a bit more context on the song. The magazine is split in half, with effectively two front covers, so you can read the daytime contributions, then flip over to read nighttime and vice-versa, and it feels like the perfect format for the concept: A short and sweet read that’s enough to give you a glimpse of somebody else’s life and evoke some sense of being in New York, it manages to feel precious and personal in the way a real mixtape does.

Cassette Tape Magazine

Another magazine squeezed into a cassette tape case, this collection of pop-cultural observations was published in 2010 by Melbourne’s Team Evil, adapting pieces that had been published online and printing them on a long concertina format that folds out with short pieces of text on one side and images on the other. In the introduction editor Mikolai remembers his schooldays, when “a mixtape was the quickest way to someone’s heart… This project has exactly zero to do with mixtapes, and very little to do with picking up girls. It does, however, have a whole lot to do with producing something you can hold in your hand.” And it worked – the Team Evil site has disappeared, but 13 years on Cassette Tape Magazine still has its place on our shelves.

Steez
Issue 35 of Steez came tucked into its own denim slipcase, featuring badges, a patch, and a back pocket stuffed full with stickers, a leather beer coaster, and a cassette mixtape (a real actual cassette this time). It’s a brilliantly exuberant, totally over-the-top celebration of the magazine and the community that had grown up around it, and I think it was also intended as a farewell – the 35th issue was the last one Steez published.

The magazine cover has a denim design that ties it into the slipcase, but more than that the jeans pocket seems to symbolise what Steez was all about; crammed with skaters, rockstars, DJs and artists, it was a celebration of lowbrow pop culture that overflowed with enthusiasm for its subject, in the same way the custom-made ephemera spills out of the pocket, feeling lived in and made with genuine love.

Dead Slow

When I started thinking about this post I assumed there were going to be loads of magazines that dressed themselves up as vinyl records, but when I started searching the shelves the only one I could find was Dead Slow. It comes packaged in a slipcase, and makes use of several vinyl references, like the 33 ⅓ RPM on the cover and the idea of splitting the magazine in half and labelling them Side A and Side B.

The whole magazine is dedicated to the idea of slowing down and escaping from digital overload into the more deliberate pleasures of the physical, analogue world. In that sense the vinyl stylings suit the content, but of all the examples gathered here I think Dead Slow’s skeuomorphism feels the most awkward, the two ‘sides’ of the magazine not reflected in the content and the vinyl references functioning as stylistic quirks rather than something that runs deeper through the magazine.

This article was originally published by Stack, the organization that searches out the world’s best independent magazines and delivers them to thousands of readers around the world every month.

When I opened The New York Times on Sunday, January 29, the cover of the Opinion section grabbed me with its power— and artistry. Words and phrases jumped out: Massacre, Hate, Rage, Pain, Grief, over and over in real typeset headlines as densely packed as the list of 617 mass shootings that took place in the United States in 2022.

Families grieve, communities grieve. What about the rest of us? Are we inured, used to it, resigned to it? What will knock some sense into us and call us to action?

Those are questions the Opinion editors must have asked and answered when they called Carmen Winant, a fine artist, writer, and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University, to make the cover art.

“We chose Carmen because her work has a strong message, a strong point of view,” said Opinion Design Director Frank Augugliaro. “We wanted to grab readers by the shoulders.” ‘Urgent’ was the word Augugliaro used to describe the mood and tone they were after. He said the Times already had a rapport with Winant and knew she could meet the three-day deadline, having already done projects for T magazine, the Sunday edition, and a photo-collage for Opinion last May analyzing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim fellow in photography who shows in museums and galleries worldwide. Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and MoMA, and she’s been written about in The New Yorker, Artforum, Aperture, Vogue, and Art in America. “Winant’s work poses a challenge to the ways we understand women’s power, pleasure, labor, healing, and liberation to function, querying the aesthetic and political legacy of second-wave feminism,” said her faculty bio on the OSU Department of Art page. “Winant’s appropriative installations and artist’s books grapple with this question for all its contradictory impulses: the awe of living in a revolutionary moment [and] a shared preoccupation with the female body as a zone of political strife.”

Opinion Art Director Damien Saatdjian learned about Winant at MoMA in 2018, when he worked there and Winant was featured in the museum’s biannual New Photography series. “When the Dobbs draft was leaked, I thought about how her work ‘My Birth’ dealt with issues around motherhood, autonomy, politics, and feminism,” he said. “I was curious if she would be able to use a similar visual language and process, with an eye towards the debate around abortion rights. We reached out, and she immediately dove in.”

While Winant’s more recent cover shifted her focus from pregnancy and birth to shootings and death, the Times thought her bold approach to collaging made her perfect for their response to the Monterey Park shooting. “My colleagues and I wanted to see how far we could push the idea of gun violence using mostly typography,” Saatdjian said. “So much has been written about the endless epidemic of gun violence in America, and we thought Carmen could make a powerful collage using headlines culled from our own coverage.”

Some art directors wouldn’t dare approach artists who show at MoMA, thinking they’d be out of reach and couldn’t agree to a tight deadline or a process that includes sketches and changes. Saatdjian sees things differently. “We don’t think that because an artist shows in museums or galleries their work isn’t welcome,” he said. “It’s quite the opposite— it’s great to collaborate with any artist who has a strong point of view, and it’s important to break down perceived notions between ‘high’ and ‘applied’ art. Giving feedback and bouncing around ideas are part of any true collaboration. We love working with all kinds of artists and are always hoping for a deep partnership.”

Winant herself echoed those thoughts: “I see more and more happening between ‘fine art’ and commercial modes of creative output,” she said. “I like being able to pivot— to be seen in such a flexible way. But I wish [the space] were more fluid than it is.” Does she think readers are ready to accept more cerebral, personal pieces rather than typical editorial illustrations? “I’m interested in working in the space between the illustrative and the conceptual. There is room there.” The images of her process tell their own story— of working in layers, by hand.

“It’s a studio-bound process, not something that happens on the computer,” Winant explained. “I move based on feeling. It’s fairly intuitive. I need to set myself up with all the material I can get my hands on, then start visually processing it in relation to itself.”

In order to meet the Times’ rapidly approaching deadline, she drew upon her years of experience making layered collages to communicate complex ideas. “Damien sent me a package with hundreds of stories,” Winant continued. “I printed all of them on newsprint. Then I arranged and arranged, taking pictures as I went. I was mindful of creating visual balances and echoes; telling a story between the headlines and also creating a dynamic composition.”

The final art was provided as a photograph of the collage. “We didn’t add any additional text on the cover, since her art did all the talking,” Saatdjian said.

The Center was founded in 1980 by Aaron Lansky, a then-24-year-old graduate student who’d hitchhiked across the United States on a personal mission to save Yiddishkeit. He rescued books from attics and basements and built a network of zamlers, collectors who amassed nearly 1.5 million books. Some were translations of classics written in other languages, and many were editions of the estimated 50,000 original works, written in Yiddish and published between the two World Wars. This included volumes of poetry, social satire, morally instructive texts, romances, folktales, history books, political treatises, children’s stories, and fiction, such as the short stories and novels of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“Design was taken seriously,” Lansky said of the Yiddish-language publishers who were in their heyday between 1918 and 1945. “Jews were discovering the world in every sense, and that included the typographic arts and illustration.” Leading artists of the Russian Constructivist movement designed for the Yiddish presses, including El Lissitzky, an important influence on contemporary graphic design.

Design is taken very seriously at the Yiddish Book Center, from the buildings that evoke an Eastern European village by architect Allen Moore, to the exhibitions and signage, website and publications. The inimitable Isley touch infuses all print and online communications, from fundraising literature to the Center’s magazine, Pakn Treger. Back in the day, Lansky explains, a pakn treger was a wandering peddler who travelled from from shtetl to shtetl bringing books and news of the world. “Today,” Isley added, “Pakn Treger magazine carries on that tradition.”

“Working with the Yiddish Book Center has been one of the most rewarding and fun things I’ve ever done,” Isley said when asked about his connection to this deeply Jewish institution. “I founded my design firm in order to work with cultural, cause-related, and educational organizations, with the goal of helping them to spread their good word. I enjoy ongoing collaborations, where over time, we can help convey what makes our clients unique and vital. I’ve loved every minute of our work with them.”

