Synchron sets a strange tone
Lea Kloepel is editor of Synchron, the magazine she started earlier this year with her boyfriend and art director Johannes Farfsing, and which stands out as one of the strangest and most striking magazine launches I’ve seen for a long time. It’s dedicated to exploring contemporary visual art and fiction, but it does so in a way that is brilliantly inventive and entirely its own – Lea’s explanation of the origins of their weirdly organic typography is one of my all-time favourite examples of geeky magazine design obsession!
This is the sort of magazine that doesn’t reveal itself straight away and I don’t mind admitting that when I first read Synchron I didn’t completely understand everything I saw. But I was intrigued by the odd, sci-fi-inspired flights of fancy and the often gruesome aesthetic applied to stories about contemporary art and current affairs, and like Yana’s brilliantly cryptic juggling references mentioned in last week’s episode of the Stack podcast, these enigmatic editorial and design choices pulled me further into the magazine, and it was brilliant to hear Lea explaining her thinking behind the project.
We have copies of Synchron available to buy in the Stack shop now – head over there if you’d like to pick one up for yourself, or just to take a closer look at some of the spreads and stories. And remember that if you enjoy this conversation, you can follow us via Soundcloud or wherever you get your podcasts and we’ll deliver all our future episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
