WePresent explores the power of design
Lots of magazines these days have multiple different covers, but the new issue of WePresent has gone a step further by producing three completely different versions of the same magazine. Published by WeTransfer, the magazine brings together various different artists and entertainers that have appeared on the WePresent site, inviting them to collaborate with each other in print.
It throws up lovely encounters like the author Caleb Azumah Nelson interviewing Little Simz and the two comparing their experiences of growing up in London. But as editor Liv Siddall explains in her editor’s letter, they wanted to do more: “It wasn’t enough to just write about culture, we wanted to create it, visually.” So they handed over all their words and pictures to three different designers — Chloe Scheffe from Seattle, Seri Tanaka from Tokyo, and Nejc Prah from Ljubljana — then waited to see what would come back.
The result is brilliantly playful and impractical — you can definitely only do this if you’ve got a decent chunk of money to play with. And it also throws up tons of nuanced examples of how the design of a page affects the way you read a story. In the video above I’ve focused on the cover interview with Little Simz, but there’s loads more to discover from flicking through the different versions. I think you can request a copy of the magazine by contacting WeTransfer, so definitely have a go at doing that – they might even send you all three so you can do your own compare and contrast…
