But issue three of Year Zero was released earlier this year with an almost blank cover just the magazine’s logo appearing on a white page, along with a bullet-pointed list of potential ideas for designs.
The more you touch it, the darker it gets.”Īs reasons for publishing a blank cover go, running out of time isn’t the most purposeful creative statement. As Hugo explained: “The small metal spot between the hardcover and the cloth finishing could be interpreted as a life-sized nipple, as it pretty much looks like one.
But Untitled Folder also added an extra detail a subtle clue for those in the know, in the form of “a hard cover with a harder spot”, wedged inside the cover’s bottom right-hand corner. This same tactic is used by several other magazines containing sexual content - see the lovely single colour covers of erotic literary journal Mal, or the deliberately boring exterior of progressive sex magazine Math. Producing a queer magazine under such a restrictive regime means they need to be careful not to attract the wrong sort of attention, and for Untitled Folder, the blank cover is a way of hiding in plain sight a pure, inoffensive front that gives no hint of the content inside. When the features director, who goes by the artist name Boihugo, wrote a piece for us on that city’s independent publishing scene, he described his unease at having to hide his sexuality from the authorities. Published in Shanghai, Untitled Folder describes itself as “a Mandarin and English bilingual oriental queer magazine”. We’ve gathered eight examples of independent magazines that use emptiness and absence as the core of their cover design, to see what we can read into their blank spaces.
And it seems that when you don’t have to answer to anyone but yourself, sometimes the best way of communicating your magazine’s message is by saying (almost) nothing at all. Because as with any other facet of magazine making, there are exceptions to the rule - particularly in the world of independent publishing, where editors and art directors can do whatever they want, free from the stringent eyes of clients and senior executives. The front cover is tweaked, primped and argued over more than any other, and with good reason - it’s the page that gazes out at customers from the newsstand it’s shrunk down to thumbnail size for social media profiles and years from now, whenever you or anyone else thinks back to a specific issue, that’s the single, defining image that will spring to mind. Of all the pages in a magazine, there’s one that matters more than the rest.
0 kommentar(er)
