Bleed

Issue 41QuarterlySix poundsNever the same twice

A quarterly music magazine. Carson set an interview in a dingbat face because he found the interview boring, and the magazine ran it. The argument was that a page communicates before a word is read. Bleed takes one rule from that and enforces it: the masthead is never printed whole.

Client
Fictional, self-initiated
Sector
Independent publishing
Scope
Masthead, page system, print, screen
Method
After David Carson and Neville Brody
Built
CSS overflow and one generator
01

The masthead

One word, set enormous, and cropped by the trim differently on every issue. The reader completes it, which they can do from three letters by about issue four.

Crop

Never whole
At least one letter is cut by the trim on every cover. A complete masthead has never been printed and will not be.
One face
The same serif at the same weight every time. The crop is the variable, not the drawing.
Minimum
Three letters must remain legible. Below that it is a texture and the newsagent complains.
Cover lines
Set small, at the foot, and never allowed to compete. The masthead is the only loud thing.
02

Colour

A stock, an ink, one hot and one cold. The hot is used once per spread and the cold is used for anything the magazine did not write, which is mostly advertising and listings.

Stock#E9E5DAUncoated 90 gsm. It shows through, and that is used rather than hidden.
Ink#14120FAll running text and the masthead. Never a grey.
Hot#B9311AOnce per spread. A drop cap, a rule, or a single word, and nothing more.
Cold#2B4E8CListings, adverts and anything supplied. It marks what is not ours.
03

Typography

A high contrast serif at two sizes only, enormous and small, with nothing in between, and a monospace for everything the magazine says in its own voice.

Display
Instrument SerifFeedback
Standfirst
italicfour hours in a van with a band who had stopped speaking
Body
Space Mono 13 / 25They had been touring for eleven weeks and had run out of things to say to each other somewhere outside Leeds. The record is about that, although none of them will say so.
Furniture
mono, spacedIssue 41 · page 22 · photography withheld
Two sizes
Display or body. There is no subhead size, so a hierarchy has to be made with position rather than scale.
Justified
Body is justified with the rivers left in. Ragging it out would tidy a texture the page depends on.
Voice
Serif is the subject speaking. Mono is the magazine speaking. It is never mixed inside a sentence.
04

Applications

The cover, a feature spread and the pull-out. On the spread the huge word sits under the text rather than beside it, so the reader gets the feeling before the sentence.

Issue 41Six pounds
Four hours
in a van Nera · Static Kings · the last of the listening bars

Cover, 240 × 320 mm

IssuesWritingSubscribe
41

Four hours in a van

Eleven weeks in and they had stopped speaking. The record is about that, although none of them will say so.

Read it

Website

V
They had been touring for eleven weeks and had run out of things to say to each other somewhere outside Leeds. The record is about that, although none of them will say so on the record, and the two of them who would say so have both since left. What is left is forty minutes of a band listening very hard to one another and saying nothing at all, which is either the best thing they have done or the last, and possibly both.
page 22

Feature spread

41 Pull out and keepBleed

Pull-out poster, A2

05

What breaks it

Deconstruction is the easiest style in the set to do badly, because the failures look like the successes until you try to read one.

×
Not whole A complete masthead centred on the cover is every other magazine. The crop is the only thing that makes it this one.
×
Not unreadable Below three legible letters it stops being a masthead. Illegibility is a tool here, not the objective.
×
They had been touring for eleven weeks and had run out of things to say to each other somewhere outside Leeds.
Not only text A page of clean justified mono with nothing at display size is a fanzine. One enormous element per spread is the minimum.
× Feedback four hours PAGE 22
Not all hot The hot colour is one element per spread. Three of them and the page has no loudest thing, which is the one job the colour has.