Colors Magazine, Trilingual Freedom of Speech Issue

Publication Design, Publication Studio, The American University in Cairo

Colors Magazine is a magazine about the rest of the world.
This design explores and reflects on its 65th issue “Freedom of Speech” while translating it to 2 other languages (aside from English): Arabic and Chinese; using an experimental layout that breaks all the rules.

The text was placed according to its reading direction using the same translated content. Page numbers were also placed according to text orientation both in Latin and Arabic. This facilitates the interaction with the magazine, encouraging the reader to explore it from different perspectives as well as equalizes all languages and makes it easier for the reader to choose his text orientation according to preferred language.

The layout was designed in a balanced way with use of consistent negative space equal to text and images. Although a grid was followed, the visual style of the magazine was created to be “randomly organized”. This was based on experimenting with breaking the grid, tilting images and text and overlapping them together.