gopher projectes: gopher magazine
TRANSCRIPT
Gopher Projects:Gopher Magazine
Background Info:Gopher Magazine is a magazine
devised as a platform for showcas-ing emerging talents in design,
visual arts, literature and journalism, which emphasizes truly
global conversations by including work from regions of the world
usually not included in other media.
I co-founded and developed this publication in "Gopher Projects" in 2009, and led art direction, project
development and production management.
Goals:1) Gopher Magazine had to be
capable of displaying an immense variety of graphic styles co-existing
with each other, without losing its own visual identity. It had to be a
platform that enriched storytelling, rather than an index of
contemporary artists.
2) Long-form journalism and literature were also important
components of the magazine. This meant developing a format that
enhanced the reader’s experience of 4,000-word articles – along with
shorter articles and features.
3) Lastly, the publication had to be timeless. Instead of covering
current affairs, Gopher was devised as an ever-growing encyclopedia
of arts and content from emerging talents, and as such it had to
provide a consistent experience quality from one issue to the next.
Challenge:How might we create a visual
system that can accommodate wide variety of styles while
preserving design consistency throughout an issue?
* evolution of cover of publication,from early prototype / mock-ups.
Process:After researching hundreds of
publications across the fields of contemporary design, art and
literature, and having over a dozen interviews with subscribers and
readers, I designed a visual system with four main pillars:
1) Diversity: to be trulysuccessful, the magazine's mission
of showcasing diversity in talent had to permeate its entire
structure. Thus, I created a simple system in which every title of every
article was created by a different designer, typographer or studio.
This allowed the magazine to tell two parallel stories with every
feature: the one told by the article's text, and the interpretation of that
text by graphic artists from around the world. A set of support files and
FAQs was created and provided to every collaborator to communicate technical specs without interfering
with their creative vision.
2) Cohesiveness: the sheer number of graphic styles displayed in every
issue meant that a system to navigate and understand this
editorial product had to be developed. Creativity thrives with
restrictions, so we imposed a color system that minimized color usage:
only black, white and one Pantone color that changed in every issue of
the magazine. This provided a unified identity to Gopher that had
two effects: it pushed graphic artists to create outstanding work
with uniform constraints, and it allowed text-heavy features to seamlessly merge with visual
pieces without breaking the storytelling rhythm.
10 gopher illustrated
The urban landscape is home to
over half of the world’s human
population. It’s a factoid that was
peppered into conversations about
global warming, deforestation,
population growth, art, policy,
sprawl, and the pure evil that is
finding parking space downtown.
It’s certainly an impressive piece
of information, and an interesting
exercise in interpretation. Run-
ning the risk of revealing intimate
details of my inkblot-disposition,
the first thing that came to mind
was H.G. Wells “The Time Ma-
chine”, where the human race
evolves into two distinct species(1).
The city, in my strange, associa-
tive imagination, crystallized as
the ecosystem it is, an image that
includes its very own nature chan-
nel narrator. There are buildings
and transportation and the rush
of humans from one structure to
the next, settling indoors for hours
to work, to learn, to sleep. There
is also the weather, supply chains,
the interaction between living or-
ganisms and objects. Then there
are the homeless, without shelter
and without access to many of the
services that most city-dwellers
enjoy, dotting the landscape.
Urban ecosystems come in many
shapes and sizes, their infrastruc-
ture varies, as does a city’s
economy, cultural makeup, form
of government and daily patterns
of activity. Try to do some research
on homelessness and all of these
differences come to light. There is
no universal definition for what
homelessness means, even if fo-
cused on the United States in hopes
of seeing some certainties to hold
on to. But even within a single na-
tion, most statistical figures come
with disclaimers stating the diffi-
culty of obtaining accurate
numbers. Attitudes towards home-
lessness vary wildly. The causes of
homelessness range from domestic
violence to substance abuse to men-
tal illness to financial abatement.
Clearly, these are not new prob-
lems, and homelessness is not a
new phenomenon. Towns in colo-
nial United States kicked the
homeless out of town fearing that
permitting the homeless to stay
would cause other homeless peo-
ple to settle there as well.
