From Everything Studio:

Before we started designing BOMB magazine, we went to the office to research its history. The archive we found was like a fossil record of graphic design evolution; spanning three decades, BOMB’s mutation of style was redefined by successive strata of designers. Magazines, perhaps more than most forms of design, indicate a precise history of graphic innovation because publishing cycles catch the micro-trends of the moment.

Rather than try to find the ideal form for BOMB’s content, our approach attempted to capture what we had experienced on the shelves of their archive — the sense of ephemerality and scrappiness. To begin with we designed every issue with a different layout. The building blocks of the magazine — the caption, the column, the headline, the footer — we imagined would change in scale and placement for every issue. The only constant we gave ourselves was the use of the typeface Univers, simply because it has so much stylistic variety. As the years passed we settled into layouts with longer timespans. We stopped frantically remaking the grid from scratch for each issue, and would allow the same template to be repurposed for a year at a time.

Our favorite section in the magazine is First Proof, BOMB’s literature and poetry supplement. To contrast this with the glossy white pages of the Art section, we used a rough newsprint-like stock. Also, we introduced a serif type [Plantin] to put the reader in a slightly different frame of mind. The design is less edgy, and has a slightly more old-fashioned spirit.

Dance Ink was originally published from 1989-1996 and developed a cult following among dancers, photographers, and designers. Originally produced as a quarterly, Dance Ink won numerous awards for writing, photography, and design. Dance Ink gained recognition for its coverage of dance and its close connection to dance and performance in New York City. Our relaunch of Dance Ink picks up where we left off in 1996, with the publication of Volume 8, Number 1. The issue returns to our original premise of creating a unique and enduring stage for performance, using great photography, powerful design, and the beauty of high-quality printing. – 2wice

Ano Bold, in Regular, Italic and Back Italic versions is used throughout.

Jessica Svendsen:

Published by MIT Press, the Yale School of Architecture journal Perspecta is the oldest student-edited architectural journal in the United States. Issue 47 focuses on the topic Money, and the book design references structural elements of currency, tropes of financial newspapers, and uses a black and metallic gold palette.

Designed in collaboration with Stefan Thorsteinsson.

Enso is an in-house magazine by online publication platform Readymag. The logo is set in Nimbus Sans, URW’s version of Helvetica which departs from its source most visibily in the extreme weights, or in the Bold Extended where Nimbus has nearly circular (rather than squared) counters in its stick-and-ball shapes (‘bgpq’). Nimbus Sans’ feeling overall is slightly off-kilter, almost like poster woodtype, and that gives it a vintage mid-century quality. Willy Fleckhaus’ Twen comes to mind.

For text, Readymag founder and art director Anon Herasymenko chose Plain, another Neo-Grotesk, this one by François Rappo for Optimo, which might have better spacing and openness for small sizes.

Specific issues of Enso will be covered in other entries here on Fonts In Use.

Magazine bleib gesund by wdv for AOK, one of Germany’s largest health insurances companies.