Edge magazine. Video game art and design in print.
I’ve been buying Edge magazine for over 30 years. I still remember picking up the debut issue back in 1993. The one with the black sealed bag and the teaser campaign that described it as “not for everyone”.
A lot has changed since then. But the magazine’s commitment to layout and design, quality writing, and fanboy baiting review scores has helped it weather several console generations, the arrival of the the internet, and a bunch more.
Andrew Hind has seen a lot of that firsthand. He joined the magazine in 2003 as the deputy art director and spent the next twenty years overseeing the look and feel. I recently spoke to him about the Edge, the industry, and his new venture - ON magazine.
Let’s start with your background. How did you get the Edge gig, and were you working on video game magazines prior to that?
I wanted to be a designer from a young age, just like my dad, so I went off to art college as soon as I could. I was an avid collector of video game magazines, and around the time I started my design foundation course I saw an advert for a new magazine called Edge. I bought issue one, then became a subscriber from issue two.
Edge opened up a whole new world. I was becoming an adult and the video game industry was growing up too. You could be into games and not be embarrassed to admit it, and now there was this beautiful, sophisticated, cool magazine that was blazing the trail. I told my family and friends that I was going to be the art editor of Edge. It seemed like a big dream living in a small northern town, but I got to work.
After my degree had ended I heard that one of my fellow students had got a job interview at Future Publishing so I got on the phone. They had filled all the positions for the roles they had available but I told them I would make the 12-hour round trip to Bath if the art director had ten minutes to look at my portfolio.
I was lucky enough to get a job on one of the PC titles, but before long I made it onto a games magazine called Planet PC, a kids PC games mag. From there I worked on DC-UK, a Dreamcast magazine, and PC Gamer. Then one day a job on Edge went up on the board and I finally got my chance. The interview went well, my dream came true and I started a 20-year-long stint on Edge and loved every minute of it.
You started with Edge in 2003, at which point it already had a very strong visual identity. How do you go about adding your own ideas to a magazine like that while still preserving its legacy? Is it better to do it slowly? Or rip it off like a band aid? And which did you choose?
I probably went in too gung-ho [trying] to make my mark and inject my design into the magazine. It was early in my career and I had to learn that you need to master designing for the brand before evolving it. The audience expect a familiar look and love the product, so you have a responsibility there.
There is also a big corporate machine around you, so changes in direction need to be approved. Major changes like a redesign cost money too, so they were rare at my time on Edge as online was the focus of the publisher. As time went on I was able to inject more of my style into the features but this was helped by the fact that my favourite part of the magazine's visual language was its clean bold minimalism, which is important in my style.
What was the working environment like at Edge back in 2003 vs 2023 when you left? I assume the staffing and funding was a lot healthier back in the day? And how did that impact your role?
You're right, there were probably 10 to 12 people at the magazine at the start and 3 or 4 at the end so it was a very different environment. Also by the end everyone was working from home so none of that close, in person collaboration. But the biggest change was that in 2003 we were all young excited writers and designers, fresh out of university. The culture was work hard, play hard with a massive social scene, we would stay late in the night, come in on weekends and often end up in the pub.
What about the technology? Was there any significant difference from a production perspective between 2003 and 2023? Or had most of the technological heavy lifting been done by then?
I joined the publishing company while in-house film was still being used. The production editor would check the film for any mistakes and if one was found we would update the doc and then walk to the other end of town to pick up the new film. I don’t miss those times, it was soon checking on PDF which was much more efficient.
Getting a magazine like Edge out every month must be an arduous task. There are countless things that have to align. How fine did you have to cut it deadline wise, and are there any particular horror stories you’d like to share?
The first decade was a lot of late nights trying to hit deadlines and going late. But that became less and less tolerated by the management over time. There was one deadline I remember that a writer was putting the last touches to the last article we needed to send the last page to the printers. They agonised over the final wording for hours, stared blankly at the screen, got up, walked around, thought some more, changed a line, deleted it, then the process started again. This might sound absurd, but the team was absolutely committed to perfection, or as close as we could get, this environment of striving for your best work was extremely exciting but could chew you up and spit you out.
The video game magazine industry was still relatively healthy back in 2003. These days Edge is one of a few magazines left. Was there a specific point where you realised the monthly publication model was doomed? And did you think Edge would survive as long as it has?
There have been many points where I thought it was doomed, mostly around magazine closures. The most recent only being in the last few months when Play (formally Official Playstation Magazine - OPM) closed after nearly 30 years. If you consider that issue 42 of OPM sold 453,571 copies in 1999, then that is quite a downfall, so it's been a slow painful death.
The fact Edge has survived, I think, is down to the quality of writing and design staying high. [In the process] it’s presented an alternative to the short form throw-away articles you find online. Print is the perfect vehicle for in-depth, serious, long form writing about the industry.
I think video game magazines have been my biggest passion in life so it's sad to see them slowly disappear and that is why I have wanted to keep it going and developed a new games journal called ON.
Do you have a favourite magazine cover that you designed for Edge? And any that didn’t quite work out the way you expected?
A couple of highlights come to mind, issue 345 - the ‘Feel Better’ cover - was the first month of lock down and we wanted to do something memorable. We struggled about how to visually present that concept on the cover for a long time. An idea came to me in a meeting, “How about a tower block full of game characters playing games and having fun, despite the difficult times we were facing.” It's very satisfying when you have a breakthrough and the team is behind your idea.
The other was issue 300, we wanted to celebrate our past so the cover and main feature was my love letter to the old Edge design I so loved. I did the cover in the style of the first design period of Edge and I did each feature spread in a different design period from the first decade of the magazine evolution.
The biggest disappointment was issue 310, we had one of the most elaborate treatments. Spot varnish and a translucent dust jacket for the game Destiny 2. The spot varnish was lumpy and grainy and the dust jacket didn't fit so it was warped and misaligned. I try not to think about that one.
Tell us about ON. How did that all come about? And how is it different to working on an issue of Edge?
After 20 years, I thought I had fulfilled my mission on Edge and I had also started to work with Tune & Fairweather on luxury game books, so when they offered me a full-time position, I made the hard decision to leave Edge.
But I knew my love affair with video game publications wasn't over. My new mission was to create something that combined the high-end luxury of the books I was working on and long-form features I so enjoyed working on at Edge. Something you want to keep, take your time to enjoy and display proudly on your bookshelf or coffee table.
I was thinking half magazine, half book, so I named the company Hybrid Publications. ON is my attempt to create a videogame publication that works in today’s world: amazing longform writing, bold design, premium print quality, from veterans of the industry. I wanted to do my bit to keep the world of videogame publishing alive and give writers and designers the kinds of opportunities that I had at the start of my career.
What’s something I should ask you about O/N? -
Tell us about the design philosophy of ON? I wanted to celebrate editorial design in ON, so I made the decision to concentrate on colour, contrast, dynamics, grids, graphics and typography rather than illustration and special treatments. I'm after experimental design concepts that communicate the mood of the subject matter. One of the experimental design concepts was in Nathan Brown's run-based games feature.
When he explained there was an element of repetition and randomness in running games, I knew it was time for a concept I had wanted to explore for a long time. My mac crashes a lot in Adobe inDesign and creates these crazy visual glitches. After some time I started to see the beauty in these purely random mash ups of lines and patterns, so I started to screen grab the crashes over the last few years. I have combined those random visual glitches with runs of gradient colour and repetitive grids of arrows in Nathan's feature to try and communicate the concept of the genre.
