spin magazine and ETC

The one magazine I subscribe to is SPIN. I've always enjoyed their articles and interviews because they give me insight into the nature of musicians / creative people. Spin always shapes issues around a central idea. For example, May / June  is "The Loud Issue." It celebrates artists that are advocates of "ear-bleeding modes of expression [...] driven by thought-provoking ideology as much as brute force." I always enjoy their carefully curated content, photography, and illustration. Plus it's always interesting to see who's on the latest cover.



Spin recently gave me one more reason to be a fan when they recently redesigned the entire publication. The new look and format is in my opinion a very smart reaction to the increasing digitization of information. Instead of attempting to emulate or keep up with the music blogs, the publication goes in the opposite direction. It seeks to become a physical, precious, and charming artifact. The printing techniques and the paper are much more physical: You can feel the matte paper in your fingers and see the overlapping inks. The larger format also allows the photographs to be really immersive.

The redesign is not only beautiful, it's smart too. Things like album reviews and news updates have been removed from the magazine and relegated to Spin's site because this type of information is faster and more fleeting. The content in the magazine has been carefully considered for print. The articles are long (in a great way) and more cultural, speculative, and contemplative. I wanted to know who was behind all of this, and I discovered that it was a design firm based in Brooklyn called Everything Type Company, or ETC. Check out their site for some really awesome work for the Walker Art Center, Yale, Dwell, and more.

Hooray for printed matter! Hooray for design that understands and capitalizes on the nature of it's medium!