Studio AKFB redesigns the newly relaunched Disegno Magazine

After five years and ten issues London-based Disegno magazine has redesigned and relaunched as a quarterly publication. The magazine has been redesigned by Annahita Kamali and Florian Böhm of Studio AKFB and includes over 200 pages of insightful and critical writing on design. We caught up with the designers to find out more about the process.

How did the collaboration come about?

Florian: Johanna [Agerman-Ross, founder and editor of Disegno] contacted me a few years ago about a photoshoot she was planning. Sadly the shoot never took place and we stayed in touch. We met again at the opening of the Alvar Aalto exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum and [Konstantin Grcic’s] Panorama exhibition, for which we designed the catalogue. She called us out of the blue. She said she really liked the Panorama catalogue and when she was looking for someone to do the redesign, she came to us. We didn’t expect it.

What were your first thoughts on designing a magazine for the first time?

Annahita: Our first thoughts were that we were really lucky that the brief was totally open. Johanna had an open mind and trusted us. We started by looking at magazines from all over the world. We headed to a magazine store in Berlin and bought all the magazines we could find then took them back to Munich. We spent time looking at what is going on, but we wanted to do our own thing. So we to approach it like designing a book, a process that we are familiar with.

Florian: There were two motivations for us, one was we really liked what they were doing and it felt like it really needed a change, and the second was for us to look at magazine design in general. What is a magazine today? Spending time and work redesigning a magazine made us question a lot of things. Disegno wasn’t challenging its design any more as the content was changing. It was like the content didn’t have an ‘outfit’ that fitted. We rethought everything.

How did you respond to the content that Diesgno produces to find the right design approach?

Annahita: We read the archive and tried to learn why and what exactly Disegno does. To find the right ‘outfit’ for them. We didn’t want to take 5 magazines, choose what we liked about them and make the new design then fill it with content. It’s not how we work. We think about what we have in front of us and the get a new, better result. Because we liked the content – its critical, detailed and passionate – we were happy to someone with such good work.

Florian: We had to define the ground rules and parameters for the magazine. Within those basics there is a flexibility that allows you to create a feature that puts a priority on the pictures or a series of pages where the text is more prominent. We defined a set of creative and visual tools, guidelines, and the underlying grids. They can now edit the magazine within these rules. The goal ultimately is that they design the magazine in house in quarter. We feel it is possible to accommodate a variety of content and maintain a good aesthetic quality within the rules we have set. Also, technically we retain a level of readability, of picture quality and so on. Each magazine is alive, each issue is very different They have different priorities and we wanted to free them from unnecessary restraints that force a look on a magazine that doesn’t say anything.

This is a magazine feels like it has been made to be read. How did you go about ordering the content?

Annahita: It’s about finding a good balance and not misleading the reader. You have to pay your dues to the story. In some sections there are essays and comments and for them we decided text only is appropriate. Then some stories are better told in images rather than words. I think when we started we talked through every story with Johanna and thought how the visuals might be commissioned and how important they were for each story.

Florian: In general there is a priority on the text. That came from Disegno. The ratio of words to pages in the magazine means you automatically end up with a priority on the text. We don’t think Disegno is a magazine that would work in a purely visual way. Some magazines you feel text is an alibi. If you do it right you can communicate with pictures a lot. But Disegno is text based, so the challenge was to have a balance. We love images, and were asking for more pages, but it wasn’t to be. If you really respect the text and spend time on presenting it properly, it becomes and image in some way. It is pleasant to look at. It is a visual element. You don’t only consume it intellectually; you consume it as an image too.

How do you think the design will evolve over the coming issues?

Florian: We hope that the choices we made for papers, format, font size and so on hold up. We will see that as we make the subsequent issues. If it is flexibile enough, every issue will be fun to design and it will allow them to push the concept further. It’s an intergrated process between the content development and the presentation of it. Hopefully we didn’t try to do too much in the first issue. We have to be patient.

Annahita: What really intrigued us was the time, It goes so fast and the results are seen so quickly. In one way it is a pressure, with a book you sit for a year working on it – with a magazine its just 8 weeks. We are looking forward to doing the next three issues to see how we and the magazine grow. It’s super exciting, the chemistry is good. It is a key factor in any project.. Now the readers have to accept it and be happy with it. Everything we integrated has followed a function, in our mind anyway. We tried to find one solution at a time. Maybe the readers who are used to the old design, which had a very similar design throughout, might not get it. We have tried to make the whole thing more diverse.

Florian: The underlying structure is quite interesting, the sections are reflected in the design. Reviews, essays, photo essays, observations, round tables, interviews – we really wanted to create something that becomes more recognisable to the reader. Regular readers will orientate themselves easier in the magazine. You will know what to expect from a certain page from the look of it. The placement might change from magazine to magazine. For the reader and the designer is more fun and if you design a magazine with passion and fun it will translate. The design of the magazine shows that Disegno is in the process of change – its representing that the magazine is evolving.