Since our collaboration with Cereal on their first self-published book, These Islands, we had the opportunity to help redesign a number of their printed city guides as well. In March of 2018, Cereal proposed another exciting project—the redesign of Cereal Magazine for the launch of volume 16.
As we approached the project, we understood the impact Cereal had made on the creative community and beyond. With a massive following that loved the magazine for their distinct minimal aesthetic and perspective, we were careful to respect their global readership while assisting Cereal to establish the next evolution of the magazine. It was important to us to understand the core of Cereal, what makes it what it is, as a way to redesign with integrity and reverence for what came before. Whether seen in print or online, the photography approach was one aspect that was distinctly Cereal and iconic to their brand. We wanted to create a design to achieve that same level of thought and simplicity, an iconic design that was distinctly Cereal.
Type Treatment
During the research phase, we observed that most magazine layouts are filled with large contrasting headlines with small text as a way to establish hierarchy. However, when we were mocking up spreads with this type treatment, we found it took away from the calmness and simplicity of the photographs and writing. Through several iterations, we challenged ourselves to create a sense of hierarchy through a different approach — a hierarchy with as minimal amount of type size variations as possible. This resulted in majority of the magazine, from title to body copy, to be set in a serif typeface at 8.5pt and credits/captions set in a 6pt sans serif. We were still able to achieve the page hierarchy through the use of negative space. Another adjustment we made was changing the previously justified paragraph styles to a ragged edge for enhanced readability and adding a line to indicate the end of an article.
