Editorial design is the biggest source of reference for me anytime I look for inspiration. Designing products require much more than just beautiful compositions. I feel that we are so attached to beauty, that we tend to forget that there's something much bigger behind everything. I know that beauty is the greatest seducer of man, but I also know that designing a product requires us to think about systems, degradation of data and how flexible our design is. Editorial designers have been dealing with this for a long time and that's why, in my opinion, we should not reinvent the wheel, just improve upon what was already done.
In this post I feature the work done by Wedge & Lever in 2011, when they were hired to redesign the TransWorld Surf magazine. I decided to publish this project because it's incredible how much what they have done here in 2011 has become one of the biggest trends of this last year, and probably the biggest design trend of 2016 in terms of web.
The cool thing is that it looks like the web is finally becoming mature and flexible enough for us to have such rich compositions. On the other hand, most of what I see that follows this trend is on Dribbble, where most of the times, it's just visual explorations. That said, I am trying hard to implement similar style for the new Abduzeedo. The biggest challenge for me is, of course the technology (Drupal) and CSS. In addition, we need to think of how the design will adapt for the different screen sizes (tablet, mobile and desktop).
The work that Wedge & Lever did here is a great example of a solid grid system and the flexibility it gives to experiment with different typography styles. Vertical text is often present and it gives a very stylish look.
In late 2011, we were hired to re-design TransWorld Surf magazine. Our objective was shifting the creative direction to support a photo-driven editorial model while breathing new life into the magazine format. The intended result: sophistication that does not take itself too seriously. An immediate increase in market-share proved the re-design was successful and it continued gaining until May of 2013 when the publication was purchased by its main competitor and subsequently shut down.
For more information check out http://wedgeandlever.com/
