Brown GRAPHIC box with black lettering and a collage of stickers and imagery from the individual publications.

GRAPHIC #47: Current Issue

How can a magazine reflect the complexity of the present without simplifying it?

Context

For its 47th issue, Seoul-based GRAPHIC invited ten international teams of designers, researchers and artists to engage with social and political issues shaping their present.

Approach

As the editorial team, we developed the concept for the issue, accompanied each contribution throughout the process, and translated the resulting material into its final editorial form.
Rather than applying one visual system across the magazine, each contribution was developed as a publication of its own. Its format, structure and visual language respond to its particular subject, resulting in reports, chronologies, interviews, conversations and other forms of narration.
The ten publications are collected in a shared box rather than bound into a conventional magazine. What connects them is not a uniform design, but a common editorial framework: ten different ways of looking at, thinking about and giving form to the issues of their time.

Open brown GRAPHIC box containing a stack of differently designed publications and stickers.
Open GRAPHIC box with a Korean contents sheet and smaller printed items placed to its right.
GRAPHIC box with publications laid out, including a black-and-white colouring book and a black Revue Faire issue.
Overlapping publications from GRAPHIC #47, including yellow “Yellow Objects” and “Klasse Klima”.
Individual GRAPHIC #47 publications spread out, showing varied formats, text layouts and colourful graphics.
Overview of the yellow “Yellow Objects” publication, with its cover, spreads and photographs of yellow objects.
Overview of the black-and-white “Parallel Parallel Coloring Book”, with text pages and line-drawn colouring images.
Overview of the Revue Faire publication, with a black cover and spreads about printed matter and design.
Black-and-white GRAPHIC printed matter with a timeline of horizontal bars extending across wide page formats.
Project Title
GRAPHIC #47: Current Issue
Client
Propaganda Press
Year
2021
Services
Editorial Design
Role
Concept Development, Editing, Design
Editorial Team
Dokho Shin, Young Sam Kim, Pawel Wolowitsch
Contributors
David Williams Manchester Type, Inter Graphic Views Ingo Offermanns, Klasse Klima Berlin University of the Arts, Natural Enemies of Books, Studio MMS ORGD (Open Recent Graphic Design), Prem Krishnamurthy, Parallel-Parallel.com, Dorothee Dähler, Yeliz Secerli, Revue Faire, Studio Syndicat, SPINE, Tetsuya Goto, Studiengruppe Informationsdesign, Hong Kong Protest Poster Archive, Yellow Object, Futuress, Troublemakers 2020, Sulki and Min, Matthias Görlich
Graphic Design
Dokho Shin, Young Sam Kim, Pawel Wolowitsch
Image Credits
Young Sam Kim
Publisher
Propaganda Press