Design: Kinfolk Magazine

Kinfolk magazine is based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a simplistic "slow-living" lifestyle magazine, focusing on relationships, food, work, style, and culture. It's contributors are creative types all around the world. This magazine oozes design and graphic appeal. I've made two categories to break down it's design: Love It and Not-So-Much.

Love It:

-Let's start with the cover. It is beautifully simplistic! Each cover features a large, clean photograph with the simple-serif text "Kinfolk". The theme of the issue and edition is in small print either at top or bottom. I like that the text is not attracting attention to itself or is overpowering in anyway, but it demands respect. I get the feeling that this magazine will have a large emphasis on image and art rather than text.

-The first "welcome" page is so clean. There is no doodles, cheesy typography, or any nonsense here, only a clean cut and divided text explaining exactly what it says it will. It has a large image to offset the text and provide a nice place for the eyes to rest.

-Imagery. This magazine has crisp, graphic photographs and illustrations that are filling pages more frequently than text does. The tone is either black and white, or neutral subdued colors, unifying the whole magazine as you fan through it.

- Text. Text is all very small in this magazine, and it is all seemingly contained in invisible boxes. It looks sharp and clean. It is not too much that it overwhelms the reader from starting a novel, and there are enough large images to keep the intrigue

Not-So-Much:

- Some of the text can be too "hipster", such as this page that has the whole blurb in the same size font, no indents, all crammed at the top going down. It reminds me of a large-print book for elderly readers. Even though it is not, the formatting here makes it look like one giant run-on sentence.

-Some colors used are too bland for me and leave the realm of classy and head towards old-lady. Especially when the two page spread is all bathed in the same color, like this example. This does not look enticing to me and I do not want to read it.

In conclusion, this is a very beautifully designed magazine, and I enjoy flipping through it. It has intrigue and visual appeal from it's clean and crisp photographs, and is not too overwhelmingly text-y. This magazine is classy, simplistic, and clean.