July 12, 2007
Magazine of the week 10: Pyramid Power
Regular readers will know I like nothing better than a magazine that knows it’s a magazine, that plays with the form, and this week’s featured magazine is a great example of just that.
Pyramid Power hails from Vancouver and claims to be that city’s ‘most newer magazine of arts’. Strange language, but it suits the visuals. It’s an arts magazine, covering a broad range of Vancouver’s eclectic art scene. And the content is pretty interesting, but absolutely superceded by the way the pages look. If the front cover, above (issue 2), appears obtuse and abstract, check out the opening spread, below:
Split personality? You bet; this magazine uses a quite random selection of fonts and graphic approaches, altering the structure to suit each message. Yet it hangs together, has a united sense of purpose.
If that all sounds very serious and po-faced, there’s a healthy sense of humour to Pyramid Power that lightens the tone; a humour that plays with the conventions of magazines. Issue two acknowledges that many readers won’t have seen the first issue, offering a mini cut-out verison of the launch issue, complete with assembly instructions (above and below). There’s also a list of mistakes from the first issue; not a polite paragraph but a whole page shouting about their indescretions.
This sample layout is fabulous. Solid text but the mix of colour and basic technique – the clear hierarchy of headline, intro, drop cap, body copy and pullquote – are just slightly upset, in a good way, by the mix of column widths and the tiny details like the way the running head runs diagonally from the right corner, close up below:
Just as you think you’ve ‘got’ what they’re doing, you turn the page and…
That colour! Those fonts! And then…
Where did that come from?
I love this magazine. In a world of sameness it’s great to find somebody so enjoying themselves with our medium. Yes its weird, and if described in too much detail sounds absurd, but as I hope this images demonstrate, it works. Really well.
5 Comments
Comment on July 13, 2007 by Philmo says:
Awesome! Props to Sacha & Crew for an outstanding publication. It’s definitely pushing boundaries of magazine/book/mook design.
Comment on July 13, 2007 by nathan hanna says:
i agree the color choices and fonts are very cutting edge, with a feeling of fun and rawness. thats what makes it what it is! great job sacha! you killed it once again!
Comment on July 14, 2007 by Georg says:
Haven´t seen the real magazine yet, but I´m afraid to say the sample layout spread looks alarmingly like being pulled directly from a late Emigré magazine.
Comment on July 16, 2007 by jeremy says:
Weird; I don’t see a link to Emigré at all. Would be interested to see a scan of an example.
Oh, and that ‘Mook’ word is hereby banned!
Comment on July 16, 2007 by Sacha says:
Actually, I thought the spreads were much more similar in style to the May 1973 issue of the East German Komrade Quarterly.
But as I write this I notice alarmingly similar details to early Holmes-era Polynesian Front propaganda pamphlets!
It’s obvious to me, without even having seen the magazine, that there is an nefarious fraud being perpetrated on the magazine reading public.
I don’t need to see their spreads to identify the outrageously blatant truth in front of me: these men are frauds.
They leave me with no choice. I am left with only one course of action: a strongly worded email to the editor of Pyramid Power.
While I hope it will help them realize they cannot get away with wholesale design theft, I doubt they’ll be changing their ways.