Isley describes his initial 2011 work on Pakn Treger as a “top-to-bottom redesign of an existing publication.” Three times a year, the magazine features articles about Jewish culture, new fiction, and book reviews to its 17,000 readers. Its pages include exquisite English and Yiddish typography, as well as the work of illustrators who can only be called “legendary,” such as Istvan Banyai, Barry Blitt, Seymour Chwast, Brian Cronin, Paul Davis, Anita Kunz, Victor Moscoso, Laurie Rosenwald, Anthony Russo, Ward Shumaker, Elwood Smith, and James Steinberg. Other artists— including many featured in this post— are drawing and painting their way into the legendary realm.

“This magazine is an ideal place for editorial illustration,” Isley explained. “In many cases, we’re illustrating passages of literature, so photographs aren’t available or might be too specific.”

Isley begins the process of art direction by reading the manuscript and noting passages that could lend themselves well to illustration. “There’s a long list of artists whose work I admire,” he said. “Some have been around for a while, and I’ve grown up liking their work, and others are younger, whose work I might have run across in my reading. The big decision is what tone to reflect: lighthearted, serious, specific, enigmatic. I try to match the artist to the feeling we’re looking for. Not necessarily based on what they’ve done on the past, but on what they might do for us that could come from a new or unexpected place.”

“In the first few years, we ran the Yiddish text alongside the English, and it posed challenges for me because I don’t read Yiddish, and it was hard for me to tell whether the line breaks were visually and editorially graceful,” Isley admitted. “Yankl Salant, an art director who is also the owner of the Yiddish Translation Institute, was a great help.”

Together, Isley and magazine editor Lisa Newman narrow the choices to one or two potential artists, and Isley reaches out to see if they might be interested in the assignment. “Pakn Treger is not on most people’s radar,” Isley said, so they send links that show how it’s designed, and how each feature opens with a full-page bleed illustration.

The budgets are “not huge, but serviceable,” according to Isley. In addition to the full-page image, the assignment often includes one or two small spots, which are typically a detail of an object mentioned in the piece.

“Some artists beg off, most often if they have a labor-intensive style or technique, but most, I’m happy to say, accept the assignment with enthusiasm,” Isley said. “We offer a good amount of editorial freedom and usually a generous timeline. When an artist accepts, I pass along the scenes I’d like them to consider and always ask for their ideas. I believe in commissioning people for what they know and what I think they can do, not just what they’ve done before. I usually ask for a couple of approaches. More often than not, one of their interpretations is what we go with. The stories are evocative and the readership is invested, so we want to make sure we get all the details right. Many stories take place in the past, so we often provide reference material from the editors, especially for clothing and locations, so we can ensure that the art is historically and culturally accurate.”

When sketches come in from the artist, often three or four per story, Isley chooses his favorites and passes them along to the editors. “After a round, of sketches—or very occasionally, two rounds— we’re good to go to the final,” Isley says. “Then it’s time to start thinking about the next issue.”

“Illustration has always been central to Pakn Treger,” said Newman. “Working with Alex is really a dream. There are times when others would opt for a photograph, but for us, an illustration often works better. In the history of Yiddish publishing, many books were illustrated by notable artists like Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera, so when Alex redesigned the magazine, we agreed to always commission original art for each of the pieces in translation. We’ve been lucky to work with such great editorial illustrators who bring so much to the work they illustrate.”

Alexander Isley Inc. is currently a key player on the team that’s designing “Yiddish: A Global Culture,” a permanent exhibit that Isley said “will be the centerpiece of the facility.”

Sanchez’s covers for Metropoli will be missed for the inspiration they offered other magazine designers and for what they say about the capacity of the public to focus on a brand that is purposefully in flux. Here he talks about a few of his favorite covers (the captions are also in-depth analyses of each, so make sure to read them).

What is the process of conceiving, pitching and executing a cover?
A chaotic process. Full of doubts, obstacles, more doubts and unexpected solutions. More the fruit of intuition than of practical theory. Although the result may prove otherwise, I am not able to apply an aesthetic or practical theory to any of the challenges I face.

I put my mind to it and I do it. And it comes out. But it’s intuition. And that brings me problems when it comes to working in a team. Because it is difficult to transmit to a team something that I don’t know, that I just do it. Hit and miss, that’s how work is.

In Metropoli, for example, there is more intuition than reflection. A reflexive intuition, because experienced and trained intuition has a lot of reflection. There is energy, audacity and a lot of courage. These covers are a step forward taken with courage. Without fear of equivocation, looking the error in the face and being aware that the defect is beautiful.

Metropoli, its covers, are the work of an author, not of a team. There are many professionals, many techniques and many hands doing them, but they are instruments working for an orchestra conductor.

So there are no committees or editors to thwart you? But is there a brainstorming process?
There is no brainstorming to make a cover, there is only one tormented head, mine. Searching for an agile, ingenious, different, obvious or fanciful formula. Working on the concept of the theme, getting to the bone. And, at the same time, to find an object or a common referent on both sides, the author’s and the reader’s, so that the idea is recognizable and shareable. If we lose the common referent, we lose the essence of communication. That is why life experience is very important in this and in almost all professions. The more trips, the more films, the more books, the more years and the more experiences and the more resources to use.
What I have figured out over the years is that stress, lack of time and the fuss around me brings out the best in me. That is, a newspaper’s newsroom. I believe that in an isolated environment, to some extent aseptic of noise and movement, I would be a failure as a designer.

The execution of a cover has to be perfect, but that is only a matter of skill, ability and knowing how to handle tools correctly. The important thing is the idea and the management of that idea. The execution is incidental. Fundamental, but accessory. Metropoli feeds on ideas and is executed with craftsmanship.

What, if anything, is your philosophy about cover design for the magazine?
Normally, publications take their themes to their covers and adapt them to the shapes and forms of their magazines. Metropoli, on the other hand, took its cover to the theme and it is the cover that adopts the form, shape, color or smell of the theme it deals with. If no two themes are the same, no two covers should be the same. It is our obligation as communicators to adapt to the needs of that subject, to its shape, its sound, its smell and its color. It is the constancy and consistency of this treatment that makes a product identifiable over time, not the masthead. And the masthead has to be an active part of the front page, no longer a spectator who is oblivious to what is happening underneath it. Integration is also information. From there, the secret lies in fun, emotion and love for the work. Always do something better and bolder. Go where others don’t dare. To do what the competition never does (or doesn’t know how to do) and to think about the capacity to surprise, towards our readers and ourselves.

Every issue, every cover is different …
But our magazine is always the same, but the topics that make the cover are unique and unrepeatable. Why should we treat them all the same? Equality is sometimes the greatest inequality. An injustice and, in journalism, a mistake. Each subject must have the opportunity to stand out from the rest, to live its moment of glory, to stand out and become unforgettable.

There is little more to say about a work in which there are no rules, no conventions, no concrete guidelines and not even defined long-term lines. Eclecticism becomes a flag and it is difficult to define boundaries between styles, manners or working trends. Anything goes: shouting, whispering, caressing, singing … and for this we put colors, shapes, sizes, letters, drawings or photographs at the service of graphic journalism. Be flexible and unpredictable.

Pell is the editor-in-chief of Zoom Street Magazine. He has authored more than 30 books, many of which he designed and illustrated, in addition to the Doktor Bey series, such as Bewildering Beasties, Assassination Rhapsody, Lost in Translation, and The Little Red Book of Adobe LiveMotion, along with several collections of his work. In 1989, he founded the international anti-censorship art collective Beuyscouts of Amerika. Just yesterday, he premiered his latest production, TYPO: Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics & Constrained Design. Just what I’ve been waiting for. Today he tells us about this latest treat in the typopictorial universe.

Why did you start Typo?
I was hungry for a journal that would jiggle the brain and excite the eye—that was unpredictable, would move between past and present as smoothly as Wodehouse moves Jeeves around. A journal that would surprise me, as well as the reader. It’s a slightly absurdist vision aimed at design and semantics, with strains of eroticism and pataphysics. (By the way, the second issue includes an essay by Alfred Jarry on the English language.) 