Economic downturns in the nine-
teenth century came with their
respective increases in the home-
less demographic, as did the
Great Depression, when shelters
were added, in many cases be-
cause cities’ Skid Rows(2) had
become overpopulated.
Text by Gopher StaffTitle by Billy Ben / Website: billyben.ch
1 Published in 1985, “The Time Ma-
chine” features an inventor from
Surrey, England, who travels in time
to the future and encounters two
species – the surface dwelling Eloi and
the underground Morlocks - which, he
speculates, evolved from humans.
2 A run-down area where an impov-
erished and often transient
population lives. By the end of the
19th Century, there were Skid Row
areas in every major city in the
United States, and homeless men
inhabited entire sections of Skid
Rows during that period.
26 gopher illustrated
About halfway through Charles Dar-
win’s 1872 book, The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals,(2)
there is a careful drawing of a chimp
with his lips pursed and extended
into a pout. The caption reads
“Chimpanzee—disappointed and
sulky.” The very next illustration
is a drawing of an insane human
woman. She has frizzy hair, parted
down the middle and puffed out in
large, dark wedges from either side
of her head. She looks straight at the
viewer, all large eyes and full lips,
with an expression fixed somewhere
between sorrow and detachment.
She is not unattractive.
Why Darwin had a drawing of a
sulky chimpanzee and an insane
human women sandwiched be-
tween the same green cardboard
covers of one of his last books is a
story connecting the search to un-
derstand mental illness and
Darwin’s theories of evolution to
the shared emotional experiences
of humans and other animals.
The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals was one of Dar-
win’s last published arguments
in support of his larger theory
that humans were just another
kind of animal. He believed that
the shared emotional experiences
of people and other creatures
(like crying elephants, sad
chimps, dejected dogs, or happy
horses) proved that almost all of
these human experiences were
similar to those of other animals
because they were inherited from
a shared animal ancestor. Men-
tal illness is a key part of
Expression because Darwin
thought that the insane(3) (as he
called them) were a purer source
for the study of emotion. Like
a good Victorian he was preoc-
cupied with all manner of social
mores and inhibitions and he
felt, perhaps rightly, that many
people in insane asylums had
been loosed from the shackles of
proper emotional control and ex-
pressed themselves more
authentically (this is not to say
that they did not become shack-
led in other ways. They most
certainly did and these were often
not metaphorical restraints).
And yet, Darwin did not see these
people as morally bankrupt (as
many physicians of his time did).
Instead he saw the insane as sim-
ply not self-conscious, as unaware
of themselves and lacking an idea
of self. Since they weren’t self-con-
scious, they couldn’t embarrass
themselves and thus were
unchecked in their expression of
emotion. This, Darwin believed,
made the insane the perfect study
subjects for what despair, anger,
fear, and more really felt and
looked like. And so Darwin de-
voted a lot of space in his book
to covering the phenomena of in-
sanity in human beings, discussing
such things as upset mentally-ill
humans raising the hair follicles
on their heads just as dogs do their
hackles (this last point not having
withstood the test of time or ob-
servation) and poring over photos
of people in insane asylums.
Darwin also wrote about all man-
ner of emotions in nonhumans,
such as anger, joy, sadness, rage,
and terror. Perhaps more surpris-
ingly, he argued that many creatures
were capable of enacting revenge,
behaving courageously, and ex-
pressing their impatience or
suspicion. He described mental
phenomena like surliness, con-
tempt and disgust (in chimps),
astonishment (in the case of
Paraguayan monkeys), and love
(among dogs, between dogs and
cats, and between dogs and men).
A female terrier of Darwin’s,(4) after
having her puppies taken away and
killed, impressed him so much
“with the manner in which she then
tried to satisfy her instinctive ma-
ternal love by expending it on me;
and her desire to lick my hands rose
to an insatiable passion.”
He was also convinced dogs ex-
perienced disappointment and
dejection.
“Not far from my house,” he wrote,
“a path branches off to the right,
leading to the hot-house, which I
used often to visit for a few mo-
ments, to look at my experimental
plants. This was always a great dis-
appointment to the dog, as he did
not know whether I should continue
my walk; and the instantaneous and
complete change of expression
which came over him, as soon as
my body swerved in the least towards
the path (and I sometimes tried this
as an experiment) was laughable.
