Internship
Employment
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Design for Music
Typography & Fonts
History of Non-Format
Art Direction & Design
Design & Illustration

Do you have different approaches for your personal work compared to your commercial work?
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Is there much difference between designing The Wire magazine and Varoom magazine?
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What are the most important things to bear in mind when working on a design?
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What is Non-Format’s design philosophy?
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What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in terms of art direction?
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Which is most important:
the big idea, the design or the production/implementation?
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When creating graphics, when is ‘eye catching’ too much?
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When starting a new project, where do you look for inspiration?
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We’ve been through a phase of revelling in baroque and heraldic imagery. What’s next?
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Why hasn’t the ‘death of print’ happened yet?
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We approached the design of both the Wire and Varoom with a clear focus on developing grids and structures that would work well for showcasing the content of the magazines. The two magazines are quite different, however, in that The Wire is a text heavy ‘reader’s magazine’ whereas Varoom is more image-heavy, so they posed fairly contrasting design challenges for us.
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One thing they have in common, though, is a strong belief in their content — the editors and writers take both their subject matter and their readers very seriously and this needed to be reflected in the design. Our designs for The Wire have been described as opulent and flamboyant, in the past, but we always tried to avoid letting our design interfere with the content of the magazine.
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We’ve also aimed to give each magazine its own distinct voice and to achieve this we have invested quite some time in developing custom typefaces and type treatments but always with the clear understanding that the design is there to serve the content, not vice versa.
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