Sam Boxer on his downright disgusting design of Gut Magazine’s third issue

Gut Magazine was founded by artists Ami Evelyn Hughes and Georgia Kemball as a space to collaborate with people they find interesting and celebrate all things instinctual, clumsy and raw. With The Makers Issue and The Magic Issue behind them, the latest instalment of Gut continues its fascination of all things dark and obscure with The Food Issue.

Sam Boxer is the designer responsible for the gruesome and, at times, downright disgusting visuals present throughout Gut’s third issue. Sam met editor-in-chief, Ami, last year around the time that The Magic Issue was released and the pair have been working to develop the magazine together since.

As the previous issues didn’t really have a design process in place, the pair collaborated to further evolve Gut as an output for Ami’s taste, research and ideas using “design as a tool to communicate this atmosphere and aesthetic”. Not wanting anything to feel too over-designed or clean, Ami and Sam drew reference from “old porn magazines, VHS tapes and German food packaging,” as well as “euro trash, medieval embroidery, renaissance paintings and depictions of the devil.” This eclectic mix of niche visual sources is apparent throughout the magazine which utilises a host of display fonts and layouts creating an appropriately chaotic personality. A personality that’s reflective of the “transgressive, probing, ugly, anti-design and anti-fashion” ethos of Gut.

Sam explains how the creative freedom granted to them as an independently published magazine, as well the “nature of the content of issue three, meant we could get quite gross and scrappy with the design approach,” in reference to the titles made out of ham and cheese and the “disgusting meat house Ami made as the cover.” Other spreads feature vomit art, whipped cream lettering, a typeface called pube sans and potato smileys on fire.

As always, Gut’s third issue features a host of up-and-coming names alongside some more established ones including Rottingdean Bazaar, Raphael Bliss, Joyce NG, Dexter Lander, Saskia Dixie, Joshua Gordon and Jess Maybury. The Food Issue is available now, having launched on Halloween at Sang Bleu, London.