Interview with Andrew P Hind

Andrew got the design bug from his father, and went on to study at the same art college in Carlisle. He spent 25 years in editorial design working on titles including DC-UK and PC Gamer, and 20 years on Edge magazine. He is now the co-founder and creative director of ON and Hybrid Publications. He is also the art director of Tune & Fairweather, the publisher of luxury books like You Died and Grace Given, and which specialises in the games of FromSoftware.

Andrew is the creative director at Hybrid Publications and responsible for the fantastic design throughout ON: Volume One.

How did you first get into designing magazines?

Andrew Hind: I wanted to be a designer from a young age, just like my dad, so I went off to art college as soon as I could. I was an avid collector of video game magazines, and around the time I started my design foundation course I saw an advert for a new magazine called Edge in my Gamesmaster magazine. I bought issue one, then became a subscriber from issue two, and something changed in me from that point.

Edge opened up a whole new world. I was becoming an adult and the videogame industry was growing up too. You could be into games and not be embarrassed to admit it, and now there was this beautiful, sophisticated, cool magazine that was blazing the trail. I told my family and friends that I was going to be the art editor of Edge. It seemed like a big dream living in a small northern town, but I got to work. After my degree had ended I heard that one of my fellow students had got a job interview at Future Publishing so I got on the phone. They had filled all the interview positions for the roles they had available but I said, if the art director had ten minutes to look at my portfolio I would do the 12-hour round trip to Bath. I was lucky enough to get a job on one of the PC titles, but before long I made it onto a games magazine called Planet PC, a kids PC games mag. From there I worked on DCUK, a Dreamcast magazine, and PC Gamer. Then one day a job on Edge went up on the board and I finally got my chance. The interview went well, my dream came true and I started a 20-year-long stint on Edge and loved every minute of it.

Could you tell me a bit about where the idea for ON came from?

Andrew Hind: After 20 years, I thought I had fulfilled my mission on Edge and I had also stated to work with Tune & Fairweather on luxury game books, so when they offered a full-time position, I made the hard decision to leave Edge. But I knew my love affair with videogame publications wasn't over. My new mission was to create something that combined the high-end luxury of the books I was working on and longform features I so enjoyed working on at Edge. Something you want to keep, take your time to enjoy and display proudly on your bookshelf or coffee table. I was thinking half magazine, half book, so I named the company Hybrid Publications. ON is my attempt to create a videogame publication that works in today’s world: amazing longform writing, bold design, premium print quality, from veterans of the industry. I wanted to do my bit to keep the world of videogame publishing alive and give writers and designers the kinds of opportunities that I had at the start of my career.

What is it that you think makes magazines so special still? What's their magic?

Andrew Hind: There is something special about picking up a piece of physical media. All your senses are in play. Feeling the quality of the paper, smelling the ink, flicking through the colourful pages and having the pleasurable reading experience - that's only possible in print. There is plenty of good journalism online, but it's very rare that it is teamed with bespoke design and has the room to breathe and really get stuck into a meaty topic. A magazines feature is a team effort, and ON gave me the opportunity to collaborate with lots of former workmates. When a great subject comes together with fantastic writing and a design concept that elevates it further, then that is truly magic. It's a very enjoyable experience to be involved in.

Are there any layouts in the current issue you're really proud of?

Andrew Hind: I wanted to celebrate editorial design in ON, so I made the decision to concentrate on contrast, dynamics, grids, graphics and typography rather than illustration and special treatments. I'm after experimental design concepts that communicate the mood of the subject matter. One of the experimental design concepts was in Nathan Brown's run-based games feature. When he explained there was an elements of repetition and randomness in running games, I knew it was time for a concept I had wanted to explore for a long time. My mac crashes a lot in Adobe inDesign and creates these crazy visual glitches. After some time I started to see the beauty in these purely random mash ups of lines and pattern, so I started to screen grab the crashes over the last few years. I have combined those random visual glitches with runs of gradient colour and repetitive grids of arrows in Nathan's feature to try and communicate the concept of the genre.

See all the features in ON: Volume One: