Open any magazine rack and you’ll see the same cover over and over. A face. A smile. A bit of teeth. It works, which is why everyone does it, and why it’s a bit boring.
For my final-year major project at university in 2012, I wanted to see what happened if the cover simply refused to give you the face.
The result was Valour, a concept men’s lifestyle magazine about grooming, style and everyday know-how. You can see the finished work on the Valour project page, but this is the story of how it got made, and the bits that didn’t go to plan.
One letter, found the hard way
I’d love to tell you the “V” arrived in a flash of inspiration. It didn’t. It came from trying lots and lots of options.
Cover after cover, I was working out the same problem: how much of a face can you take away before the picture stops working? Cover too little and it’s just a normal cover with a letter on it. Cover too much and it’s a black rectangle with some hair.
Somewhere in the pile, a big, heavy, cut-out “V” over the model’s face did the job. It hides the face, which is exactly why you look twice. It’s also the masthead, the logo and the hook all at once, and it means the magazine doesn’t need a tagline. If the cover can’t stop someone walking past a newsstand, nothing inside it will save it.
Getting there took longer than I want to admit. It was the single biggest time sink of the whole project.
Taking it off the screen
Pixels are forgiving. Ink isn’t. So I took the cover design into the print studio and made a screen-printed version.
Screen printing is a lesson in how much you rely on the undo button. The setup is fussy: the screen, the exposure, lining everything up. It needed a few attempts before I got a print I was happy with, and every failed one taught me something a monitor never would. When it finally worked, the “V” held up with ink on paper.
Everything behind the cover
Once you’re past the cover, the “V” steps aside and the headlines take over: big, chunky type slammed over black-and-white portraits and sharp product shots.
I filled the issue with the kind of thing I actually wanted to read: the perfect cup of coffee, a beginner’s guide to whisky, why wet shaving is worth the effort, the anatomy of a classic jacket, a weekend wash bag, how to grow a beard, and the practical stuff nobody teaches you, like networking in person.
I had help. Friends lent a hand with things like photography, styling and illustrations, which is a big reason it looks like a proper magazine and not one person’s attempt at one.
What went wrong
Three things, mostly, and they all ate time:
- The cover. See above. A lot of versions died so one could live.
- Print setup. Screen printing has a lot of ways to go wrong before you’ve even pulled the squeegee.
- The sheer amount of text. A magazine isn’t a poster. It’s page after page of words that all need laying out, and it’s easy to underestimate how much work that is until you’re in the middle of it.
What I’d do differently
Two things.
Fewer articles, better ones. I put in a lot. A smaller issue with every page properly polished would have been stronger than a bigger one with some pages carrying the weight of others.
Write all my own copy. Not every word in that magazine is mine. If I did it again, I’d write all of it. Layout can make words look good, but it’s much better when the words and the design are the same person’s idea.
Why it still matters
Valour is a concept project, not a published magazine. But it taught me the thing I still come back to: the simplest idea, committed to all the way through, beats the clever one. One big letter on one face carried a whole identity, from a poster to a screen print to a stack of pages.
If you want to see the whole thing, it’s on the projects page, with more of my design work on Behance.