Literary Magazine
Branding, Print Design, Design System
Strange Matters (strangematters.coop)Text-forward, footnote-heavy, essay collection with a twist.
For UXR & UXD head this way.
Overview
Strange Matters is a magazine of new and unconventional thinking in politics, economics, and culture. The 5-person team’s makeup and editorial outlook is playful, open, nerdy, and experimental, while remaining attentive to evidence and grounded theory.
As such, the editors wanted a suite off aesthetics that could communnicate jazz-like experimentation, modernist geometric forms, unexpected inversions, and odd-ball kookiness.
Branding & Identitiy
The magazine had to convey several important messages & associations, while strongly differentiating itself from competitors and other publications, on bookshelves, on Twitter, and online in general.
Logo
The logo combined the letters “S” and “M” into a single zig-wag.
Zig-Wag
The zig-wag motif emerged as a way for the editors to express the magazine’s commitment to “grounded theory” - the feedback between observable evidence and conceptual frameworks.
It’s lofty, but a galvanizing idea for the editorial board, that manages to be expressed with simplicity in this motif.
Issue Patterns
Individual issues are identifiable by their characteristic pattern. These fill the end pages of the magazine, feature on the cover, and populate sections of the website after each issue’s release. They also serve to identify each issue in the web archive.
Characteristic fonts are used throughout the website, print issues, and marketing of the magazine. These were selected for their legibility in large swaths of text and their historical associations with science, technology, art, and publishing. They were also selected to maximize their compatibility with the range of graphical variation & experimentation expected between issues.
Various materials were created for the communications of the co-editors, including business cards, email signatures, letterheads, and press cards.
The Literary Magazine Genre
Competitor magazines tend to have dull, novel-like designs, in which the only point of visual interest is the cover. We studied visual trends beyond the literary magazine genre to innovate, while emphasizing the reading experience. After interviewing readers and editors of prominent magazines we were equipped with years of knowledge and were aware of the desires and pain points of existing audience members.
Print issues have characteristic elements in common. The cover features the issue pattern and a central space where the pattern inverts in some way. These rules are loose, interpretable, and invite reinvention from issue to issue, ensuring freshness while retaining a degree of consistency.
End pages & Flyleaves
The issue pattern populates the end pages and flyleaves of each issue.
Index and Section Pages
The indexes and section pages of each issue riff on the colour scheme of the issue and are internally related to one another. These designs vary radically from issue to issue - preventing them from being overly fussy and staid, and opening them up to bold experimentation.
Grid
The grid had to accommodate a lot of text. While most literary journals in our page range have plain, novel-like layouts, we decided to innovate.
The gird was designed to reduce visual clutter and to make the experience of reading and navigating the issue as calm & clear as possible.
All text elements fit within a central box aside from the page numbers which lie outside of this box at the bottom of the page.
Materials and Fabrication
I fussed over the print specifications; selecting a high quality, off-white egg-shell paper with a silky but textured surface that would enhance the tactile experience and receive ink well while remaining matte (and nice to read). We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the design of our print issues.
Reception
The print issue has been exceedingly favorably received. Elements continue to evolve issue to issue and small modifications are made based on reader feedback (such as the font size, which is the same as the Londonn Review of Books, but which was too small for some of our older readers.