Art magazine

Project: Create a short magazine. The only constraint was to use the word “Hero” as the title.

Design process: I had recently come across Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” when I received this assignment, so I knew I wanted to make a photography magazine. The title gave me trouble though—because we had to use “Hero,” I felt a bit stuck about how to bring to life what was such a clear vision in my mind.

The breakthrough came when I thought about the title as geometrical building blocks, rather than a single unit of a word, which led me to play around with splitting it up into the four corners of the magazine cover, using a heavyweight, angular font as the central branding choice. I used the beautiful Rig Shaded font to create the offset printing effect, using the CMYK palette to allude to photographs as physical objects.

The rest—using a more free-flowing grid to lay out the text and images, playing with the white space to cut off the header text on page three—was inspired by this choice.

Result: A magazine I would love to read, which ended up inspiring the brand kit and visual identity for Socci Studio.

The process

I love photographs because they blur the edges between the real and the unreal. A moment captured is frozen in time in a way that is both an exact reproduction of what was seen through the lens, and a gesture, a grasping of time as it flows past you like water. There’s a Sontag quote that captures this: “Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”

I used this as inspiration for the layout, incorporating bits of the quote on the second internal page. The idea of using photos to carve out a slice of time for yourself inspired the first internal page, where I cut the word itself against the white space to create that feeling of borders, of decision-making. Like the edge of a photograph, deciding what is saved or lost.

Final product

Here’s how it all turned out!