Niépce magazine Nº1
This publication was developed after a briefing by Maria Fernanda Antunes for the discipline of Editorial Design at ESE Coimbra. The output should be a magazine in Portuguese; it should include a barcode, a price, a title and existing (magazine) articles of different dimensions; and publicity. It was also demanded for us to choose between areas of study such as cinema, music, illustration, photography, etc. We settled on a magazine about photography, and restricted its scope to erudit photography.
Back in 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce exposed a plate of tin to the sunlight during eight hours, obtaining what may be considered the first photograph of the world. Homaging the creator of the photographic era, Niépce is now the name of this publication.
The magazine aims to to offer a pleasant reading experience, and to perpetuate formats of photo-albums that may fall into disuse – in this case we reused old “catalog bags” photo-albums. On opening the album (10x15cm), the bags show the photographs, that in turn hide the articles.
For the typography we chose Courier for photographers’ names and biographies, the familiar Adobe Garamond for body copy, and Arial for main titles and some highlights. A careful typographic hierarchy was made for obtaining the best balance between economic use of space and readability, and to create a sufficiently distinct-but-not distracting layout.
As it was demanded to use a barcode, we fully embraced it and assumed it as a main element in the cover. It was also demanded that the magazine included price information so, despite this being not a commercial project, we included a price on the back cover.
All the photographs are followed by a sticker with a respective label. That is not only important because it gives information about the images (title, author, date), but because it slightly covers them.
An observer that is really interested in seeing the whole photograph must remove it from the bag. By doing that, articles about the photographer as well as them biography will show up behind the photos, turning the observers into potential readers.
An article about photographer Nan Goldin, hidden by one of her photographs.
We chose to include publicity (also demanded) in camouflaged way, by making it to appear in the form of an article, only marked with a discrete “sponsored” side by its author. In this case, it is an article referring to an exhibition.
