Tinted Window dives into one person, place, or object to the point of obsession

Tinted Window is a new publication with an editorial angle that focuses on one person, place or object. Although its subject is very focused, thematically the publication touches on a wide range of areas, tapping into multiple audiences too. Its editors, Oscar Gaynor and Alex Bennett, evidently relish in the details, noting that the publication’s defining feature “is its commitment to exploding its subject; to seeing it from multiple angles.”

Issue one of Tinted Window, currently in arms reach of hitting its Kickstarter target, hones in on one person: the life and work of writer, filmmaker and photographer Hervé Guibert who died from AIDS in 1991 at the age of 36. In exploring a character known as “a writer’s writer”, Oscar and Alex have worked with contributing editor of Artforum, Bruce Hainley, to examine his film La pudeur ou l’impudeur. Writer John Douglas Millar zooms in on Hervé’s work as a photographer, and the publication additionally features the first English translation of the writer’s short, Flash Paper by Jeffrey Zuckerman, sitting next to responsive drawings by artist Louis Fratino.

“Alex and I had wanted to produce something for a while that took our loves of memoir and New Yorker style articles into a project that exemplified attention to detail and its subject,” Oscar explains of Tinted Window’s editorial angle. “Through the commissioning process, we came across certain subjects that were shared points of interests for authors, artists and activists; things they were obsessed with really."

For a publication that scrutinises a place, person or object to the point of obsession, the design decisions and aesthetic around Tinted Window had to be just right. To achieve a design embodiment of Oscar and Alex’s editorial efforts, the pair worked with It’s Nice That favourites, London-based studio, Regular Practice.

Wanting to create a beautiful object to be treasured but also read on the bus, the pair “always set out for the design to be bold,” Oscar tells It’s Nice That. “In order to mirror the journal’s promotion of original essay writing, long-form journalism and translation, we put a lot of emphasis on typography in order to underline the importance of print to us, as well as its malleability.” To embody this thinking Regular Practice first created a specialised font for the publication, based on research with editors at the Bob Cobbing Family archive.

In its research-led process, the format of Tinted Window feels more like a document than a bound magazine. The approximate 100 pages of the publication sit within a specially designed wallet so readers have to dig around its content, jumping around alternate points of view in order to get a cohesive, deep understanding at the issue’s chosen subject.