Sabat Magazine 2 social media reception

In the beginning of 2015 I got an incredible e-mail from a London College of Fashion MA graduate. It was Elisabeth Krohn saying she had seen my work on Behance, and asking me if I had the interest to design a magazine about witches. She couldn't know at the time that the occult is one of my favourite subjects since my childhood. And I couldn't know at the time, what a joy this project would be, and how wonderful it would be to work with her: all her suggestions made the magazine more beautiful, all the collaborators she finds have an amazing work, all her texts are smart, top-notch literature.

One of the best design decisions we got in the beginning of the project was to keep everything chill/minimal, while keeping things edgy. In this way, the content (photography, illustrations, texts) could shine. Since we were creating a print publication it was really important to have a strong tactile feeling, and "little surprises" for our readers throughout the publication. We were indie, so we could also try some stuff commercial magazines don't, such as not having a printed Masthead on the cover, or not explaining or promoting anything at all on it. There is a lot of conceptual thought / theory / experimentation / feedbacks behind these decisions (renaissance of print, anti branding, and so on), but the most important thing all along was to make something beautiful and precious. 

At the time we started the design process, I wrote in a post-it "Is it the best magazine in the World?". It was a reminder I still have to keep tweaking and pushing the design whenever I can. Eventually you have to stop and send stuff to print or are unable to do everything you wish (by time, printer limitations, budget, inexperience, lack of skills, etc) so it's harder than it seems to make the best magazine in the World, but anyway Sabat 1 got an incredible reception and made me really proud of. 

(We got critiques of course. Specially regarding race and female representations. We handled it with respect, conversation and giving space to the ones who criticised. But this is a subject for other text, written by another(s) author(s)). 

Now, in September, we launched the Second issue with a lot of editorial and design improvements, a printer change, new papers, more incredible content from amazing collaborators, and different surprises. I still didn't receive my copies, because... well... Brazilian post-office system sucks, but in the meantime I have been reading about what our readers have been saying about Sabat 2 and it is really heart-warming to see people caring, enjoying and sharing the stuff we made. Quoting Spears: "we did it again", learning enough to make a better product. 

So proud right now, with love, because love is the law.