Wolf #3
What better to follow up Rob’s post about reading foreign-language magazines than a recent publication written in that strangest of European languages, Finnish? During a recent visit to magCulture HQ, Pekka Toivonen of Helsinki’s Kasino Creative Studio – one of the team behind magC favourites Kasino A4 and FAT – dropped off copies of another of their projects, Wolf.
Published for client Flow Festival, and distributed free to festival-goers last month, the A3 magazine consists is printed on newsprint and bound in colour card. This is the third edition, and each has arrived wrapped in a delicate pastel shade, this latest in lemon yellow.
Open the issue and the tactile conflict between lemon card and newsprint is exaggerated by a welcoming headline running across the two stocks (above).
Dig deeper and the tone is immediately set; this is a visually-led publication packed with mini-bites of content vividly expressed across the page. Like its title, (think ‘Flow’ backwards) this is a magazine that allows the Kasino team to make the most of their talent at having fun with magazine-making. The numbered points across the bottom of the page continue throughout the opening secyion, flowing from page to page.
Rob is correct to say that without the ability to read the text you can’t fully engage with a magazine – it instead becomes an object – but in this case the visual language is so strong you can certainly read the intent behind the project. More Kasino A4 than FAT, this is a lightweight, entertaining but intelligent piece of publishing. Typography, illustration and photographic treatment come together to make something visually quite unique, while it’s clear from the editorial work on the pages that the content is working hard too.
Along with Penguin’s The Happy Reader and Rapha’s Mondial this is another fine piece of customer publishing, a maagzine promoting a product. It makes me want to attend Flow.
A single three-point English language section (above) confirms the shared visual and verbal tone.
And the issue signs off as it signed in. I know there’s something clever going on here but…
Coming up next: a new issue of FAT.