His look of dejection was known to
every member of the family and was
called his hot-house face.”
Darwin went on to document grief-
stricken elephants, contented
house cats, pumas, cheetahs, and
ocelots(5) (who expressed their sat-
isfaction with purring), as well
tigers—whom he believed did not
purr at all but instead emitted “a
peculiar short snuffle, accompa-
nied by the closure of the eyelids”
when happy.
Strangely enough, after writing
eloquently about the expression
of shared emotions in humans and
animals, and then the expression
of emotions in insane humans, he
stops short of discussing insane
animals. This could have been a
natural fourth part of his treatise.
Why isn’t it there?
The answer may be in Scotland,
with a physician who liked fungus.
In 1880, eight years after the pub-
lication of Expression and two
years before Darwin died, a study
of animal insanity popped up in
the scholarly world. It was written
by a Scottish physician named
William Lauder Lindsay who had
been busy publishing his research
on everything from lichen and ra-
bies, to cholera and hygiene.
Lindsay’s two-volume series titled
Mind in the Lower Animals cov-
ers morality and religion, language,
the mental condition of children
and savages, and more. But it is
the second volume, Mind in Dis-
ease, that is truly remarkable.
Like other physicians and natural-
ists of his day, Lindsay believed that
Text by Laurel BraitmanTitle by Diego Bellorín (EMPK) / Website: empk.netIllustrations by Eleni Karlokoti / Website: elenikalorkoti.com
1 This text is an excerpt from Animal
Madness, forthcoming from Simon
and Schuster.
2 The book was supposed to be one
of the first to include photographs,
but their inclusion was finally de-
cided against for financial reasons.
Instead, the published version fea-
tures lots of illustrations
and engravings.
3 Nowadays “insanity” is chiefly a
legal term determined in the court-
house. In The Concise Medical
Dictionary it is defined as “A degree
of mental illness such that the af-
fected individual is not responsible
for his actions or is not capable of
entering into a legal contract. The
term is a legal rather than
a medical one.”
4 The terrier’s name was Polly, and
she was a Wire Fox Terrier. Which re-
minds us of another Wire Fox Terrier
that rocks: Milou (or Snowy, as he is
known in the English-speaking world)
from the Tintin comics.
5 Surrealist Salvador Dalí had a pet
ocelot named Babou.
(1)
gopher illustrated 27
* evolution of features,from idea maps.
* diversity ofgraphic styles
* limitedcolor palette
* cohesiveeditorial voice
* strict use of grid system
Process (continued):3) Personality: diversity was not
only present on graphic elements, but also in the content of articles, with writers coming from several
countries and specialization areas. Instead of imposing style uniformity,
we embraced different voices and unified the experience by creating a
system of sidenotes featuring editors’commentary. These
sidenotes provided additional information and context, just like
modern hyperlinks do, but also included commentary that helped
shepherd the reader from one feature to the next.
4) Tempo: lastly, creating a system that juggled different kinds of
articles plus a universe of graphic styles meant that we had to implement a system to help
readers navigate the publication easily. I devised an strict four-
column grid used in roughly 90% of the magazine, with only one
exception: the portfolio pages, which were printed in full CYMK color, gloss paper, no sidenotes,
and using an adaptable grid. This provided a very clear message: we
are here to showcase beautiful work, but also to have fun.
Results:Gopher Magazine quickly became a
hit among design and visual arts audiences alike, with circulation in
eight countries and single copy sales of over 70% (far outperform-
ing the standard 45-55% copy sales of other peer publications).
Its design was key in attracting audiences, as it became one of the
first 500 projects on the online fundraising platform Kickstarter, where it achieved its funding goal
within days of the project's launch.
The magazine has been featured extensively in design exhibitions and books worldwide, including
more recently "The Modern Magazine" by Jeremy Leslie, and
the Ibero-American Design Biennial. It also spurred an still
ongoing series of cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists and designers, including
events, multimedia, and other editorial products.
Lastly, the magazine has received numerous design and arts awards including a Print Regional Design
Award (Southwest Region), an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts grant, and a City of Austin –
Cultural Arts Division grant.
Role(s):Creative Direction,
Art Direction,Market Research,
Project Management.