You call this a Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics and Constrained Design. Where do you fit into these categories?
I dove in … do I fit? That’s your call. It’s all constrained … the odd size of Typo … images sans color, etc.  

Who is your ideal reader?
A person who loves wordplay, fonts, literary constraints and eroticism.   

What are the most consequential features in this first issue?
I’m reluctant to pick favorites. 

Your marquee writer, Norman Conquest, is you. Are there other pseudonyms that you work under?
I’ve been working as NC for many years (I founded an anti-censorship art collective in NYC in the late 1980s—“Beuyscouts of Amerika.”) I occasionally try on a new pseudonym (the way one tries on a pair of shoes), but I don’t reveal it when it fits.

What is Asmeric poetry?
I hope you meant Asemic poetry, otherwise there’s a big, unintentional typo in the issue. I’m self-uneducated, so this question should be answered by Michael Betancourt (not a pseudonym), who has a Ph.D., and produced the example of Asemic poetry in the issue. He creates his poetry from typography and creates disordered artforms. I think his lines rhyme, in the same manner that history rhymes. That’s the best I can do.

PRINT is a member of the Amazon Affiliate program. If you purchase something through one of our links, it may earn us a small commission.

Architecture Snob analyzes how the humans interact with the medium, and while the magazine places architecture at its core, its reach is all-encompassing, from fashion and design to social sciences to ecology. The design style is minimalistic, raw, and stripped to the basics, but still retains a high-fashion, editorial driving force. The sans serif typography and beautiful imagery highlight a deep love for understated aesthetics and a strong eye for composition. 

Art direction: Michał Mierzwa, Maciej Mach
Editorial design: Anna Morawiak
Production: Anna Morawiak
Logotype and cover: Supergut Studio / Łukasz Smolarczyk
Photography: muto.studio
Editor-in-Chief: Marcin Szczelina, Architecture Snob. 

errorerror studio pays tribute to Lorca with Fragmentos, an incomplete book of poems inspired by the legacy that Lorca left behind. The designers burnt, spray painted, and destroyed pages of the book with the goal of making the reader feel the discomfort and frustration of his untimely death. Not only does the work create a lovely visual homage; it’s also an engaging way to represent a life interrupted.

Milton makes me assume one thing but, in fact, it is another. Who is the publisher of Milton?
It’s published by Milton Academy’s comms department.

Why is a high school putting so much of its resources into a print periodical?
I’m a little mystified, too, though we are very efficient with our truly limited budget. Its primary purposes are recruiting, alumni engagement (i.e., financial support)—and their support of our work does suggest that the magazine gives them some one-upmanship over rival schools recruiting the same genius kids.

What is your favorite part of doing Milton?
Traditional publishing has gotten so depressing—the poor paper quality, super-thin issues, reduced frequency, combined with a real lack of imagination. These alumni magazines are small, infrequent, and have an intentionally limited circulation, but they care—really care—about quality. They’re putting themselves out there and, in the case of Milton, investing in this publication is a real competitive advantage. All of that allows me to do good work and to hire very talented photographers and illustrators, who also don’t get nearly the volume of magazine work they used to. We all win.

I presume that your staff is small, but the quality of everything—from illustrations to the layouts—is impeccable. What determined your design style?
My staff is essentially me. I’ve occasionally been able to bring on help when I get very busy, but mostly I work alone. I have good relationships with contributors, and the work we produce helps us continue to make new relationships with photographers and illustrators. The design style is usually simple—there’s no point in over-designing, but it always comes back to something the great Fred Woodward told me when I was just starting out: “I just hire great artists and try not to let what I do make them look bad.” It was something like that.

Did I mention I’m a Beatles fan? One reason is that the words are clear— no mumbling, screaming, or being drowned out— and almost every song is a story I appreciate, no matter how many times I hear them. But it’s another level of understanding to read the beautifully typeset lyrics, learn in the songwriter’s words how the song came to be, and take in spreads of photographs from that time and place. Sometimes you get a look inside the people’s heads who were there, the inspirations, and antecedents, and sometimes mystery remains. Real people inspired characters in many songs, but some questions seem purposely unanswered. Such as who, exactly, blew his mind out in a car?

And who, exactly, designed this masterpiece, I wondered. On the copyright page, in very small type, I found: “This book is set in Rigby, a typeface created expressly for this book by Triboro Design.”

I began reading reviews: “#1 New York Times bestseller. A Washington Post Notable Book. Excerpted in The New Yorker. Published November 2, 2021.” Where had I been? Sleeping under a rock? Well, I was out of the country, quarantining, and stuck in an Omicron-empty airport last November. Still, no excuse.

None of the reviews I read mentioned the book design or the designer— typical— so I set about finding Triboro Design. This Brooklyn studio has a long, enviable client list that includes museums, galleries, fashion brands, restaurants, artists, and musicians, magazines, and book publishers. The book’s designer David Heasty works with his wife and partner Stefanie Weigler, and they’ve won many important design awards. It started to feel like a very heavy rock I’d been sleeping under.

I invited Heasty to meet via Zoom, and found him to be sharp, quick, articulate, and modest. Below, we discuss Paul’s involvement with the project, the book’s gorgeous bespoke typeface, and the importance of staying true to a legend’s vision.

How did you get this gig, and who was the client?

The client was the Liveright imprint of W.W. Norton & Company. Anna Oler, the production manager at Liveright approached us, perhaps because we’d done Prince’s memoirs and a book on Frank Sinatra.

It’s good to hear that someone below the CEO/publisher level has the power to choose the design firm for a project of this magnitude. How many people are in your firm?

Just two— my wife and partner Stefanie— and myself.

Amazing— not a word I use lightly. Did you and Stefanie work together on this project?

No. We generally have separate projects. This was exclusively my project.

How long did it take?

About a year.

I’m imagining you sorting through cartons of photographs, having them scanned and restored, then making difficult choices.

It wasn’t like that at all. The publisher had already made the selection, and everything came organized as good quality files. Linda McCartney was a photographer, and she and Paul were always interested in the preservation of assets.

Were you disappointed that photo selection wasn’t part of your job?

No. It’s Paul’s book. It’s his memoir.

Let’s talk about your working style. Did you present one mockup, or did the client have the choice of a number of potential treatments?

I did many, many sample chapters; various layouts. There was a lot of collaboration and back-and-forth. It took months. When I get feedback, I keep an open mind. You could think of this book as one man capturing another man’s vision. 

Some designers and firms tell me that it’s necessary to show the client a range of options because many people want their opinion known. Other designers make it a point of honor to present one thing, saying: ‘This is the solution.’

There’s so much psychology involved in dealing with different clients. Some clients are hands-off, and others want to be involved in every detail.

Did you get to work directly with Paul?

Paul was very involved, but no. We received his comments via his people.

I’m interested in the choice of listing the songs in alphabetical order, rather than chronologically. In alphabetical order, the reader might jump from the screams of girls at JFK, to following George, to Rishikesh and the Maharishi, then back to getting haircuts at a certain barbershop in Liverpool. The sense of going through time— through decades— is thoroughly mixed up.

Paul liked the aspect of jumping around, the messier juxtapositions. It’s more surprising; a cool way to do it. There is more focus on the songs themselves, rather than the book being a history of the Beatles.

Speaking of which, what happened to John in this story? His name is sometimes listed as co-author, but Paul makes some snarky comments, such as John’s ‘lack of interest in literature.’ Was Yoko upset about this book? And the other surviving Beatle, Ringo?

You’ll have to ask them.

Okay. Tell me a little about your background, yours and Stefanie’s.

I am a 2000 graduate of Penn State, where I had an incredible mentor, [the late] Lanny Sommese. My first boss, Alexander Gelman, was another very important mentor. He gave me a lot of responsibility on a broad range of projects. Stephanie is from Germany. She studied visual communications there and also worked for Alexander Gelman at Design Machine after coming to New York. That’s where we met.

Most designers would kill for your client list. How did you build it?

We worked hard over 15 years, beginning with a focus on the cultural sector, doing artists’ books and gallery work. We got better known after we started working with the Justin Timberlake fashion label.

The set I received has a green linen slipcase and spines. Some images show an orange slipcase. What is the difference?

