Behind the scenes: Cut magazine

One of my favourite speakers from this year’s QVED conference was Anke Eberhardt, editor-in-chief of the German fashion and DIY magazine Cut, who spoke about their latest issue, made in collaboration with type foundry Monotype.

Initially sceptical of a commercial partnership, Anke showed the process of creating the issue, and explained how it turned out to be a creative as well as a commercial success. Keen to know more, I caught up with Anke to find out more about the collaboration and what the experience taught her.

You don’t categorise Cut as either a women’s magazine or a crafts magazine – how would you describe it?
We always say that we’re a fashion and DIY magazine. But it’s a challenge because it’s not a high-fashion magazine, it’s not a typical women’s magazine, neither is it the type of crafts magazine that you’d expect to find at your grandmother’s. It’s a mix. We feature young, cool designers and DIY tips, but also pure design pieces and travel articles. Each issue also comes with three different sewing patterns, one of which is a designer piece – we’ve worked with some really great designers like Stine Goya.

I’ve never found a magazine with a similar mix to us, which is really awesome, but it also makes it hard to approach advertisers because they don’t really understand it. The fashion people thinks it’s too crafty, while the crafts people think it’s too design-y. But the people who get it tend to really love it.

Had you worked with partners before?
Not on that scale. We had collaborated with brands for certain features, for example we did a themed issue on knitting and we collaborated with a brand that supplied us with the wool.

So how did the partnership with Monotype come about?
It was an idea that our publisher Horst Moser from Independent Medien-Design presented to us. He has really tight bonds to the design industry and Jürgen Siebert from Monotype approached him and suggested the collaboration. At first we were very sceptical; would it be a total sell-out? Would we be forced to do things we wouldn’t normally do?

So what convinced you to go forward with it?
Well, first off all, we’re a small independent magazine and they were offering a substantial amount of money compared to our normal advertisers, so from a financial perspective we couldn’t really turn it down.

But more importantly, after talking it through with Monotype we realised that the topic was perfect for CUT. We always work with typography and most of our headlines are handmade somehow; knitted, stitched, hand drawn… Our art directors Marta and Lucie love playing with letters, and once we started throwing ideas around we fell in love with it.

We decided that we would either go all in, or not do it at all. So we went all in and did our best to incorporate the theme into every aspect of the magazine. We have a DIY article on embossing letters onto various materials, type-themed photoshoots, and we also did an interview with a typeface, Monotype’s FF Hertz, ha!

I think the biggest threat when making a themed issue is that the reader isn’t interested in the topic and puts the magazine away. So we wanted to give our readers an introduction to typography in a way that was both informative and entertaining. So we incorporated pages that explain the basics of typography, and we also state which typefaces are used throughout the magazine.

Which feature did you most enjoy making?
Definitely the photoshoot where we created gigantic letters spelling out ‘wort’ (German for ‘word’). We spent days and days arranging everything from a wig to a trash can to designer clothes… anything! It was the weirdest way to understand how lettering works – just a slight shift in perspective or the wrong curve and everything looked wrong. We had so much fun making it, and learned loads too!

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