Some Magazine #9
Some Magazine is the hardest print publication to Google that I have ever come across: its name is brilliantly inconspicuous and vanishes into the abyss of every web search, and it’s also a name that is very well suited to the magazine’s concept. Since 2010, the biannual publication has been produced by the students of designer Sven Völker at the University of Art in the German state of Halle. They get given one simple assignment: to make some kind of magazine together in half a year, and because Some Magazine has to be about something, the brief is to centre on art and design. Issue nine’s theme is ‘Complicated’ - an idea crisply evoked by the tangle of colourful tubes weaving in and out of each other on the cover.
The content and overall design is impressive. Some doesn’t fall for the usual first-time-magazine-maker traps as it has Sven steering the design in the right directions, but it still retains the sense of freshness and excitement that you find in student publications. The design is clean and direct (possibly Sven’s influence, see above), and the selected content (in German and English) is intriguing – the kind of projects that would catch the eye of students and end up on elaborate mood boards. For one feature, a man with a complicated viewing structure on his head goes about every day tasks (below), and cold war relics become design inspiration in another (also below).
Gorgeous peach-coloured text compliments a spread of photographs of Kiev, Ukraine by Sascha Kurmaz (above). The selected illustrations throughout the magazine are also brilliantly on point (see below).
From a design point of view, the bold simplicity of the spreads is probably what stands out the most: striking colours gently manoeuvre the eye across the pages (above), and because most of the magazine is so deliberately clean, the few heavily designed sections stand out all the more (below).
Some is a brilliant 101 in magazine-making and editorial design, taking great advantage of all the visual tools available. Other Universities (and even established publications) should definitely take note.
Editorial and design: Patrik Bablo, Florentine Bofinger, Sarah Fricke, Lydia Kluge, Lisa Petersen and Pawel Wolowitsch.