Orange was a special edition of 175 copies signed by Paul, with embossed lyrics on the cover, a tipped-in-photo on a special clamshell box instead of the slipcase. That set originally sold for $2000, but now I understand it’s selling at auction for much more.

And about Rigby Display? It’s so impressive— and rare— that a book is set in a bespoke typeface. Who designed it?

I drew the typeface myself. I’ve always tinkered around with creating fonts. I’m not officially trained in type design; I’m self-trained in the programs. A company called Omnibus-Type in Argentina made the different weights.

What is your favorite part of this project?

The textures. There are a lot of surfaces— two volumes in a slipcase, plus dust jackets. And the fact that it was an organic, collaborative experience. That’s how we want all our projects to be.

What accolades you are most proud of?

The Rigby typeface being included in the Type Directors Annual 2021, and The Lyrics named ‘Book of the Year’ by Barnes & Noble.

PRINT is a member of the Amazon Affiliate program. If you purchase something through one of our links, it may earn us a small commission.

Well, the days of melting polar caps and radical weather fronts are now getting real and realer since planet Earth’s caretakers—in business and politics—have become dumb and dumber. The facts are in and the science is verified that if greenhouse gases, carbon emissions and the human errors that foster natural upheavals are not controlled, we’re not going to be in Kansas anymore—in fact, neither will Kansas.

Through the monthly indie magazine subscription service STACK I was recently introduced to It’s Freezing in LA!, the smartly edited and elegantly designed London-based magazine that scares the bejesus out of me.

Published biannually, it walks the razor’s edge between science and activism, inviting writers and illustrators from a variety of fields to share their views on how climate change (and its falling dominoes) impacts all our lives.

“We want to help untangle the environmental tensions and choices that humanity must navigate by platforming as many different perspectives as we can find,” state its editors.

I contacted the primary crew—editor Martha Dillon, deputy editor Jackson Howarth, art/co-creative directors Matthew Lewis and Nina Carter—top among an impressive roster of contributors, to collectively discuss this refreshingly written, conceived and art directed, intriguingly titled magazine. Their answers are fused together below.

I will say this: If we’re headed for disaster, the ratio of sensitive graphic design and illustration to chilling science helps to focus our attention.

What is the origin of the periodical? 
We started in 2018. The core team all worked on climate and ecology in our respective jobs, but there was little crossover or dialogue between fields. It was just before XR and Greta [Thunberg], and the renewed attention to climate in the mainstream in 2019, so we were all desperate to find reading that went into detail on climate, and connected it to the other issues our peers and colleagues were talking about: social justice, polarization, capitalism …

We realized a magazine was a perfect format to pin some of these conversations down. It invites lots of voices, it changes over time and it can be permanent and shared (rather than another tab to close or link to leave unopened). We’d also all done a bit of magazine or editorial work before, so as a team we felt able to make a tiny print run of hand-bound issue 1s. And people seemed to like it!

This is not a typical lifestyle magazine but it is about life and graphically it has style and personality. Does how it looks represent your editorial aims?
Our written content has always been aware of a polarization in climate communication between science and activism, so in the design, too, we have tried to find an accessible middle ground. Our design reflects on this by combining scientific visual elements with bold colors and an eye-catching visual identity. We also reference the design language of counter-cultural zines to reference the activist history of environmentalism. In all our issues, we feature a graphic motif through the pages that is derived from a different environmental pattern: maps of the earth’s temperature heating, microscopic images of ice cores that show global carbon emission patterns, smoke patterns from climate-exacerbated wildfires. The design of each magazine is this mix of information, accessibility and visually pleasing outcome.

This issue we looked at images of different pollutants flowing and dispersing. We use different scales of pollutants (from oil flares to microbes) so we were also very interested in the fixed, satellite perspective of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten films as a reference. The perspective offers accessibility, by flattening the view for clarity, with interesting and unexpected visual outcomes, by abstracting recognizable forms.

In the illustrations, we look for work that is approachable and humane. We want to center the text and ideas in the piece in real people and real spaces.

You have a pretty deep masthead. Where do you find your staff members?
We are a broad editorial team of activists, writers and everything else. We all work in other fields when not collaborating on IFLA!—as engineers, designers, lawyers and more. So we often find writers and illustrators through the people we meet in our “other” worlds. But we also find people through other climate projects we enjoy, through social media, and through other activist groups we work with.

One design decision you made and carried out from front to back cover and all stops in between is the phosphorescent green color. It represents various hotspots and unsafe zones. These swaths of green add up.
There has been conscious decision-making behind the green and blue graphics. We collected far more of these images than there was room to show so that there were plenty of images to select the most striking outcomes from. In this way they have been very intentionally curated. We think that there is something intriguing about the interplay between information and curated visual appeal in images about climate destruction. How we choose to tell a story affects the way it is received, understood and responded to.

How has the public response been to the magazine?
As we have essays that cover a mixture of topics (from art to politics to science), we get a broad range of responses. Some readers are also activists and engaged in their own work; they often get in touch with writers to continue a conversation, or absorb the articles in their own work. 

Others are people wanting to find out more about climate and get more deeply involved—we often hear from them that they find it a strangely uplifting read, given we make no effort to be “positive”! We think that’s because so often climate is treated with anxiety and distance, whereas we embrace the depth and try to untangle it bit by bit, which helps people have something to grasp. 

And often, we just hear from lots of like-minded people with ideas and drive to tackle the issue, which is how we’ve grown, and which gives our team a lot of hope.

Why did you start BLAG?
There is a growing and thriving international community of sign painters and, while magazines exist for sign makers at large, there is nothing specifically focused on hand-painted work. However, I see it as more than a trade publication; it will also appeal to those with related or tangential interests such as graphic designers, type designers, calligraphers, graffiti writers, muralists, etc. I refer to the journey I’m going on with the magazine as “adventures in sign painting,” and for it to inform and inspire these international communities.

Is there a translation for BLAG?
Taken literally, it is B[etter] L[etters] [M]AG, i.e., Better Letters Magazine. However, the word itself has meaning within the worlds of signs and sign painting. In the first instance, a “blag” can be a sales pitch, and ultimately that’s what most signs are. In British English, the verb “to blag” can mean to sweet talk, or to be “winging it.” Sadly, in the absence of many formal training and apprenticeship opportunities for novice sign painters, many are to an extent “blagging it” through the early stages; they have to “fake it until they make it.”

The word BLAG also has a nice combination of letter shapes, which UTILE Studio has worked up into the logotype. This will have its color switched per issue with respect to the cover image.

How will you populate the magazine? Is it all your own discoveries?
The first issue includes a mixture of external contributions and pieces that I’ve written, largely about other people and their work. I see the magazine as serving the international sign painting community, and so should reflect their needs. To that end, I am taking submissions and, in the future, will have more of an editorial role while still penning pieces myself. As well as the print magazine, there is a monthly email newsletter (free) and weekly articles published online at bl.ag. These also feature contributions from others, which will continue to grow in weighting over time.

Do you foresee it only being UK signs?
Absolutely not. I’ve covered topics from all over the world on the bl.ag site, and the print magazine continues with this international perspective. Issue 01, for example, has material from 16 different countries, including Austria, Panama, Peru, Poland and Singapore. I want to celebrate and share work from around the world with each issue, and the second one already has pieces lined up from Brazil, India and Japan.

Why are ghost and old signs so damn popular and appealing to people these days?
While there are ghost signs in the magazine (see the regular Ghost Sign Corner feature, for example) the focus of BLAG is contemporary sign painting and its practitioners. Many quickly dismiss sign painting as a “dying art” but the fact that there is interest and demand around the world for this magazine shows that it is anything but. I’ve just done the shipping data for the first issue, which is now on its way to locations in 29 different countries on five continents—Africa, where are you?!

I recently asked Derycke, known for his art world books for Tuttle and others, to reflect on this volume.

How did you come to design the Richard Tuttle catalog?
Richard and I had been working on a number of books before and he chose me to be his companion for this one. Working on his Stories I-XX book we also had a prolonged and intense correspondence, which because of COVID had a Decamerone vibe—we were both isolated and had this queer time on our hands and enjoyed sharing stories.

