periodical

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Previously the magazine was mostly a collection of written and visual rants with a street appeal for hardened activists. I saw it as an opportunity to explore how to reach and message broader readerships while exploring publishing, laying out page design and preparing artwork for lithographic printing.
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I can’t remember whether the chicken or the egg came first. But I had previously been commissioned to design the cover pictured above for one issue and had laid out some pages on another edition. From those experiences the student union president recruited me to work alongside the new editor, art directing and producing the magazine for the following year, my final design school year. I agreed with one proviso: That my job title would be 'Propagandarist'.

He agreed. I seized the moment by reinventing the magazine’s persona, moving things along from their macho gun-toting revolutionary raven called Crow Magnus, to less discriminatory opportunities. Instead, by exploring the new possibilities of all bird metaphors, crow!magnus was hatched with new meaning, and a purpose to ‘make some noise and be heard’. This was expressed in the banner type I had designed with my cover art the previous year.
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Following the banner type style of bold and light Frutiger, the house style evolved using Univers as the ‘publication voice’ (from available type families on the inhouse electric golfball typewriter). As variation, Times was used whenever an ‘other voice’ was needed, which occurred regularly when publishing interviews.

The editor and I defined our roles as either the words or the pictures department. This was based around the electric typewriter, with its selected typefaces available in a couple weights and sizes with italics. The editor’s responsibility was feeding and formatting his words into the eight-thousand-character memory of the typewriter. Once proofed and corrected the memory would be cleared for more typing while the approved galley was mine to compile into printed pages. From this arrangement I explored my newly forming graphic design knowledge through experiments with hand separated full colour printing, page and advertisement design, and publication composition.

Along with simply formatting the page design, my bravest decision at the time was breaking away from the established mentality of printed newspapers covers being in black with a spot colour. When assessing the web offset printing process of the day, I recognised that full colour process printing was an affordable option. And it offered other significant graphic opportunities. I was already changing the cover page stock to be whiter and bulkier than the newsprint of the remaining pages and the imposition process inevitably saw the colour cover printing also used on the back page and centre-spread.
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crow!magnus was getting ready to launch as a different publication. But when I commissioned students from the design school and it's illustration stream to create covers by applying bird themes to the topic of each issue, things really began taking flight! Their illustrations were supplied for the black plate and we would discuss how I could hand separate and collage the cyan, yellow and magenta plates to best colour the image. Similar separations would occur for the centre spread and back page advertisements.
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A humble honourarium per issue afforded a small amount for the cover illustrator and smaller amounts for any fellow design school students gaining rudimentary experience laying out magazine pages and gaining printed examples for their portfolio.

At times we were illustrating using nib pens and brushes, other times it was paste-ups with Rotring pens and markers, lightboxes, Liquid Paper, drafting benches and rub-down Letraset type, tones and textures in varying states of decay. Boxes of gluesticks were always on standby for adhering various type, photos and whatever random materials might be associated with a story.

Feature photographs would be specified and supplied as screened bromides and at times headings were provided as phototypesetting. Otherwise everything that went to print was prepared at that time, by the hand of the person in the student union office laying out the page.
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The hand separations I performed for full colour printing were particularly experimental. The education system at the time provided demonstrations of the expensive, highly technical and heftily equipped reprographic process. Although never recognised by the design school, these activities were a practical extension to my design education in many regards. The opportunity I had created empowered my little bit of knowledge to dangerously explore colour separations physically.

As such, it was important to see the process through all its reprographic and printing steps before the editions became public. Throughout the year I would skip class, slip across town to approve the reprographics and platemaking or to press check the magazine reeling out of a web offset press. In these moments, great rolls of paper would feed into one end of the machine along individual lines and on the fly the entire publication would be 'printed inline' through the press and appear collated, folded, trimmed and bundled ready for delivery at the other end of the factory.

It was the mid-eighties and this was my precursor to desktop publishing.
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Among these activities I finished my final design school year. Over the following summer I cut my teeth as a 'timelord', and by that I mean designing diaries and planners for student unions while furthering my own production and time management skills. A couple of years later I was writing and presenting prerequisite courses for desktop publishing at the state’s School of Printing and Graphic Arts.

Discover what became of my publication design.