Elephant Magazine

Elephant is one of the art world’s most respected independent publications, giving artist led coverage of the art world and contemporary culture. They came to us through their bold logo, designed by acclaimed artist and editor in chief, Tschabalala Self, and a vision for an image driven website as eclectic as the art it covers. They wanted the site to feel fun and engaging, serious without being pretentious or aloof, carrying the intellectual rigour of every article while staying vibrant and inviting.

We started by understanding everything that already made Elephant feel like Elephant, then built a system flexible enough to hold it. A suite of three typefaces, each with its own feel and flavour, paired with a palette of sixteen brand colours that could be matched to each article, gave the site room to breathe and to surprise. As people scroll, the art, the colour and the type work together to intrigue, giving a sense of synthesis across Elephant’s varied verticals while still feeling eclectic, bound together without ever feeling uniform.

For the articles themselves, a centred layout became the default, carrying most of the magazine’s coverage, while a more immersive two column feature mode, built around asymmetric imagery, was reserved for the bigger stories, echoing the feeling of the printed magazine.

Across the whole site, the aim was to create something that felt right for an artist led arts publication, with design and artistic sensitivity applied to every area, translating the experience of reading Elephant in print while giving it a voice of its own online.