Mid Century Magazine, Issue 5

magCulture just posted a good redesign rundown of the UK’s young Mid Century magazine:

“Simon Esterson and Holly Catford have provided a modernist design that is a perfect foil for the content. Features open with Futura headlines on fields of colour taken from the subsequent room shots. This allows the photography to be take up whole spreads without interruption, particularly important in the tight 170 x 240mm format. Like the headlines spreads, pull-quotes take their colour cue from the images, while the lengthy picture captions stick to a dark cyan.”

The stencil typeface used for the magazine’s logo and large headlines is Lineto’s Le Corbusier, a font family that Nico Schweizer and Phillipe Desarzens derived from old zinc stencil sets. Despite the name of the typeface, Le Corbusier did not invent these letters, but they are very much in tune with his aesthetic.

The big and bold use of Futura in Mid Century is reminiscent of the glorious modern identity for London’s Barbican Arts Centre, so despite the obviousness of Futura for a mid-mod mag, I commend its application here.

Finally, if the goal is typical type of mid-century design, Century Expanded is a good choice for text. The handful of uses in our Collection show that it was a popular typeface in the 1950s and ’60s.