surf/skate/snow/fordham

The company that were going to publish adrenalin worked out of rented offices in the ignored part the Docklands on the Isle of Dogs, away from all the glass and steel towers springing up at its northern edge. I went through that metropolis on a fairground DLR train to meet one of the publishers, where we sat in an empty office to discuss the project in a sad pastiche of Bond meeting an arch villain. We got on and I accepted the challenge to put a new magazine together with them.
One of the highlights of doing Xtreme magazine was meeting the assistant editor Michael Fordham who was the editor and structural lynchpin of adrenalin, it was Mike who had recommended me to the publishers as a possible designer.  
Mike’s skills in commissioning and finding great writers and content for issues has led to many collaborations and a lifelong friendship. The conceptual idea for adrenalin was to extend the three running themes of surf, skate and snow by adding a fourth different thematic device for each issue. This gave us the opportunity to wrap this fourth temporary element around the sport and content of the entire issue and enabled me to change the visual and contextual structure of each new issue. It meant repetition was avoided and freshness became normality.
I was still freelancing for various periodicals at the time for £100 a day, which in many cases just meant inputting new copy and pictures into the same old templated pages. I spent weeks doing content entry on loud speaker reviews, club listings and page after page of beauty products.
I was determined not to make adrenalin one of those Groundhog Day magazines and the secret to this turned out to be the design of a grid system which would give me unbound flexibility. My research into historical layouts saw the beginning of another of my vocational obsessions, that of modular and column page grids.