Okay so I have been reading a whole bunch of design magazines  and  the one that really piqued my interest was [ENJIN]MAGAZINE.Yes, you guessed right I just tried to emulate the ENJIN magazine’s logo in the first sentence, because I have to give tribute to how well Gregor Naude and his team organize the ENJIN magazine. Every bit of information in the magazine is completely different from the next, but yet they have found a way to harmonize the content by uniting all the elements of the articles under one theme. Whether it’s imagery, text or even ads; everything is carefully considered and is brought to terms with their theme at hand.

LAYOUT

The layout in ENJIN magazine surprisingly enough follows the conventional way of organizing information with the heavy use of a three-column grid and occasionally throwing in a two column grid. The cover below is done with a three-rowgrid. For me it feels like the layout of this cover forces my eye to read the elements of this cover in a systematic sequence.

                                               

TYPE

The type used in ENJIN magazine is usually a serif font for both headings and body copy. They also use ligatures, as seen in their logo, cover and the page below. Visual unity between bodies of text is achieved through Grids , hierarchical organization of text and grouping of information as in the image below.

                                      

CONTENT

The content found in ENJIN magazine is usually publications of designs that have been done by other designers. Unlike magazines like Smashing Magazine that are purely meant for designers and even go as far as to publish tutorials on how to design, ENJIN is all about the world around the designer and how the designer can interact with the environment. As a result it sometimes comes across as political media, with images and articles that attack the “Taboos”, of modern society like; racism, political violence and homosexuality. The issue of racism can be seen in the image below.

                                         

This image coupled with the words “White people are going to burn”, was done by Anton Kannemeyer. The image shows a black man lying on the ground naked and appearing to be cold while in the background a white man sleeps in his bed. In the above image he is depicting the cold past that was apartheid. Below are more images of how ENJIN magazine takes a “in your face approach”, to the treatment of their images.

                                         

                                          

                                         

                                         

                                 

The target market for ENJIN is designers first and foremost, then people in their late teens up to people in their 40’s. For the designers it serves as a port for communicating ideas, concepts and even new tools and software that help or speed up the design process. For the late teens it shows things like skateboard designs and tech news and for the people in their 40’s it becomes a medium that discusses politics in a light and 

sometimes satirical manner. 

                                              

In conclusion [ENJIN] MAGAZINE is a design magazine that is clearly post modernist. It challenges social and moral issues that most magazines would not dare to fathom, but at the same time doing it in such a way that it almost feels natural. The content is carefully arranged using the grid while at times it is just pasted on a page, but surprisingly enough it remains organized and achieves visual unity and harmony. You could almost call it organized chaos.

For more http://www.enjin.co.za/magazine