Had you been an admirer of his work prior to this?
I admire a lot of art, and his work is admirable in many ways. When we first met at the Drawing Center in New York to work on Drawing Paper 51: Richard Tuttle Manifesto, I had not singled out his work for specific admiration but that changed quickly. I am in awe of the incredible level of intensity and focus he brings to a creative process. I remember being exhausted and exhilarated by these first meetings.

It is one of the few recent catalogs that intrigued me as much as the work itself. Was there an attempt to complement Tuttle or make your own interpretation?
It has a story of sorts. Often, at the start of a design process, Richard will show a paper object, or some constellation of paper objects. For this book it was a folder with sheets sticking out, like gathered in a hurry and not arranged properly. This object one can consider as a formula with which to solve an equation, or a “logic,” or a key—whatever. This object challenged (1) shape and (2) the relation of a cover to its contents. This was the start of a process—in which Peter Miller, dean of the Bard Institute, participated—to bring the challenges to a model that could be printed in 2,000 copies. The result is my interpretation, sure, but technicalities and budget were very determining.

The size and shape of the book is distinct and unique. Were there any issues that limited what you were able to accomplish?
On the contrary. We know books to have four sides. Adding one, making it a pentagon, opens a myriad of possibilities.

You’ve designed many art catalogs. Do you have a “philosophy” of what such a book should be, and what purpose it should perform?
I do. The philosophy is clear to me but hard to explain in ways other than a design process. An art catalog is—to quote Robert Smithson—a “logical picture,” a Non-Site, the transposition of a list of objects, which would be a Site. What is the Site? What is the logic? What does the list want? The purpose a catalogue should perform is the discovery of the complexity of both validity and ownership of art and art discourse.

Where does this work fit into your critical mass of work? In other words, are you pleased with its innovations?
Definitely. A lot of innovation was in the context, thanks to the Bard Institute and Richard Tuttle. Glad I could respond in kind.

Can you tell me what it felt like the first time you saw a finished copy?
To be honest: sad, which took me a few weeks to overcome. A journey can be so much better than its destiny. But then one forgets, and starts to accept the object. In the end, the object always wins.

The covers are piled so high with lettering and hearts and insets and flowers and ribbons and cute characters that it extends up over the magazine title. You have to know what it is to know what it is.

Incredibly, the madness continues inside and throughout the magazine. Every page has layer upon layer of patterns, shapes kanji, English, and photos in a myriad of styles and sizes.

And if you think I’m going to lament this as an abomination of design, you don’t know me.

It is gorgeous!

Boys appear seemingly only as objects of fantasy, laid out in manga-style stories.

Inside the magazine is an uncoated paper insert, chopped down, and printed in one color with more boy profiles, horoscopes, lists, and more.

What I find particularly interesting about this aesthetic is how completely incapable most North American designers would be of accomplishing this. Every ounce of their training is to not do this: to pare back, be spare and simple. Most are tortured when or if they have to work on a regular trade magazine, with all of its inserts, sidebars, and asides that attempt to make it look exciting while pandering to short attention spans. To go further— further yet— far over the line of design decency and common sense— is something they are just not capable of. And I think it’s a pity.

Of course, the whole world can’t and shouldn’t look like this, but neither should it look like the sameness of “clean and simple,” as it often does.

Designers are trained to be inflexible; to follow a prescribed path. They love and hate— which is fine— but they love and hate the same things, and look to each other for guidance and “inspiration” (don’t get me started).

Design and design education should be a process of exploration across cultures and time. Steal this, steal that, mash them together see what happens. What is bad taste, and can it be used inventively? What is good taste, and can it be subverted? People often ask me where I get my ideas from, and my answer is always “everywhere.” Difference is good. Madness is good. What you think of as bad is often good. Give Joseph Muller Brockmann kittens— see what happens.

This essay was originally published on Marian’s blog, Marian Bantjes is Writing Again. You can keep up with her work here, or look through her archives on Substack.

Thanks to Adidas’ partnership with the US Soccer Foundation, now Rodman can add “superhero” to her impressive resume. She stars in the bright, action-packed new children’s book Wake Up and Kick It, featuring design and illustration by Wolfgang and Black Madre. Eye-catching graphics, glow-in-the-dark ink, and Rodman’s own artwork make this a desirable addition to any child’s bedside table. It might even inspire them to pick up a soccer ball!

Wake Up and Kick It with Trinity Rodman x adidas

The words “hero” and “athlete” have always been used to describe men. Combine that with the fact that 95% of sports media coverage is focused on men’s sports, and we are teaching another generation of boys and girls to idolize male athletes. Few had heard of 19-yr old, Trinity Rodman, US women’s soccer phenom, and Rookie of the Year, fewer had seen her play. So, instead of creating a traditional campaign to share her amazing accomplishments, we made a children’s book that told Trinity’s story as inspiration for other young athletes.

Unlike other children’s books, which are designed to put kids to bed, this is a “wake up” book. After all, Trinity didn’t become the youngest player ever drafted into the NWSL by sleeping in; she got there by getting up and getting after it.

The Wolfgang team worked closely with Trinity to write the book based on her life experiences and partnered with visual arts studio, BLACK MADRE, to create the illustrations. Some of Trinity’s own artwork appears in the book. Photoluminescent ink was used to make the cover glow in the dark.

Now that Trinity has been called up to the USWNT, the only remaining question is, when will the sequel be announced?

If you’re fascinated by the deeper meaning of emojis, you’ll love EMOJISM from ECH Creative Publications. This cheery, eye-catching coffee table book is full of general design inspiration, charming infographics, and fun facts about emojis. For example, you might not be surprised that the scream face is inspired by Edvard Munch’s classic painting, but had you ever really stopped to think about it? If you’re looking to boost your mood, slow down, and appreciate the small details of design we see every day, EMOJISM might be just what you’re looking for.

For now, you’ll have to either live in Vietnam or speak Vietnamese to access EMOJISM, but ECH hopes to publish the book internationally by the end of the year. In the meantime, you can pre-order EMOJISM here.

EMOJISM

A station of inspiration for everybody

Not in the good mood, huh? Just fine! Leave the real world behind and join with us into the surreal world EMOJISM where you might take your motivation back.

Aiming to become a visual healing station for anyone who loves design and creativity, EMOJISM takes you exploring spectacular artworks from the top studios, designers all around the world. Featuring a curation of over 60 projects with different design characteristics yet share the emoji theme in common, this visual collection successfully expresses the diversity of the visual language in creative ways; becoming a means of escaping the bad-mood status and a station of inspiration that fully charges your mind with incredible ideas.

TOPICS: Art, Design & Creativity

FORMAT: Book & Magazine

LANGUAGE: Vietnamese

SPECIFICATION: 190 x 255 mm (hardcover), 280 pages

PAPER: PEFC®-certified products

CONTENT WRITER: Thao Ho, Le Phan

ART DIRECTION: Roy Vu

DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION: Dong Luong

The layout design is neatly designed, with the Negative Space factor being utilized to the fullest, helping readers relax their eyes with each page of the book. Besides, we created a smooth transition between showcases yet still keeping the consistency for the artbook in general.

But once upon a time, it wasn’t quite so hard to find exciting creators working together under the same roof. For decades, magazines have provided readers with a one-stop-shop for a wide range of work from fresh, new voices, including essays, criticism, and fiction. You could find an eclectic range of publications in the racks of most bookstores, and choose any number that reflected your views or lifestyle. Readers could keep up with faraway creative communities, and even become a part of one themselves through subscribing to a given magazine.

Sadly, after a solid decade of folding publications, failed new media companies, and massive editorial layoffs, it’s been hard to avoid the lingering sense that magazines are dead. But don’t be fooled by disappearing newsstands and shuttered domain names— rabid print fans still lurk on eBay, social media, and even in quiet storefronts.

Writer Nadja Spiegelman has seen the rising tide for herself. “I go into the few specialized magazine shops that still exist in New York City, and see them consistently filled with young people who really, really want magazines,” she told me. “There’s sort of a resurgence of them, in part because they’re disappearing.”

