Freight creates new literary magazine Gutter
Glasgow-based-design agency Freight is set to launch its own magazine this week.
Gutter, which will be published every six months, will feature contemporary fiction and poetry.
The magazine will be co-edited by Adrian Searle, director of Freight, alongside Colin Begg.
It is a self-funded venture for the agency although it has secured some support for the second issues from Culture and Sport Glasgow and hopes to receive more in the future, while income will also come from subscription, retail sales and advertising.
It is understood that the agency will look raise the number of issues released to three issues a year in the future.
The first issue will feature poetry, short stories and novel extracts from 40 contributors, a mixture of well known and unpublished writers, selected from over 200 submissions from all corners of Scotland and from expat writers in the US, Canada, Australia, all the major European countries, Japan and Thailand.
Searle explained: “We do a lot of editorial design for various clients and have been thinking about publishing our own magazine for some. But we didn’t want it to be some dreadful piece of navel gazing. It was important it the magazine had its own integrity and audience. We’ve published a number of books of new writing which have sold well and won us some awards, and we reckoned that Scotland needed a decent literary magazine in the style of Granta – but better designed!”
“There are some online magazines but nobody likes reading fiction or poetry on a computer screen. A printed document was very important. We made the decision to make the design almost entirely typographic – as a celebration of the written word. There are a couple of satirical cartoons but that’s it.”
Stephen Kelman, designer at Freight explained the look of the magazine, “Aesthetically, we opted for minimalism and two print colours only. The signature colour will change from issue to issue but we wanted to make the reading process as pleasurable and free of distractions as possible. We chose a contemporary monolithic slab serif, Stag, for the masthead and headers and Agendatype, a fresh but elegant serif face with an unusual italic cut for the bodycopy. It’s been great to get the chance to really craft something for its own sake. It’s been a real labour of love.”