Wired Italia, n. 94, “Il vero volto della Cina”
Wired is an American magazine created in 1993: its editorial line focuses on new technologies, new media, and how they shape our contemporary world. Claiming their inheritance from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the original team of Wired was ahead of its time and deals now with numerous questions at the heart of our more and more digitized societies.
The magazine has spawned various national versions: Wired UK, Wired Japan, Wired Germany and Wired Italia. Since 2016, the latter is designed by Pitis e Associati: for each new issue, the studio creates a brand new design and layout including a new choice of typefaces that will suit the main theme of the quarterly publication. The theme of number 94 is China, and the issue’s title “The true face of China: all the lights and shadows of the world’s biggest technological superpower”. With this in mind, the team of Pitis e Associati commissioned vector illustrations of robot-like creatures by Zimm Wan, and designed a videogame-like layout for the magazine, with flat 3D shapes superimposing one another and pop colors all around. The designers used Exchange Text from Frere Jones Type for texts in the interior and Signal and Signal Mono from Production Type for the more visual spreads: the typeface finds its place in the heavy cluttered pages, and its simplicity brings a little air to the digital aesthetics. Moreover, Signal reconnects with digital types from the beginning of the twenty-first century: the wide spacing and the colored text blocks remind us of some usual effects found on blogs and vintage self-coded websites. The multicolored layout takes us into a regressive world, where the page itself becomes virtual.
The Chinese type is yet to be identified.
