Very Elle, Very Cool

With so many photographers and stylists working for both editorial and advertisers, fashion magazines are finding it impossible to create a distinct tone of voice through their imagery. Instead, it is typography that is increasingly being used to separate ‘ed’ from ‘ad’. Joining the likes of David James’ Another and M/M’s Arena Homme Plus is new-look French bi-annual Very Elle, designed by Non-Format’s Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn.

Part of the studio’s brief was to use its renowned typographic skills (displayed, for example, in the design of Varoom magazine) to give the magazine a singular voice that would set editorial pages apart from the advertising. “This led us directly to the idea of creating typefaces especially for the magazine,” they say. Forss and Ekhorn created Heroine, an adaptable family of display faces used for headlines and standfirsts. “The magazine aims to celebrate women from very diverse fields so it was important for us to develop a family of typefaces that would not only signal high fashion but one that could span the whole spectrum,” they say. “To begin with we created an ultra-thin version which would be used for the main feature openers in the fashion sections of the magazine. Then we began work on a bolder, much brasher version and then, regular and thin versions.”

They also decided to employ blocks of type with very tight spacing. “To avoid the inevitable problems with clashing ascenders and descenders, we produced alternative versions of each typeface with extended charac ters,” they explain. “These can be altered to get an offending ascender or descender well out of the way and, as a bonus, they also provide an appealing visual texture within the body of the text.” 

The result is a really beautifully crafted magazine that absolutely succeeds in creating a distinct voice - this is, after all, a mass-market publication, not a niche arts title. There have been other periods when type has come to the fore in magazines - think the three B’s of Brodovitch, Brody and Baron. And no doubt advertisers will soon catch up with editorial’s use of elaborately expressive type – it’s often the same people doing both anyway. But for now, editorial pages like these offer a rare chance for typography to shine.

CS Shanghai: Final Thoughts

Shanghai after 4 hours sleep in 3 days and the hottest Szechuan meal known to man

Three days isn’t long enough to do more than scratch lightly at the surface of a place but my time at the Creative Social in Shanghai did bring home the scale of the changes that China has undergone. There are no more Period Police for a start…

We heard about the dreaded Period Police from writer and journalist Lijia Zhang. Her memoir, Socialism Is Great, record her life as a young worker in a missile factory in Nanjing. She had wanted to be a writer but, aged 16, her mother took her out of school in order for Lijia to take over her job at the factory. She thought she was doing her daughter a great favour as a job at the factory meant security for life: “The factory was a mini state of its own,” Lijia said, “it fed us, there were hospitals, a library, a kindergarten school, we had indoctrination at its meeting halls. Our whole life was contained there.” But it was a life that was totally controlled by the state: “We weren’t allowed lipstick, or high heels. The width of our trousers was controlled.” And every month the women among the factory’s 10,000 workers had to line up before the dreaded Period Police to prove that they were not pregnant and thereby obtain their ration of sanitary towels.

Charity Ads: A More Mature Approach?

Kids Company by AMV.BBDO. Art direction/ design: Paul Cohen. Copy writer: Mark Fairbanks. Photography: Thom Atkinson

The unscrupulous among the advertising community have often tended to look upon charity accounts less as an opportunity to help those in need and more as a chance to help themselves. Is a more mature approach emerging?

Charity campaigns have often been taken on with the express intention of winning awards and, in order to do so, many have resorted to crude tactics. In the mid-90s when outrage over ‘shock advertising’ was at its peak, some of the worst offenders were for small charities many of which, miracu lously, were never heard from before or since.

But perhaps there is something of a more mature approach emerging. The first thing that occurs with these campaigns is the amount of copy used. It’s not so long ago that we were all bemoaning the death of long copy in advert ising. And yet all four campaigns use lengthy, discursive texts to make their case: in Kidsco, the copy runs to nearly 400 words. The style is convers ational.