A magazine with one big idea
Every magazine cover wants to be looked at. Faces, smiles, a bit of teeth. I wanted the opposite. Valour is a concept men’s lifestyle magazine covering grooming, style and everyday know-how, and the whole thing hangs on one stubborn move: a big, cut-out “V” parked right over the cover model’s face.
The identity
The “V” is the masthead, the logo and the hook, all in one. It hides the face, which is exactly why you look twice. The type is heavy and unapologetic, built to be read from across a room. No clever tagline, no fuss. If the cover can’t stop someone walking past a newsstand, nothing inside will save it.
I shot the cover photograph myself, with a model and a stylist, and then spent a long time deciding just how much of a face you can take away before the picture stops working.
From screen to print
Pixels are easy. Ink is honest. So I took the cover design into the print studio and made a screen-printed version, because a shape that looks good on a monitor can fall apart the moment it meets a squeegee and a pot of black ink.
Screen printing is slow, messy and unforgiving. You get one pull of the squeegee, a smell you never quite wash out, and a result that either works or doesn’t. That’s the appeal. The “V” held up.
Editorial design
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. The issue covers wet shaving, whisky, coffee, wardrobe classics and the contents of a decent weekend wash bag, plus the practical stuff nobody teaches you, like networking in person and 25 style tips.
The contents spread lays out the whole issue at a glance, from the perfect cup of coffee to a beginner’s guide to whisky.
Design: the identity, the cover and poster, the page layouts and every type decision, for better or worse.
Photography: I shot the cover image. Some other images in the spreads are third-party or reference images used to show how the layouts would work.
Production: a screen-printed version of the cover design, alongside the digital layouts.
Valour is a concept project, not a published magazine. But it’s a good reminder that the simplest idea, committed to all the way through, usually beats the clever one.
I wrote up how it came together, and what went wrong along the way, in the blog post Hiding the Face: How One Big Letter Became a Magazine.