September Industry

Design Rationale

The structure of the magazine is very distinct, three clear sections which interweave over the 128 pages.The sections are made up of:

1. Work – this is the best things to have been posted on the blog, at a size where they can be appreciated more fully, and we can write a bit more about the project and practitioner… a lot of the work we show on the blog is print, and so to show them in a printed format just makes far more sense…

2. The interviews are done in a way that is very honest and conversational… They are all recorded by me and Will, and very, very lightly edited from a real, face to face, or on the phone conversation. It means we can have a more honest representation of the person than your classic email interviews, which is fine for online but we’re keen to add a bit more depth in print… Also, we get to know that person a little bit more, and we hope the readers feel a little closer to them than if it were a standard interview format.

3. The features are written by practitioners, and they are given free rein to write on a subject they feel passionate about and will engage the audience. That’s the only brief. It’s very open, and leads to some really nice surprises, and unexpected content, which is what makes what we do that little bit different…

As for the design details, they’re very much developed in collaboration with Joseph Burrin, who helps out on the design. The strike-though was a system we bought in last issue to make sure people new there were lots of interviews in the magazine! It was born out of a functional purpose rather than aesthetics, and has been taken on a little further for this issue with a hand-drawn quality…

The grid is very flexible, and makes sure the work isn’t crowded, and has the space to speak for itself, as we believe everything in the publication is really worthy of the platform and don’t feel it needs to be over-designed

The typography, again, is developed every time. The body copy all remains, but the title type is a developed version of DIN condensed, which we play with every time… Mostly again though it’s functional – to try and help us differentiate between the 3 sections…

The list on the front cover is something we’ve always liked as people get a good idea of the content straight off the shelf. We like to champion the names in the publication, as so many of them are a little unexpected…

We’re always looking to change things up though, and we’re already thinking about how Issue #5 might be a little different…