Mute Magazine Graphic Design
I highlighted Mute Magazine Graphic Design here before it was published back in April and have been meaning to take a closer look at it here since.
Mute is a small independent title launched in 1994 by Simon Worthington and Pauline van Mourik Broekman. The magazine was a rare voice of opposition in a world obsessed by the arrival of the personal computer and the uncritical fetishisation of technology personified by the then new Wired magazine. The first issues of Mute were printed at the same print plant as the Financial Times, and were produced in broadsheet newspaper format on the FT’s pink newsprint – a deliberate and ironic move on the part of the Mute team. As the examples above and below show, the design works to a newspaper-style grid but throws a few surprises typographically.
In 1997 Mute dropped the newspaper format and took on a more traditional magazine shape, and the newly graduated Damian Jacques was brought in to help design the title. It was at this point that Mute began to really develop its own identity – a clean, bright and upbeat style that was deliberately undermined by Jacques to reflect the magazines editorial standpoint. ‘Mute Magazine Graphic Design’ provides an overview of that visual style, and it quickly establishes that the magazine deserves such close examination. Magazine obsessed I might be, but I can think of few such relatively unknown titles that can repay attention across 144 pages the way Mute does in this book.
In his introduction, design writer Adrian Shaugnessy positions Mute as the latest entry in a brief but excellent history of magazine design. The book is worth a look for this intro alone, as woven within his history Shaugnessy describes the plight of todays magazines and publishers well. Magazines and technology have always served each other and in its short lifetime Mute has mapped the changes in production – from monochrome broadsheet through to its current presence as an online magazine with quarterly printed collections.
I expected a lot from this book and it delivers both as a visual record of some great designs and as a close-up history of a singular project observed by the people who were there at the time.
Highly recommended.
‘Mute Magazine Graphic Design’ is published by 8 Books, ISBN: 978-0955432224, £19.95
