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APFEL - The Happy Hypocrite

Originally the title character of a fin-de-siècle moral fictiom by Max Beerbohm - concerning a wayward dandy who deceives a woman into marriage thanksto a nifty mask - The Happy Hypocrite is now also the fictional editor (and title) of a brand new journal for and about experimental art writing. Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life and edited by Maria Fusco, the A5 journal's first issue concentrates on Linguistic Hardcore and features the linguistic tricks of everyone from Cosey Fanni Tutti to Douglas Coupland.

A melange of fiction, scripts, descriptive guessing games, artwork, and interview, the Hypocrite called for a typography-led design thanks to the written nature of most of the contributors - with each section granted a different typographic language to reflect the diversity of the content. "We used Baskerville with a combination of monospace fonts for the body texts" says APFEL's Emma Thomas. "Our aim was to combine the languages of liturature of documentary, transcribing and scripts." Stencil fonts were used for titles to reflect old 1960s journals with pages a mixture of highbrow book paper and recycled magazine stock. Similarly issue one's cover raised a conundrum: how to achieve a balance between playfully experimental journal, something academic or research-led, and finally something that would sell alongside other magazines on the shelf?

Opting for a grainy black and white close-up shot of what appears to be someone's head, alongside the issues title, Linguistic Hardcore, in debossed pastel yellow, APFEL subverted the usual author/title hierarchy with the words "The Happy Hypocrite" rendered in tiny, almost insignificant type. With the contributors' names scattered seemingly at random on the reverse, the result is pretty grunge. Great Work.

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