issue 002
/ test dept.#3/cut&paste /
I’ll tell you a little secret, the best way of making something look like it was made by hand, is to make it by hand. My web feeds are full of new start-up companies trying to sell me digital bundles of textural dirt that is meant to look like it was made by Xerox machines or shaky handed scissors. Please, you lazy fuckers, just make them yourself. It’s more fun and more importantly, your outcomes will be unique.
The words ‘generic’ and ‘default’ are dirty words in my lexicon. For this feature written by Stuart Cosgrove about the time Motor City was burning to the sound of Motown music, I used the ascii text generators to make the smoking backgrounds. I found a town plan of Detroit that I Xeroxed and then cut the Supreme’s dresses from. The Motown logo was the basis of the main angular text blocks, almost rectangular, but not.
/ rectanglephobia /
Box clever
This four page feature is the current pinnacle in my attempts to break the rectangular edges of ‘A’ sized magazines. The text ‘boxes’ were traced from a baseball picture as vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator and then imported into InDesign where I could fill them with the articles copy. My favourite justification is ‘forced’ (see entire back catalogue) and in this case it is perfect for the job. The size of the text and the kerning was tweaked by quarter points in lines or words that were stubbornly not playing ball. The golden rule with the editing of text like this is if you can notice it’s crushed or fucked-with, then rewind until it looks the same as everything else visually.
/ test dept.#4/classifieds /
Deep within my storage boxes of photocopied examples of newspapers that I had gathered whilst researching for The Stool Pigeon were these little gems I had found at St. Brides in a book about newspaper design from the 1930s. These large manually typeset headers came from the classified sections of an American newspaper and fitted the crossover betwixt text and image that I was aiming for in The 108. With diligent use of the shift and alt keys I made headers straight on the page in InDesign linking each text box together to make editing the size and weight of the type a much quicker process.
In 1966 he found it just up the river Alde at Snape in a disused maltings complex that within a year he had expensively converted into a purpose-built concert hall in which he and his lover, singer Peter Peers, could hang out in privacy whilst rehearsing, developing and performing new works. The hugely popular Aldeburgh festival has been held here since its completion in 1967.
