Electronica (magazine features)

Whilst working as designers and creative directors for the international music magazine Clash, we worked on hundreds over features over our 5 year span. Clash was aimed at a more stylish design lead readership and we always tried to layout each page in a vibrant, exciting way that captured the feel of the band or the music the article portrayed.

We’re pretty up on our music anyway, but any artists music we weren’t previously aware of, would be hunted down first, helping give us a good grip on the mood for each piece. This together with checking out how each represented themselves visually through their record sleeves, website and promotional materials usually gave us a good starting point for designing a new feature.

We were then given photographs for an article, sometimes these were so good that only minimal additional design was needed to illustrate the article, on other occasions they’d be disappointing and would require substantially more work to create an exciting spread. Often they’d be press shots that had (or would be) used in other magazines, and we always tried to change these enough to make them unique within this magazine.

The most important element of each article was of course the text itself, and we always laid out the copy to be an easy enjoyable read. Large pull-out quotes were used to lead the reader into the piece, and strong lead intro’s highlighted to capture the eye.

The key factor in each page design was to have fun with it. They all needed to be done quite rapidly due to the constant monthly turnaround of the magazine. Therefore we’d need to quickly choose something and blast through it, this technique of experimenting with different styles produced some great designs over the years and here’s some of our favourite features for electronic artists.