Victory Journal: Blood & Asphalt
Delivered to Stack subscribers in Jan 2014

by sevfurneaux in January 2014

A sports magazine made in Brooklyn, Victory Journal is a true labour of love. Its large-format pages are packed with beautiful photography, lovely illustrations and some of the best sports writing you’ll find anywhere – essential reading for even the most committed couch potato.

www.victoryjournal.com

Name
Christopher Isenberg

Job title
Creative director

What is Victory?
The semi-annual manifestation of whatever we’re interested in on the plane of sporting culture.

What makes it different to the rest?
I think we have a particular take on the sporting universe – we’re really obsessed with it. Our creative process doesn’t have a lot to do with looking at other people’s things, so hopefully there’s something in the final product that is unique and interesting – it’s just what we’re compelled to do.

Who makes Victory?
It’s really a tight circle of people. Me, Aaron and our partner Kimou, who’s in Switzerland, are the creative directors, then we have Justin who’s the associate art director and Versaci, who works with me on the edit side. We’ve just brought in Piotr Orlov to help us also on the edit side, and then there are our contributors, a community of photographers, writers and illustrators, who cross over a lot with our circle of friends.

Who reads it?
It’s heavy in New York and we’re trying to get into the major American cities and major international cities to reach the people and places that we think will share our sensibility. It’s more the knowledge and interest demographic than it is the age or gender demographic – those people who need to find it will find it.

Why do you work in magazines?
My original life goal was to work in magazines, to be like a globe-trotting international sports feature reporter for a glossy magazine. I was interested in practicing a kind of sports journalism that I was exposed to in Sports Illustrated growing up, and looking further back in Esquire, or Life Magazine.

Aside from the print magazine, what else are you involved in?
The mothership is our creative agency Doubleday & Cartwright. We basically started doing the things we wanted to do off our own bat, and over time that led to us getting commercial work or creative agency work based on people liking what we were doing in our personal work. And No Mas was a personal project I started when I segued out of journalism, basically recreating vintage t-shirts from photographs I’d seen, or sometimes commenting on sports through t-shirts. So there’s a lot of shared DNA between No Mas, Doubleday and Victory.

What would you change about Victory if you could?
More sponsorship money! I think right now we’re just really happy with the way things are going and the trajectory of things. Each quarter it gets a bit tighter, we run a bit better, the colours come out a bit better.

Where do you see Victory in five years?
I’d like to have a few hardback books under our belt, and we’re really excited about what we’re going to do with video and animation, which is a big part of the work we do at our studio. It’s hard to say right now what’s going to be the right way to get what we make to the people we want to see it, but we’re trying to think holistically and creatively about that.