001 old rivalry, new ground

/ cover story /

The first issue of The 108 focussed on the New York Yankees vs the Los Angeles Dodgers which gave us the opportunity to revolve the content around the differing cultural patchworks, people and places that these cities have to offer. It also allowed Mike to use this flexible content template in the same way that we had within adrenalin and Bogey magazines ten years before whilst pitching subjects like hotdogs and tacos against each other in the mix.
There were many discussions with the client about the colour of this cover, all due to the inherent alchemic differences between the transposition of CMYK into RGB and back again. I had chosen a Pantone colour for the paper stock and when transferred from a CMYK Pantone swatch to an RGB screen colour reference via a PDF the colours did not visually match (I defy you to simply explain this problem to an accountant). It was against the laws of physics Jim, but the people viewing the roughs across the pond were convinced that it was ‘too pink’ and “we want it to be peach, not pink”.
I persisted and they conceded. We also wanted the outline graphic of the pitch to be de-bossed so a foil block was made that we would use for each of the four covers because their format and design would stay exactly the same with only the colours changing for each different issue. The printers ended up doing a double hit on the white cover paper stock of Pantone 170U as well as using Pantone 254U purple on the masthead and pitch graphic. Well, as Mike had spent most of the budget flying himself and Zach to America I felt it only fair that I should use some of what was left on these production specials to get the colours and feel as perfect as I could.

/ test dept.#1/masthead /

There are one hundred and eight stitches on a regulation baseball and the thread used to make one is eighty eight inches in length. Either of these numbers seemed like a good title hook for our zine and the decision to use ‘the108‘ as the title was made only after vigorous visual testing, some of which you can see below.
I never usually give a client too many choices, three at most, because they’ll always end up cherry picking bits from all of them and leave you with a much weaker end product. Design by committee is a dangerous thing, especially if you’re like me and know that your solution is the right one, I mean isn’t that why they hired me? Companies will often hire a designer and then impose their own bad taste on the visuals but you never see me in the CEO’s office telling them how to do their job do you?
I had been waiting for a project that Kalligraphia would fit and The108 was perfect. This beautiful art nouveau masthead font was designed in 1902 by Otto Weisert’s foundry in Stuttgart but looks like it should come straight out of the 1970s wearing floral flared trousers. It induced just the right amount of organic feminism into what was going to be an overtly masculine artefact.

/ rectanglephobia /

Many new photographers have grown up without the experience of producing pictures for print artefacts and, as a result they sometimes forget that you can actually hold a camera two ways, landscape and portrait. Print formats are nearly always portrait and so when faced with editing and using shots, nowadays your options are more limited by this omission. After more than twenty years putting pictures in rectangles for magazines and newspapers I have an aversion to maintaining this tradition of boxed images and text.

I spent many hours in the development of the108 trying to expand the rectangular frameworks of an A4 page into something much more abstract and less conventional so for this feature I brought in the shapes of the baseball pitch layout to frame the images within. The compositional difficulties that this brought with it was first of all, a struggle to complete, and secondly, a minefield when trying to convince the conservative clients of its validity to the visual language we were creating for the magazine.

©michael fordham & ©ellen jong — #1 game day

/ disco don't suck /

D.I.S.C.O

To camouflage my ever-present reluctance to box elements up whilst reinforcing the ambiguity between an articles text and images I used text as image with an online ascii text convertor. It also continued my never ending endeavours to find visual solution to pages that cost us absolutely nothing. When the text/image was pasted into InDesign and the spacing and justification manually customised, the text was set in IBM Plex Sans a monospace font that we were already using within the zine. The overall aesthetic now gave a little nod to both the dadaist concrete poet’s and the American west coast typesetting style of the nineties which are two of my favourite things, as someone once sang.

/ test dept.#2/format/colour /

One of the most important decisions to make when creating a new magazine, book or newspaper is the shape and format of that printed product. The material and size of a printed object can have a vast impact on the user experience because it can immediately convey the spirit and message of a piece before a single word is even read. With The 108 I wanted to get back to the very first incarnations of zines from the 1920-40s which were jellographed on cheap pulp paper. I dug around in my own large collection of research material that includes all types of printed things with varying formats and materials. The object that really got me excited was my old secondary school report because it, like those early sci-fi zines, was just two pieces of thin card unpretentiously stapled together. For me, those staples added another layer of authenticity and invoked a home-made methodology that was a crucial part of a zine put together by nerds, for nerds. I imagined someone finding a copy of our zine in a loft in a hundred years time with its faded paper and rusting staples and I wanted the format we chose to not just allow, but encourage, this passage of time upon it.