Good magazines copy, great magazines steal: The Fence on mining the archives to create one of the UK’s best periodicals

Charlie noticed, at the tail end of the 2010s, an uptick in print magazine subscriptions, and a growing UK interest in the New Yorker, and he felt there was space to add something of his own, something “in more of the classic English humorous tradition”. Importantly, it wasn’t set to be something just “for the boys” or solely those looking middle-age dead in the eyes, as is often associated with such media, but something for everyone. It’s true, when I first picked up a copy of The Fence I was first inclined to think it in the same vein as my parents’ piles of Private Eye, ones I opened and sadly never seemed able to muster the same eye-watering laughter it evoked in them. In the pages of the first copy of The Fence I picked up, I was pleased to find something both my mum would enjoy (an encounter with a historian trying to clear Oliver Cromwell’s name) and something I would too (a story about Princess Diana’s favourite cafe).

Studio Mathias Clottu has art directed The Fence from day one, and its eponymous founder Mathias also has no fears of tradition, using his vast library of old magazines for inspiration, adding the French publications La Quinzaine Littéraire and Canard Enchaîné to the long list of references. Mathias defines the design as “rigorous yet flexible”; he wants it to be akin to a reader returning to a favourite restaurant – finding comfort in well-worn habits, but still, within that recognisable format, holding the potential for surprise. The traditional side of things translates in the typography, the body serif text is set in a modern take on the 17th century Jannon’s typeface, and is what Mathias describes as “no-fuss, something that’s easy to read but also elegant and clean”. The long and blocky bespoke typeface, designed by Adrien Vasquez from Abyme foundry, and used primarily for titles and the magazine’s masthead, draws on the long history of woodblock printing and midcentury poster typefaces – “we use The Fence bespoke typeface to fill the space and be loud when we need to”, says Mathias.

The bones of this display typeface are space for experimentation. At the top of The Fence, you might often find that the masthead has been “mess[ed] up”, Mathias says. For each issue, Adrien develops the masthead, adding playful, illustrative features that respond to the cover story. Past designs have included a pannacotta biscuit treatment, it’s bulbous edges mimicking the cooker cutter shape; one had drips falling from each letter, possibly blood, possibly a suggestion of a sweltering heatwave; while a recent issue removes the middle of each glyph to emulate a neon sign, heightening the tired isolation of the cover star’s messy bedroom scene. Once published, there are no rules to how these bespoke mastheads might be used again. The latest issue, issue 26, was a print special – using its pages to pay homage to all things print and the medium’s potential for playfulness – and it recycles and repurposes these illustrative mastheads, dropping them around like easter eggs. Clearly, Charlie and Mathias aren’t just mining other magazines’ archives, but their own too.

It’s a bold move to “mess up” the masthead, arguably the most recognisable visual facet of a magazine, but other rules and consistency across the design help to maintain The Fence’s recognisable identity. One is its use of colour – or lack thereof. Leading with a primarily black-and-white palette, its one accent colour is a rich orange… or red. No one seems quite certain: “I like calling it orange, but it’s in-between – a typographic red”, says Mathias, “it really depends on the lighting.” The application of this orange-red isn’t fixed – sometimes the masthead wears it proudly, and it’s infused into cover art to varying degrees, sometimes to just indicate the liquid and spill of pints in a pub, and sometimes taking over entirely. For the print issue, however, it was absent on the cover, appearing only on the magazine’s fastening staples.

Perhaps the most recognisable visual aspect of The Fence is its purely illustrative approach – a photograph is yet to grace one of its spreads. “To start with, it was economical,” says Mathias, “and on every level, not only financially. It’s a more direct way of getting something we imagine onto paper – illustration has a broad reach.” It’s true, as some of The Fence’s writing veers into the strange and surreal, pen on paper feels much more fitting than the concrete materiality of a photographed image.

Working with a handful of recurring illustrators, Charlie and Mathias will lay out all the finished text and work out where each illustration will go, so each illustrator has an idea of theme, how many illustrations they’ll need to provide and what size. Ideally, says Mathias, when it finally comes to printing, there should be as little white space as possible. But Mathias has no interest in creating strict briefs, often giving illustrators “carte blanche”; some adhere closely to topics touched on in articles, and others go more off piste. “The best art direction is to choose the right people and let them do what they do best,” says Mathias. In issue 26, a column of Chris Black’s stream-of-consciousness foray into modern celebrity is simply interrupted and malformed by a giant thumb illustrated by John Broadley. It pleasingly frames your own as you hold the mag, an illustrative touch done purely for fun.

Mathias views the magazine as much a platform for new illustrators as it is a platform for new writing, and he commissions illustrators across styles and across locations, spanning Europe and the US. Despite The Fence’s founding locale and close interest in the inner-workings of London (its newsletter Capital Letter acts like an unofficial tour guide of the city and Charlie sees The Fence as building on the noble traditional of the first ever iterations of magazines in the 18th century: “gossipy publications about London”) Charlie revels in having a mix of well-worn Londoner artists and those who’ve rarely been paid to illustrate it. “It’s good to have that balance between people who know the subject like the back of their hand and people who are trying to sort of work it out, to whom you’re giving quite a difficult task,” says Charlie. “I think if Mathias only commissioned illustrators who were English and working in that sort of poppy English style, it would be to the detriment of the magazine.”