Hato Studio + Press
Today we’re at Hato in London, browsing through the graphic design studio and Risograph printers’ magazine shelf. You’ll know the studio for its work for Pick Me Up festival, the Serpentine Galleries, the Wellcome Collection, and the V&A, and you’ll have read through the pages of paraphernalia printed at Hato Press if you’ve ever had a copy of OOMK or looked through fantastic illustrator Alice Bowsher’s Scruff book.
Today, one of the Hato founders Ken Kirton takes us through some magazines that are currently inspiring or informing Hato press and studio team members. We asked him to select three magazines for us: an old issue, a new issue, and a detail that is especially great.
An old issue: 100 Idees
100 Idees is an old French magazine, each feature had over 100 ideas, or ‘how to’ instructions on creating and making. The content was aimed at housewives in the 70s but the ingenuity and imagination behind each craft resonates with the studio’s own love of learning and making.
The instruction guides are beautifully designed, some have quite a contemporary aesthetics, some are abstract, others are purely functional, but the typography and images are always well curated.
A new issue: Lucky Peach
We all love food at Hato so it’s probably no surprise that one of our favourite magazines is quarterly food mag Lucky Peach. It’s beautifully designed, uses both illustration and photography to punctuate its articles, and consistently produces super creative content – even though it’s simply about food.
Plus the editorial director, Peter Meehan, is a friend of ours – he wrote the introduction for ‘Cooking with Scorsese’ which we published in 2014, and is the co-author of ‘Momofoku’, a cookbook and noodle bar based in NYC which we absolutely LOVE.
And another thing… Sexymachinery
Sexymachinery IS detail. Every issue changes format according to its content. We have one issue whose pages are bound into wallpaper casing, another that was printed into a chunky bible-sized book titled ‘Save me From What I Want.’ They’re experimental, inventive and it’s all in the detail.
It might be questionable as to whether it’s a magazine - perhaps it isn’t, they aren’t fixed to any apparent visual identity - but it certainly exists in a continued series.