F.U.C.K. Magazine

F.U.C.K. stands for Florence Urban Cocktail Kitchen. It’s free, it does the rounds of selected restaurants, cocktail bars, hotels and venues, and it has no interest in being glossy: the tone is direct, visual, often rough round the edges. Design and content tell the same story.

The challenge is to make eleven issues that are all different, yet all recognisable, moving from mixology to food and wine, from design to urban culture. There’s a shared aesthetic, and within it every piece gets its own small-scale art direction: an interview with a bartender has a different tone from a report on a restaurant.

The tabloid is big and physical: you open it out on the table. I worked on grids designed for wide pages, on text that holds up at different reading distances and on images that wouldn’t carry the same weight on an A4 page.

The grids hold the issues together; within them, each feature moves in its own way. I follow production all the way through, right up to overseeing the print run.

In all, I’ve laid out eleven covers and dozens of features.

For me it’s also a lab: the place where I try out ideas, mix visual languages and keep my layout skills sharp, and what I learn there goes into every other project. It’s an ongoing collaboration with FUL Magazine, and issue by issue it has become one of the jobs I care about most.