All Purpose Studio

0:00 [Applause]

0:06 we're all purpose I'm one of the co-founders alongside ted who's in the audience and this is will our lead designer we're a design studio based in london. And we kind of specialize in branding editorial website type design and kind of yeah creative direction overall with kind of clients ranging from art fashion music and lifestyle brands to take you through some of our work we also recently relaunched our new website and got a billboard to celebrate it.

0:52 But then today we're going to be talking about law magazine as obviously you already know particularly the 10th issue which we are lucky enough to have worked on.

1:03 So the magazine itself contains three individual issues three bespoke typefaces two inserts and some stickers all housed together in this case with two intersecting bands and kind of every corner and millimeter in detail were kind of poured over as a studio and with john the founder so it's quite hard for us to cover all of the tiny little nuances and details within the time we got tonight but hopefully we'll do our best to try and cover everything so law was started by john holt sat down there in 2011. Law stands for lives and works and is a documentary magazine focusing on the perspective of style in modern britain issues one to nine were released between 2011 and 2017 and then at this point the magazine kind of paused for a hiatus but between 2017 and 2021 john was still creating and building lots of content and you know you can't really stop at issue 9 so there was a kind of desire to complete the set with issue 10 also 2021 marks the kind of 10th year since it's an inception.

2:08 So it's kind of the perfect timing all previous issues of law I think this is issue 7 on the screen on my desk and the kind of mayhem of sending everything to print all all previous issues with these a4 saddle stitch publications when john approached us to work on the design of law there was this kind of desire to because law had always been the saddle stitched publication. There was a desire to give it this spine and give it this kind of more weight on a bookshelf so that it could kind of boast itself alongside other magazines a bit more and you know you'd be able to see like the law logo on on the spine itself and you know some people had like previously dubbed it as a zine which doesn't really do the content inside kind of enough justice so that was the kind of like starting point for the brief was to try and make it feel you know more like a mag you might see on a traditional magazine shop or on your bookshelf and there were three themes for the magazine that were folklore faith and unity so we'll just take you through some of the like initial sketches from the work.

3:12 But we we started off from a completely blank canvas you know I didn't really take any design cues from the from the previous issues and just really wanted to to start from scratch yeah.

3:27 So a few kind of really rough draft designs on here started playing around with kind of modern space typefaces or serifs some of the designs that you'll see up here kind of held their own throughout the whole process and some of them were reworked over and over you know like day by day kind of thing a lot of the content within law is quite nostalgic so we tried to like reference the past in some of the typeface selection or some of the details that we put in but then as the design process went on we wanted to kind of bridge a gap between what had come previously in issues one to nine and then you know this kind of like new look for for issue 10 so we started bringing in a few more of the design cues from previous issues such as the kind of structure of the three column grid and this numbering system along the bottom and then the kind of yeah the the more we interrogated the design the closer we got to you know get feeling it feeling kind of right and a feeling like this proper magazine to put on the shelf we then kind of got a dummy made to to test it which is obviously running through here you know with the spine testing out like some of the layouts typography and obviously we had to kind of like restructure the whole thing to factor in for like sort of difference in like differentiation in paper stock which law was kind of like known for doing basically.

4:58 So we so we got that.

4:59 And then we shared the dummy with john and although it kind of felt really exciting the way we kind of just like flipped through it didn't really do the magazine justice and after we kind of thought it'd be celebratory to make issue 10 more of a traditional magazine we found it.

5:14 Actually became kind of less special so it's at this point we decided the magazine needed to feel more special collectible and unique and john kind of said it should feel like a pilgrimage reading it because obviously so much work had gone into it he then visited the english folk dance and song society library at central sharp house where he found this essex house song book which is like this like really beautiful cloth bound kind of folder that has these like little sort of pamphlets inside and kind of it's a sort of procession like ritual to unwrap it in a set like and read it so like john kind of felt like you know if you want to read the magazine you have to invest the time to go through it.

5:56 And then yeah. So it was kind of like he saw that. And it was like three it made sense that to like tie in the three themes photo of faith and unity into kind of three individual magazines and kind of bring back that like saddle stitched like original lore kind of feel but then house it in like a slip case and yeah bringing back like a little middle page poster and the mix of like gloss and unco pages obviously like it was like a massive change for us from like one magazine to three but we knew it felt right.