As the chief collaborators behind Astra Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Spiegelman and Creative Director Shannon Jager are poised to ride the crest of this wave. In this bi-annual publication, readers can find exciting new work from creators around the world, all in one place. Within almost 200 gorgeous pages, you’ll find an eclectic range of prose, poetry, essays, comics, and art. In their first issue, “Ecstasy,” work from previously unpublished writers lives alongside exclusives from bestselling authors like Ottesa Moshfegh and Leslie Jamison. These stories are accented with rich visuals by prolific cartoonists like Evan M. Cohen, Diana Ejaita, and Nicole Rifkin. Design enthusiasts will delight in Jager’s bold color palettes and ambitious, yet accessible visual flourishes, all on elegantly embossed, high-quality paper.

The expansive feel of Astra goes beyond its diverse line-up and dynamic look. The publication provides a thoughtful approach to international literature by honoring the art of translation, engaging directly with global communities, and representing creators on their own terms. In order to accomplish this lofty goal, Spiegelman, Jager, and their expert team have combed through a century of visual references and a whole world of creative localities. You can find their editors in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and their most recent journeys have taken them from Manhattan high-rises to Canadian ice fishing shacks.

I recently sat down with Spiegelman and Jager to get their firsthand account on adventures in modern publishing. They discuss challenging the dry, western feel of literature, the importance of strong crediting, and the weird, secret trick to publishing magazines without newsstands.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

How did you both end up at Astra?

Spiegelman: I’ve always dreamed of starting my own magazine, but I was waiting for an idea for something that doesn’t exist yet, that really would fill a space. So I started working with Astra Publishing House on creating a magazine that would align with their vision of international literature. They wanted to make a literary magazine that was genuinely cosmopolitan, and that didn’t ask any one writer to represent an entire country. It seemed really exciting, and like something that I wasn’t seeing done elsewhere.

Jager: I’ve always had a love of magazines. I’ve worked for places like Pentagram, T Magazine, and a few other Canadian editorial magazines. I also had my own magazine called Double Dot that’s now defunct, but at the time, it was celebrating the cultural differences between cities around the world. So when I got wind of Astra, this ideal of global collaboration really spoke to me.

It sounds like you both bring a solid amount of perspective and experience to the magazine. Is there anything specific that draws you to the medium of print?

Spiegelman: I grew up with parents who were incredibly interested in art for reproduction, something that can be endlessly reproduced and accessible. There’s this magic in being able to not just create an object, but create an object for reproduction on a large scale. I just grew up like feeling like that’s the coolest thing one could possibly do!

In our moment, all of the systems for magazines are falling apart, like the print advertising dollars that once made them possible. There are no longer newsstands; there are no longer easy distribution systems. That means it’s a really difficult time for magazines. But I think there will always be a desire for print magazines, because the internet is like this endless, flooding river. A magazine is a snapshot that’s less ephemeral, and that offers a really strict curation at a time when everybody has, like, 1000 tabs open on their screen. A magazine is something that is curated, that is inherently finite, that is also something that you can return to. You have a relationship that’s different from what you’d have with a book, in the sense that it’s a community, and it evolves issue after issue. That’s a really unique thing that a magazine can do, and I think it’s always going to be valuable.

Jager: I’ve always loved the medium just because of the slight resistance to single authorship, and just how no magazine can be put together by one person. And the quick turnaround is what makes it so temporal and of the moment.

This first issue features literature and art inspired by the theme of “Ecstasy.” What inspired that, and what goal do you hope the magazine accomplishes?

Spiegelman: This one is “Ecstasy,” the next one will be “Filth,” the one after that will be “Lust.” It’s intentional that we’re countering a preconception that literature in translation is going to be inherently medicinal or boring, or like an anthropological approach for a very foreign other. So instead, we wanted to focus on these universal, and somewhat transgressive and subversive emotions, and just think about what it is that we all have in common.

For the root word of “ecstasy,” you stand outside yourself and a god enters you. It’s like the moment of transcendence when you are outside your own being, and you are sort of becoming a god, and that, for me, is what reading is about. Engaging with art is like standing outside yourself, and letting someone else in, and being able to see the world through their eyes. The best moments of reading for me are the moments when I’m literally transported to the point where I don’t see the room around me anymore, or the train car around me, and I’m just living inside the story, and my physical body disappears. That’s the feeling that we wanted this issue to evoke.

How do you know when you’ve found something that works for the magazine?

Spiegelman: When I worked as an online editor at The Paris Review, I had a lot of space to actually publish what felt really moving, or that really spoke to me. Or I found myself wanting to send something to a friend, because she’s going through something similar, and I’m going through something similar, and this writer really captured it so beautifully. There’s a piece called “The Crane Wife” that went really viral that was about a bad relationship, but it was beautifully written. I never would have read that piece and been like, This piece is gonna go viral. It just spoke to people, and that is so much more satisfying.

We didn’t put any very timely nonfiction in here. Instead, it’s like much more like lyrical writing that you could return to at any moment. Some of the stories are more explicitly ecstatic than others. The theme is more of like a guide, and then we also just want to highlight the very best writing we can find.

Jager: The concept that Nadja and her team have built Astra around is not limiting, and there’s just so many exciting opportunities and possibilities for future operations. And even with having thematic issues, there’s this excitement for the next issue, and what that means. How do we share different sides of the same story, and give dimension to these dramatic words in the form of literature, illustrations, photography, so all these different components come together?

What kind of images did you use to communicate this?

Jager: For each cover, based on the theme, we wanted to have an image that ties closely to it. This photographer, Isabelle Wenzel, opened up her portfolio to us, and we were able to put together a story that I think it worked for the theme in a very expressive and abstract way.

Spiegelman: This photographer takes herself as her own subject. She’s trained as an acrobat, and so all of these are self-portraits where she holds these impossible poses for really long time until she gets exactly the shot she wanted. But there’s also an intentionality in her work as well, and an anonymity for the body. It’s her, but it could be anybody. It’s the body as a form, and that is part of the ethos of what we’re interested in. It’s also what we’re interested in editorially, is the feeling of like, “What is it that we all share? What is the body?”

Jager: There’s something really nice in the black and white photography, and I think it also helped visually open up the conversation about what ecstasy could mean. We could have done an ecstasy pill, or we could have done something like a little bit more like over the head, but this one really felt like it was like a feeling that was really emotive.

Tell me more about the look of “Ecstasy.”

Spiegelman: “Timeless and of the moment” was the inherent contradiction that I first gave to Shannon. How do you do it? And even thinking through a design perspective: what does timeless mean? Because nothing is ever truly timeless. Like, when I think timeless, I’m thinking the ’20s, which is a very specific time.

We looked at a lot of references, like the old Gallimard covers, and even Fitzcarraldo books now, and ’20s modernism. And I think Shannon did a really good job of pulling inspiration from there, and from the ’70s at the same time, in a way that really does feel like every time and right now, especially because of the modular color scheme. So we’ll have different, contrasting colors, and every issue and our website will also update with those colors. But I think that having something that’s so classic, with colors that are so right now, really hits that nail on the head.

Jager: I think, to speak on the colors too, that decision was just to show the emotional spectrum that literature can have, and how that can play a part and elevate stories in new ways. So we were very thoughtful with the color selections, and continue to be excited about like the system that can be built in this harmonious color wave that a subscriber would have across the shelf.

Can you point to any favorite design choices within the issue?

Spiegelman: One of my favorites is this story “Wisteria,” which is one of our longer pieces. With every turn of the page, there’s ever so slightly more of a purple gradient. You only really notice that it’s turning purple by the end, and hopefully you’ve been so pulled into the story that you’re not even really noticing that it’s turning purple.

It was a really nice collaboration between Shannon and I. So I was like, “Can you just make wisteria petals fall on the page?” And she was like, “No, you’re making a literary magazine; you want people to read it. This is too literal, and also people won’t actually be able to read the story if there are petals all over the words.” So we found something that is just a more subtle expression of exactly that feeling through this accumulating purple.

It’s smart that you’ve figured out how to make it look both nuanced and accessible. I feel like it’s much more common that innovation in art or literature obscures meaning, instead of making it clearer.

Spiegelman: What made me want to work with Shannon from the start was her clarity. “Okay, I’m making a literary magazine, so people have to be able to read it, and it has to look really nice, and make you want to read it.” And I think that’s something that really comes through. You pick this up, and you can see that it’s like a very thought-through object, but you actually want to sit down and read the stories, and that never got lost.

