Spanish studio Creanet pushes the form of the magazine with its latest project

Creanet is a Spanish graphic design studio founded by Jose Moreno. The studio works in printed and interactive design creating identities, websites, editorial and illustration. It was Creanet’s recent design and art direction of 12, an architecture magazine that caught our eye and Creanet had fun with the project. “Our first thoughts were that we were very lucky that the brief was fully open. The objective was to focus on architectural projects of existing buildings and structures. Essentially a magazine, produced and written by architects, for architects,” explains Jose.

The studio’s task was to be experimental in form and direction. “It is a completely new magazine, both in its design and in its content. The artistic direction of the magazine is based on great photography and typography, which is very organised and clean,” Jose says. The cover is where the team started to create that point of difference for the publication.

“We wanted to make a cover that had a visual impact different from the conventional, and give depth and perspective. At first the corners were coloured black, but we wanted to make it more real, so we cut them in,” says Jose. This gives the whole mag its unusual shape and it’s great to see how Jose and the team has manipulated the content around the angles of the page. The main typeface used is Helvetica, along with Stanley to provide contrast. “There’s a mixture of styles inside and since the publication is a combination of minimal and monochrome typography, it’s offset by the colour of the photographs,” explains Jose.