A bunch of years ago, I interviewed to AD a startup publication aimed at systems administrators. The Internet bubble was still pre-bust, and the publisher like other e-entrepreneurs, had a pile of money he was looking to use to gain a little legitimacy and recognition in old media. His vision for the magazine intrigued me. He wanted to get away from the high-tech look of most computer magazines, he wanted something grungier, cooler, and more like a skateboard magazine. Riding the concrete wave, I gathered, was his other passion.
Is it possible to make a bunch of pasty computer geeks look as cool as Tony Hawk in mid-air? Is it possible to make routers and the men and women who love them into a visual subject? I’m glad that in the end, I never had a chance to find out. But there was enough mutual interest that I did think about the project for a while. I imagined a gridless magazine in which each page would be a collage of painted, typographical, and photographic elements and then photographed–something visual and surprising but not driven by art which I was pretty sure wouldn’t sustain his objective of making such a dry topic sexy.
What I imagined was similar to, but not half so cool as Marmalade, a British arts and culture journal that seems to have vanished from American shelves, but is still available by subscription. Marmalade builds all of its pages out of low-relief collages. layered images that are lovingly put together and than photographed.
It’s a design based on contradictions. Handmade, it is still based on a sterile, single-weight Swiss sans serif font. Complex, lush, and time-intensive in execution, the actual layouts are usually clean and simple. There are a number of magazines that go for a sense of artifact—of being cultural objects in of themselves rather than reporters on culture—but most of these—Art/Life and Esopus for example—achieve this through the use of mixed papers and printing techniques. They also don’t particularly attempt to write about anything topical, or in the case of (the late) Art/Life, anything at all. Marmalade is conventionally printed, and does write about topics other than itself. Yet it still seems every bit the lovingly put together object worthy of preservation.
My first reaction to Marmalade (number four, above) was that the conceit was sustainable. Despite the restrictive vocabulary the designer chose, he was using it to say a lot. I came later to decide I was wrong though. As stunning as each Marmalade spread is, this approach ultimately flattens the visual range of the magazine. Marmalade’s design is really about magazine design itself, not about topic. Worse, the written content of the magazine seemed an afterthought. I never bought a second copy.
Still, I would have loved to have done something like Marmalade for a while. And, sustainability wouldn’t have been an issue at the systems magazine–it only lasted an issue or two.