Jager: We did numerous type tests, grid tests, baseline tests. We went through all the typefaces, and we just really wanted to build this really strong foundation for the magazine, so there could be a place where adding illustration or color would just be the icing on the cake. Just to that point that we would have something so robust that we could take it from issue to issue and then still have flexibility within it.

The visual language was something that you don’t usually see with literary magazines. That came about through conversations about translation, and different ways of storytelling, and how visuals could elevate each of the pieces, or be a language in itself.

How involved are both of you in the printing process, and what is that like?

Jager: The printer that we ended up choosing is called Prolific, and they’re in Winnipeg. I think that the opportunity for us to be involved in the process was after restrictions had been lifted. That enabled Nadja to fly to Canada and actually be on press with the issue, which is always like a really important part of the process, especially when it’s a first issue. It’s so key, especially just with the amount of illustration and artwork that we had, to do it properly like that

Spiegelman: It was really fun to actually go to the printer and get to see it come off the presses. That was especially after like a whirlwind year of making this thing, but also after a lot of the work that I’ve done in the past, being an online editor, where you just sort of like, click “Send” on WordPress, and like it’s in the world.

They’re really wonderful printers. They like have a real artistry in what they do. And they’ve worked with a lot of cartoonists who I really admire, and that was so nice to hear when I arrived. Cartoonists are artists whose medium is reproductions, so they care really deeply about how it’s being printed, and how it’s going to look, and so that like made me feel really safe. I was like, “Oh, great, you printed Chris Ware!” Very few people in this world can print Chris Ware.

I got to just watch it come off the presses, and do the press checks, and also see their ice fishing shack, which was really nice. Just the smell of ink and the feeling of like paper, the sound of it. It’s printed on this $8 million Japanese printer that like takes up an entire, huge warehouse. And because it’s a piece of Japanese technology, every time it finishes a printing job, it plays “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and the charm of knowing that is really nice! And it’s nice to have a good relationship with a printer, because through getting to know them, that also allows us to know what kinds of things we can do in the future. I got to have conversations about like, “What if for the ‘Filth’ issue, we want scratch and sniff inks?”

You’ve both mentioned wanting Astra to have a genuinely international feel. How do you bring the feeling of a global community into the magazine?

Spiegelman: I think that a lot of times, for a writer’s work to make its way into English and translation, they often have to be at quite an advanced point in their careers. And a publisher is going to take, like, their fourth or fifth book, once they’re very established in their home country. And often a publisher in America is asking this sort of ridiculous question of like, “Is this the best writer in Uruguay? Because we only want to publish one, so is this the best one?” And like if someone asked me who the best writer in America was, I would have no idea. I could tell you my favorite writer, but I don’t know who the best writer in America is.

So what we wanted to do is a magazine where people are really excited about the lineup— writers like Mieko Kawakami, or Fernanda Melchor. Mieko’s from Japan, and Fernanda Melchor’s from Mexico, but she lives in Berlin, and these writers have achieved a certain amount of notoriety. But they appear alongside writers where their work hasn’t even been published by their publishing house in their home country. We worked with publishers in Brazil and in Mexico to find this work, but it’s their debut, and it hasn’t even come out yet there, and it’s going to come out here in English at the same time. And that’s really exciting, to not have to already be at this level of your career before anyone will translate you into English, and your work will live alongside all these writers who are very established. Our hope is that then, what we would define as successful and exciting for the magazine, is if American publishers or UK publishers then read this and are like, “I want to get the author’s whole book, and make it available here,” and it can be a starting point for their careers.

I noticed you’re making translators’ names very visible throughout the magazine. It highlights that translation is a genuine, yet underappreciated artform that requires a lot of thought and intention. In any translation, somebody made a choice to use the word they printed.

Spiegelman: Yeah, a translation doesn’t have a single author, in a way. It’s being mediated through someone, changing your experience of how you read it. Then it also has a particular illustration, and the illustrators are also very clearly credited. A magazine isn’t done by a single person, and thinking through how all three of these people might have come together to create the reading experience is really exciting to us.

We have these insane last few pages of the magazine that are just bios for every single illustrator, translator, and writer, which means that it’s very long, but that’s part of what’s exciting. And these people are from everywhere, and they’re all collaborating together, and in conversation with each other, and that is really part of what’s so exciting about making a magazine at all.

It sounds like you’re approaching this from a very anti-colonial perspective that meets everyone at the exact same level. It allows writers and artists from around the world to create on their own terms, instead of filtering their perspectives through a westernized lens.

Spiegelman: Yeah, and I think a lot of the writers who we’re publishing wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as like a writer of this country. They’re just writers who are writing about what they’re living.

It was a very intentional design decision to not have what country these people live in, or are from. We do say the language their work is translated from, but that’s different than saying, “This writer is from this place.” Most of the writers who we’re publishing are often born in one place, grew up in another place, moved to another place, and are actually writing through all of those places.

Jager: There are new voices from around the world that haven’t been heard, and haven’t been accessible to people, because not everyone is looking for specific pieces from different countries. I think that also the editorial team at Astra and their thoughts, like the pagination, and the rhythm of the magazine, is also quite unique.

Spiegelman: We have editors at large who are in Paris and Berlin, and Beijing and Cairo, who are in very frequent communication with about what’s happening there, and what the literary scene looks like there. We’re not trying to make something that’s only going to speak to these 20 people in New York City. We’re trying to make something that will have international distribution. The New Yorker does sort of evoke, “Here’s everything you’re missing in New York City,” and we’re instead like, “Here’s a lot of people living their lives, that can also speak to your life.” And I’ve just been corresponding with, like, 1000 different bookstores, so people will really be able to read it everywhere.

A lot of the infrastructure for magazines has deteriorated, but it sounds like you have ambitious plans for distribution. How are you getting Astra out there?

Spiegelman: We’re actually going to need to reprint our first issue already, which is really exciting. But one of the things that’s hard for magazines is that there are few newsstands, or distributors, or bookstores that carry magazines anymore, especially after the pandemic. Most of them stopped because people don’t preorder them in curbside pickup.

McNally Jackson in New York is one of the few bookstores that carries magazines, and when we asked them how they did it, they introduced us to a member of their staff whose sole job is to maintain individual subscriptions for every magazine. Whereas with books, you go through a distributor like Penguin Random House, or like Ingram, and you can just order books and get them, and that is a lot easier. That used to be true for magazines, but newsstand distribution has been monopolized and consolidated to a point where the few companies that do it, do it very unreliably.

And so from the get go, we’re like, “Okay, we’ll make a magazine, but it’s going to also be a book,” because one of the things that’s still working is book distribution. And because Astra Magazine is part of Astra Publishing House, which is distributed by PRH, bookstores love working with them, because they are very, very efficient. And every morning, a box from PRH comes and goes for every bookstore, and it’s very easy for them to just try a book or send it back if they don’t want it.

PRH doesn’t distribute magazines, so we had to have a whole call with them where we were like, “It’s a book that comes out twice a year; don’t worry about it.” And that work, and getting to be both, has really meant that we’re going to be able to like be an independent bookstore. If a bookstore in Athens or Copenhagen wants it, we don’t have to individually figure out how we ship books there. That goes through PRH’s global distribution system, and that gets to them very easily. They don’t have to pay shipping and like that’s an enormous, enormous gift. So that’s part of what we’re really excited about, is having the actual reach that is rare for a magazine to have.

Jager: There’s other elements or systems that we’re looking forward to exploring, like doing book tours or book fairs, or events. I think there’s like a lot of potential after this first issue for us to grow and also create a community, which is very exciting.

Spiegelman: I’m not sure if it’ll be possible, but I really hope that, for future issues, we’ll do launch events in different cities for each one. So, to launch the next issue in Mexico City, and launch the one after that in Singapore. It’s not impossible! And to do it in collaboration with the editors that we know at local publishing houses there, and the writers we know, and the bookstores. Because the magazine is fundamentally a place—it’s a very physical and localized thing, and I think part of that is really connecting to local communities in different places.

You can subscribe to Astra and read selections from the magazine at their official website. If you’re in New York City, you can RSVP for their launch party at McNally Jackson Seaport tonight (4/14) at 7 PM.

You can purchase a copy of Brutalist Scotland for £20 at Kyle Lamond’s online shop.

