Hasta La Ideas

It’s always fascinating to see how things might have looked if different design directions had been taken. Matt Willey recently shared a video of the dozens of alternate cover and logo designs considered for the late, lamented Zembla magazine.

Launched in 2003, Zembla was a mould-breaking literary magazine. Though it survived for just eight issues, its bravura art direction and brilliant photography won many awards for the team of creative director Vince Frost, editor Dan Crowe and Dan Crowe and design director Matt Willey (CR’s designer of the year for 2014).

Some of the spirit of Zembla survives in Port magazine, the men’s title founded by Crowe, Willey and Kuchar Swara. In this video, shown at the Semi-Permanent conference in Auckland this year, Willey gives us a glimpse of what might have been with “just a few of the hundreds of cover tries” he and Frost went through for Zembla’s launch issue.