Editorial Design
Studio Standard
Issue One
Overview
A seasonal print magazine on fashion, art, design, and technology. I ran it end to end, from editorial direction and layout through to printing and binding the thing myself.
The issue runs on two registers. Pure is monochrome and typographic and carries the long features; Expressive brings in colour and image for the shorter pieces. Alternating them paces the issue without losing its shape.
Creato Display, Switzer, Cooper Hewitt, and Sentient. Four faces in one magazine only holds together because each was picked for a specific tonal job rather than for variety.
Background Read more Close
Problem
Self-initiated. Design a magazine. That is a layout brief, and I could have answered it with a competent template.
But a magazine’s identity is not its grid. It is the calls a grid cannot make: what to cover, how to frame it, which pieces get room to breathe and which get to misbehave. A template does not have opinions. The harder job was building something that flexes across thirteen contributors writing about fashion, art, design, and technology, and still reads as one publication when you are holding it.
Research & Audience
Readers who pick culture apart instead of scrolling past it. Not casual browsers. Readers who want the thinking behind the work and the connections between fashion, art, design, and technology.
Issue One’s theme, “The Curated Self,” set the tone early: identity as something people build rather than something they have, read through body-as-typography, AI companionship, colonial portraiture, and the cowboy as camp.
Building the System
Two registers, used as a pair. Pure is monochrome and typographic and runs the long features where the writing should lead. Expressive is colour-forward and image-heavy and takes the shorter pieces. Alternating them paces the issue, so you get contrast without the magazine losing its shape.
Four typefaces carry the tonal range: Creato Display, Switzer, Cooper Hewitt, Sentient. Each was picked for a job, which is what keeps four faces from reading as indecision. Thirteen contributors were sequenced against the theme rather than filed by subject.
Production closed the loop. Colour, bleed, and paper were proofed on press at SCCA, and I hand-bound the issue instead of sending it out.
Designed as a real magazine, not a class deliverable, and that difference showed up in every decision.
Self-initiated. Editorial Design class project.
InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop.
Editorial design, creative direction, curation, typography, print production.
Creative direction, all layout, curation, contributor coordination, print production.
Creato Display, Switzer, Cooper Hewitt, Sentient.
Printed and bound at SCCA Seattle on the Canon ImagePress C710.
13 across writing, photography, and editorial.