Córdova Canillas on designing the latest Fucking Young! magazine

Barcelona-based creative agency Córdova Canillas has designed Fucking Young! magazine for the last four issues. Since the Catalan creatives have taken on the publication, print-lover’s interests have increased ten-fold for the rebrand. Now in its 13th issue, Fucking Young! explores the theme of neighbourhood. While its editorial stories delve into international territory from Marseille to San Francisco, the photographic commissioning and layout design take direct inspiration from local intricacies of these specific neighbourhoods.

The editorial stories and print design align together in their focus on place. Martí Canillas and Diego Córdova, the founding designers tell It’s Nice That how this specific issue “is an ode to street culture in many ways". This is particularly seen through the fashion editorials which feature local people and local brands while all the interviews "focus on the relationship between author and location.”

In one article, Allan Harmitouche photographs Simon Porte Jacquiemus, a fashion designer from Marseille. His novelty use of polaroid photography evokes the hot sun in the South of France. The slightly orange-tinted hues lift up the words of the page and stir the viewer’s senses of Simon’s coastal upbringing where he walked “barefoot most of the time and felt quite free.” Along with the complimentary photography commissioning, Fucking Young!’s typesetting sets itself apart from other contemporary magazine of a similar ilk.

“We’ve created a permanent tension between photography and text as we place the images before we place the text, so the text must fit around the images rather than the other way round”, explains Martí. For the interview spreads, the designers split the page into four columns. Despite this seeminlgy rigid grid system, the design is surprisingly free and the differing point sizes and weights creates a textural feeling to the spreads. The continual use of justified text enhances the length of the columns while the varying leaded type provides aesthetic diversity to each spread. Martí adds, “We designed a very natural and ever-present layout with the four columns so that we can break it. Without boundaries, there is nothing to break.”

In a comedic twist the designer adds, “For the index, we literally designed a standard doner kebab menu using effects that we’d researched in the city.” The anti-designed spread presents a slice of fun to the magazine, offering another insight into the interpretation of neighbourhood. In general however, the overall design of the issue is influenced by the “street culture of graffiti and newspapers.” The article’s headings refer back to this kind of lo-fi type as each article’s title has the delicacy of a fragile newspaper and the sporadic energy of graffiti on the street.