on 18 May 2001
We in the magazine trade used to be a bit snooty about contract publishing, that bastard offspring of the industry in which clients pay you to churn out bland pap to a captive audience of disinterested customers. Recently, however, contract publishers have not only been making better money than the rest of us, but in some cases, dammit, making better magazines. Words, the third title in a series by John Brown Contract Publishing for M-real (the Finnish paper maker formerly known as Metsä-Serla), isn’t going to shift as many copies as Sainsburys Magazine, but aims to shift a few paradigms in design and publishing.
Creative director Jeremy Leslie has designed this issue entirely in cyan, magenta, yellow, black and red, using only Helvetica for text, with a variety of other faces decorating the boundary-pushing spreads. A range of big-name contributors explore the theme of words through academic analysis, criticism, interviews and graphics. Of course the whole thing is a publicity-cum-vanity project for the client, and it could easily have become an exercise in self-indulgence for the publishers, but it hasn’t. There’s some genuinely thought-provoking and heavyweight stuff in here, and if you’re not already on the list of invited recipients, it’s well worth jumping on board before the next biannual edition appears.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper