INDIZILLA
The Issue
Keep the grid from the attempt before and put the design back on top. The drama lives in the composition, the scale and the imagery, and the words stay plain.
Make it look editorial, like a page straight out of a fashion magazine. But it has to convert the common business owner. While pursuing design, we do not want to alienate our buyer.
The whole edition is still standing, every page of it. It is marked archived on every screen, and the prices printed inside it are the ones that were published on the day it was built.
How it was built to look like itself.
- #F3EFE7Warm paper
- #111010True black
- #C8321ERed
- #D8FB2ELime, for decisions
Archivo, italic axis
900 at 104px, tracking -5.2px
A first pass set in Bodoni Moda was replaced with the house family on instruction, and swapping it was not a find and replace: sizes came down from 118 to 104, 78 to 68 and 52 to 44, tracking went from -0.015em to -0.05em, and the drop cap went from 4.6em at weight 500 to 3.9em at 900.
Magazine furniture used as furniture: a cover with cover lines and a strap carrying the phone number, a contents page, standfirsts, drop caps, pull quotes ruled above and below, and folios at the foot of a feature.
Almost none. The page is set, not staged.
Screens printed in two inks. A screenshot in a duotone reads as art, and the same screenshot untreated reads as somebody’s browser window. Colour returns on hover.
It proved a grotesque can carry a magazine. A magazine usually takes its drama from stroke contrast and Archivo has none, so the drama came from the other three levers instead: weight at 900 against 400, scale at 104px against 11px, and tracking pulled tight enough that a headline reads as one object rather than a row of letters.
“Even after this, why is the current version much better? The one that is live.”
A house typeface is not a limitation. If you cannot take drama from stroke contrast, take it from weight, scale and tracking, and the brand survives the drama intact.