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032c redesign

Berlin-based 032c has been a favourite magazine of mine for some time. In it’s early 2-colour newsprint format it had a strong, direct design that seemed to speak from back when Berlin was still split in two. It felt like an underground, secret project. The front cover was always the same: a large square of 032c red with a brief headline below it (for the issue below the red was screenprinted in gloss ink), and inside the design used stark black and white and bold Franklin Gothic headlines.

After three issues it relaunched with a more ‘professional’ look; perfect binding, a mix of matt and gloss papers, a glossy photographic cover (below), and a more sophisticated design. It remained left-field in look and content, more journal than magazine, but it felt more affluent, more tasteful. The big bold design was replaced with a quieter look that better reflected the content (art, fashion, culture). But perhaps it was too tasteful?

The latest edition of 032c, (cover at top of page, spreads below), features a redesign by German art director Mike Meire (Meire has previously worked on other key German titles Econy, Brand Eins and Statements). My first reaction to the issue was disappointment; while it brings back elements of the original 032c, including a warm red cover, it uses typography and layouts that are hard to describe as anything but ugly. The pages feel thrown together.

When I expressed my confusion about the redesign to the magazine’s founder/editor Joerg Koch, I received a surprising reply. ‘Thanks for your message which made me incredibly happy! This is exactly what we wanted to achieve, this sort of engagement with a magazine where you question yourself if it makes sense, if it is really brilliant or simply daft’.

The stretched fonts feel very retro-eighties to me, but Joerg went on to explain that, ‘this was never ever intended (brutalising yes, retro no). It is really about creating clashes between images, typography and content, brutalising minimalism to save it’.

There’s been a trend for a kind of un-design, or ‘unspectacular’ design as Boicozine termed it a while back, among independent magazines recently, but the new-look 032c takes that idea and pushes it further. This is very skillfully un-designed; everything is legible and clear, but presented with little intervention on the designer’s part. The design elements appear dropped loosely on the page, and clearly that is exactly the designer’s intention. ‘Everybody knows now how to design a magazine in a tasteful aspirational way that it has become such a cliché,’ Koch adds.

It’s certainly a brave experiment. The previous incarnation of 032c was perhaps too tasteful, but that seemed to suit it’s world. Whether readers and advertisers will get the new look remains to be seen, as Koch admits, ‘Even if marketing people did not get the magazine in the past, the look was reassuringly premium. Now it is much more experimental and raw but I believe we can pull it off commercially because we have great content by contributors with strong reputations’.

I remain unconvinced. Many magazines play with expectations of design, and often do things I’d never think of yet like when I see done. What initially appears artless can become artful, but this new 032c is so willfully awkward that the artless feel remains just that, artless. The artificially stretched, characterless fonts, and heavy lumps of text don’t work for me. The one time they use a different paper stock it is a pastel green paper (pictured above) – not an obvious choice!

And yet… on their track record alone, 032c and Mike Meire deserve respect for the experiment. The content remains as strong as ever, the new issue featuring images by Hedi Slimane, fashion by Paul Wetherall and writing by Werner Herzog. I’ll be watching with great interest to see how it develops.