6:23 So we said yes yeah and alongside this we're also looking at lots of references from these kind of ephemeral pamphlets or church booklets and these kind of simple saddle stick publications on on sugar paper you know lots of things that you might see in like a village hall or yeah just kind of like these church kneeling cushions is a dove just these very like symbolic references and then also these screen blocks and we kind of had all these references sitting in the background just sitting in a folder and you know as the design process was going along we just were experimenting and trying to find ways to bring these into the into the overall design so then kind of alongside the development of all of the format of the magazine we still had to like you know make decisions on the typefaces the serifs weren't really sitting quite right and the type wasn't giving the pages enough impact and john said something earlier in the process which we remembered I think of law being a strong powerful bold like a hammer or decisive like a judge's hammer you can't mess with the law so we started messing around with some like beefier type faces impact everyone's favorite one from word and compactor and you know to give it the hammer effect we sort of like you know gave gave them both to go but neither really felt right compact was too chunky impact was a bit too soft actually.

7:47 So we drew one in the middle called law hammer that's the full full a to z uppercase only as it only needed to be and here's some of it in use so we draw on law hammer and then we also decided to draw a body copy typeface which we named lawn network the style of the typeface was influenced by drock kenya and margaret calver's rail alphabet so kind of referencing the vernacular of british transport and a lot of the themes throughout law's archive everything within law magazine is kind of bespoke content created for that magazine so we really wanted to reinforce this with our design approach and make sure that all of the details that we were putting into the magazine was kind of bespoke and original and created you know specifically for it.

8:42 So it had that kind of same level of attention and and care and so yeah.

8:51 So we had you know at this point we had law hammer and we had law network. And we were still playing around with using albertus as this kind of like third pairing to tie in with some of the kind of folkloric themes and then at one point there was a kind of slip up in the studio and john john was talking about with us he said to us is it called albatross and then so at this point we kind of knew it was the perfect excuse to draw a bootleg version of albertus but just call it albatross instead and so it follows you know very similar proportions and styles to albertus.

9:23 But we literally just redrew it by eye to kind of naturally bring in some kind of almost yeah mistakes and just inconsistencies in its own kind of idiosyncrasies in itself just look at the full family and then yeah just some examples of it in print so like there are no actual references to the font names in the magazine it's kind of like a little inside joke between all of us but what was quite funny is that like aside from the spelling mistake of albatross like the the word itself is like sometimes used metaphorically to mean like a psychological burden which is taken from the rhyme of the ancient mariner and obviously like this magazine had taken john five years.

10:06 And it was like a big weight like to be lifted off his shoulders so it kind of was like a natural like tidy little link and then here's video of the weight being lifted as we send it to print yeah and then so typefaces references and everything combined here's the kind of yeah the the finished thing as its cover you'll see that albatross holding its own in the bottom left and then in the top left is a tiger symbol of the fence and then dove for destiny and the dove and then 10 pound pike in the bottom right for john's brother.

10:48 And then you kind of open up the magazine and yeah.

10:49 So you begin to get an impression of how it might start to feel more like a kind of ritual and a procession to open now and there are these riser inserts within it it's like a nice little nod to those kind of community pamphlets we mentioned earlier and then as the three issues kind of stack in the magazine the masthead is only applied so the top left is the you know what we would call issue one and then the top right is what we would call issue three so the masthead has only applied to the front of issue one in the back of issue three so they form this kind of like law sandwich holding them all together as as as one magazine and also another little touch is that the page numbers actually run through all three issues so like when you open up issue two you start on page 62 or something like that yes we'll show you some spreads of the finished thing inside each of the individual magazines has its own different colored colored stock which kind of here here are these specific articles so the first one which themes folklore has this kind of green and then the second one which was faith has this kind of red stock and then all of these kind of hero pieces that come within these sugar paper sections are kind of we've kind of broke out the three column grid and they have their own kind of unique layouts and then issue three and then here's where the kind of concrete blocks come into play they formed the borders for a series of individual poems throughout the magazines and each poem had its own kind of unique border that might have the symbol that we put inside the block might have just come from a block or we might have like referenced a little theme from within the poem itself I mean final little kind of little easter egg type thing is that the this destiny the cover feature for the third issue was printed on bible paper as well.

12:48 And then finally it had a spine so we got there in the end yeah and then.

12:54 There was a nice quote that john said to us from patricia villarillo who was one of the stylists in the magazine she said maybe five years is how long it should take to make a magazine so I think that's just a nice kind of testament to how much kind of work when went into it and also now there's the kind of special edition released which has heresy t-shirt heresy or carhart t-shirt depending on your pick the rosettes from the jeremy della cover shoot garcia sticker sheet signed adam adrella destiny in the dove print signed king cool newspaper which is the newspaper is like takes the editorial out of the magazine with some fresh content within it as well.

13:33 And then they're all housed in this kind of bespoke green box which again is a nice tie back to the essex songs appraised book.

13:43 And then yeah here's a picture from the launch party at the mild mate club and yeah. I just want to say a massive thank you to john for having us on board and also if you did want to pick up a copy of the magazine it's right down there on my left hand side thank you [Applause]