We talk to Jeremy Leslie and Katie Treggiden about their new biannual print magazine championing upcoming designers
In exciting news for print enthusiasts, Mag Culture’s Jeremy Leslie is teaming up with confessions of a design geek founder Katie Treggiden on a new project. Titled, Fiera, the new biannual print magazine will traverse the world’s design fairs in pursuit of new talent, to be enjoyed at a more leisurely pace than the break-neck speed reserved for the events themselves.
We spoke with Katie and Jeremy following their launch party last week, to talk about the crowd-funded project and find out what readers can expect.
What do you envision Fiera doing that other design magazines don’t?
Katie: Fiera is entirely focused on discovering new talent at the world’s design fairs, so it’s quite niche! It’s about bringing the fairs to life for the people who can’t get to them, and scouring every corner of every design festival for the brightest new designers that you might miss even if you were there. It’s about telling the stories of the people and the processes behind the designs, before new designers can afford to invest in PR and therefore get onto the radars of some of the more mainstream magazines.
There’s a big build up to design fairs, particularly the major ones like the Salone del Mobile and of course London Design Festival. How are you unpacking content that, outwardly at least, seems confined to a specific moment in time?
Katie: That’s exactly the point. At the moment, a huge amount of work goes into making these fairs happen. Designers prepare for months and then they’re over as quickly as they’ve begun. There’s a lot of coverage during and immediately after design fairs. It’s intense, dynamic, exciting and immediate. It’s also as chaotic as the fairs themselves. And then there’s a quiet moment before we all go back to our day jobs. In that moment, there’s an opportunity for a printed publication that pulls together what’s just happened and tries to make sense of it all.
“Fiera is about the people and processes behind the designs, and it’s a beautiful design object in its own right”
Katie – how has Fiera evolved from your blog, confessions of a design geek, and in what ways is it striking out as something very different?
Katie: Fiera is not ‘confessions of a design geek – the magazine’ but it feels like a very natural progression, reflecting one very specific niche of what the blog covers. Whereas confessions of a design geek started out, as many blogs do, as something that was just for me, and has grown and evolved over the last four years and found its own audience, Fiera is a much more deliberate endeavour. We are starting with a very clear target audience in mind to serve an identified gap in the market. It’s a bit like confessions of a design geek’s grown-up older brother!
As an established voice within the digital design journalism scene, how different are you finding it writing for print Katie?
Katie: I already do quite a lot of writing for print, I have written for The Telegraph, Ideal Home, and WRAP Magazine among others, but you’re
right – there’s a difference between writing in a pre-determined tone of voice and developing your own. confessions of a design geek has quite a distinct voice, and my next challenge as I start to write the content for Fiera will be finding Fiera’s voice.
Who do you think your typical reader is?
Katie: Our core readers are people who would love to visit all the design fairs, but can’t, or those who go but not for long enough – for example interior designers, design buyers, design journalists and design students. That said, Fiera is about the people and processes behind the designs, and it’s a beautiful design object in its own right, so it also will appeal to a broader group of people who are interested in creative passionate people and beautifully designed print.
Jeremy, do you feel a heightened sense of pressure on how the magazine must function as a physical and aesthetic entity, given your audience? Where have you drawn aesthetic inspiration from?
Jeremy: There is pressure but that’s what’s exciting. Any magazine exists in the context of its content and audience and Fiera’s context demands a strong design and high sense of physical production. It’s being published to be kept, so it needs to feel right in that respect. The audience will be very critical but I’d rather have an audience that cares than one that doesn’t.
We’ve worked on dummy pages so have a design direction defined but there are still many details to be finalised – I like to work with real content to develop things so that’ll come later. The design will remain relatively simple and spare, quite monochrome, letting the design content provide the flamboyance. The page design mustn’t fight with the content.
