INDIZILLA
The Magazine
Keep the grid and put the design back on top of it. The drama lives in the composition, the scale and the imagery, and the words stay plain.
A brand that publishes and has photography worth printing large: fashion, hospitality, food, travel, interiors. It is the direction for a business whose product is partly an aspiration.
Make it look editorial, like a page out of a fashion magazine. But it has to convert an ordinary business owner, and we are not alienating the buyer.
The whole thing is standing, every page of it, built on the same prices and the same mark as this site. It is marked on every screen as a direction rather than the live site, and the figures printed inside it are the ones 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 in Bodoni Moda was replaced with the house family, 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 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, 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; the same screenshot untreated reads as somebody’s browser window. Colour returns on hover.
It proved a grotesque can carry a magazine. A magazine normally takes its drama from stroke contrast and Archivo has none, so the drama came from the other three levers: 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. That finding is the most portable thing on this page.
A magazine needs pictures, and it is merciless about bad ones. Commit to the photography budget or choose another direction.
A house typeface is not a limitation. Take the drama from weight, scale and tracking instead, and the brand survives it intact.