Brutalist Scotland is a personal project of mine that explores a curated selection of some of Scotland’s most precious pieces of brutalist architecture. With photography from Peter Atkinson, this first version covers 6 brutalist structures that lay throughout Scotland – from the Matthew Building in Dundee to the Anderston Centre in Glasgow. 

The publication serves as an output to continue exploring the concept of ‘graphic brutalism’, to allow for total creative freedom and a project that can yield experimental compositions and typography. The first version features a black foiled front cover on 270gsm Neenah Environment Concrete by IST Printing, inner pages printed by Pressision on 170gsm Munken Lynx Rough Natural White, and all copies hand-bound by myself.

The first edition is available to purchase now via: la-mond.com/shop

Project Credits
Kyle Lamond
Photography: Peter Atkinson

The creative world was especially disrupted. Musicians could no longer tour, and many artists and designers had to cancel commissions. While this put creators in a difficult spot, many of them still used art to work through the frustration. Slanted Publishers presents a visual document of this period with HOMEBOUND, a collection of art created during lockdown. Some of the included work comes from projects that were originally derailed by the effects of the pandemic. Without this publication, these pieces may have never been finished, yet this project gave them a new home. Through its wide range of creative voices and evocative visuals, HOMEBOUND provides a compelling portrait of days that suddenly changed the framework of the world.

HOMEBOUND–New Wave shows the collaborative works of designers, artists, and authors, answering and visualizing the influence of the pandemic on their attitudes and projects!

The HOMEBOUND project was born when the pandemic began to cause lockdowns worldwide and many designers and artists had to cancel commissions. Cihan Tamti took the chance to act and decided to create a publication that would present the free projects of his Instagram community created during this period to use up the extra time. The result was an incredibly beautiful documentation of that time and of work that would never have been produced under normal circumstances.

With the second wave of the pandemic, Cihan Tamti wanted to repeat the same process, with great success: the outcome is HOMEBOUND–New Wave, a publication that features the excellent work of 75 designers from 50 cities and 12 countries! The new waves of the pandemic brought a new aesthetic, a new voice and a great progress in networking and cohesion within the community. The influence on the designers’ attitudes and projects has been questioned, answered, and visualized in this publication.

With articles by Rafael Bernardo, Hugo Suissas, Daan Rietbergen, Sophia Brinkgerd, Leonhard Laupichler, Marvin Loschelders, Jonas Diefenbach, Alexandra Breitenstein, Julien Fincker, and Lars Harmsen.

Project Credits
Slanted Publishers

A new coffee table book by Counter-Print hopes to simplify this search, at least in the typography department. Big Type explores how designers and agencies cut through today’s constant clutter to create resonant, memorable work. While the focus is on typography, it covers a wide range of projects and aesthetics. And with a sizable name like “Big Type,” it only makes sense for the title— and book itself— to take up space in turn.

‘Big Type’ explores graphic design and identity work where the emphasis is on typography.

The visual landscape in which today’s designers are contributing to is very cluttered and the digital world alone is so vast, that sometimes it feels hard to make your voice heard amongst all the noise. The work on show within this book examines how designers can produce work that stands out and cuts through the noise. It showcases a fascinating direction in graphic design, forged by a collision of technology, typography and trends which is creating new and exciting results.

Packed full of stunning imagery from some of the world’s best graphic design companies, ‘Big Type’ also contains agency interviews and enlightening project descriptions.

Project Credits
Counter-Print

Czech-French photographer Josef Koudelka clearly agrees, and his been diligent about keeping journals and diaries throughout his life. While he often contemplated destroying them, he ultimately decided to go in a completely opposite direction. Last fall, Koudelka published Deníky (Diary), a selection of diary entries written throughout his 51 years of life. With the editorial help of Aleš Najbrt, Andrea Vacovská, and Jiří Veselka, Koudelka created a delicate balance between intimate art and high-level design.

Josef Koudelka considered destroying his diaries many times but eventually initiated their reading in 2019 and agreed to publish their selection. The texts reflect his fifty-one-year phase of life connected with travel and photography after he left Czechoslovakia in 1969. This is Koudelka’s first book which is intended primarily for reading.

Project Credits
Studio Najbrt

The accompanying photography and art direction highlight everyday life and pull emotionally revelatory insights from the research. Despite the occasionally serious subject matter, it features dynamic, playful design with unexpected shapes and whimsical colors. This journal is less a catalog than a compelling portrait of how the Covid era continues to affect life at home.

In 2021, home furnishing retailer IKEA launched its eighth annual Life at Home Report, exploring how thousands of people worldwide feel about their homes — places they live in everyday. Every year they search for remarkable lessons of what makes life at home noteworthy, so they can help people thrive in the spaces they occupy and feel in there eased even more. 
And never before this research has been so important as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic when it comes to our prosperity at home.

With the help of the brand purpose agency Given, based in London, England, IKEA assembled a team of qualitative and quantitative research partners to ask over 34,000 people globally to share experiences on mental wellbeing about their home spaces. These insights shaped the report’s content and creative communications platform: Balance Starts at Home. For the first time in the Life at Home Report’s history, a bespoke editorial-led magazine was delivered alongside a traditional report format. It features a wide selection of stories that touch on the key five themes of mental wellbeing at home thoroughly explored in the research: space, community, relationships, rituals, and the future home.

MAGAZINE CONCEPT
Life at home is personal. And hence, we had aimed for this first magazine edition to be the same. As the Editor-in-Chief of “A Balanced Place” writes, the “wild contradiction is where the data ends and the story starts.” To achieve balance in a year full of ‘no’, the way we use our spaces has shifted. And we have been seeking to share many stories of motion: essays, interviews, manifestos, photographs, drawings and artefacts by contributors from all walks of life. From  pictures of tranquil everyday life in Ikaria island in Greece, to a story of culinary innovator Dr. Aris LaTham who at his age of 75 has moved far seeking new place to thrive. Diving into a bedtime scrolling with a writer Emma Beddington, and inventing a near future with the bright minds from Near Future Laboratory. 

ART DIRECTION
Led by the concept „Balance is not still”, we wanted to create a dynamic and inspiring design, yet not overwhelming that let us take a few longer breaks in this period of time. We took the already known iconic IKEA Noto font and integrated it into dynamic, somewhat unexpected compositions of shapes and colours that give the magazine a bit of strangeness and delight fun. In the art direction of photography, we wanted to highlight everyday life, pulling out simple emotions from the magazine’s heroes.

Project Credits
Andstudio .

Christina Wunderlich dives into this design niche in her recent release Mono Moment, an inspirational reference for typographers and designers. This 208-page book showcases a reserve of monospace typefaces, including Consolas, Ubuntu Mono, and Sneak Mono, breaking down the historical references of each. It’s the perfect accessory to keep in your creative space, as well as an ideal gift for a fellow type lover.

Monospaced fonts are fascinating! Mono Moment is aimed at type designers typographers and designers, but also at people who are dealing with type design for the first time. The publication thus becomes a reference book and source of inspiration!

Friedrich Nietzsche was probably one of the first to feel the aesthetic appeal of monospaced typefaces. Since he started writing with a typewriter, typefaces, and punctuation have been important to him. In the meantime, we encounter monospaced typefaces regularly in everyday life: in design and in art, in coding, on tax records, or on our ID. If you take a closer look, you will encounter non-proportional typefaces more often than expected.

Monospaced typefaces are defined by their fixed, equal width for all characters. Every character, letter, and number occupies horizontally and vertically the same space. Proportional typefaces, in turn, have harmoniously balanced spaces with variable widths between their characters. The widths are not set proportional. That is why monospaced typefaces are also named non-proportional. What exactly is the attraction of typefaces, whose letters and characters each occupy an equally large space? 

Due to the increase in typeface production over the past few decades, almost every well-developed font family also has a mono or semi-mono cut. When searching for the word “monospace” on the World Wide Web, countless entries can be found in addition to the results such as “I am looking for a beautiful monospaced font,” “Top Ten Monospace Fonts,” or “Best Monospace Fonts for Coding.” At a time when it has never been easier to design and publish typefaces, this book provides a good orientation to monospace!

Project Credits
Slanted Team (Grafik 1)