Alex Hunting Studio’s comprehensive redesign of luxury magazine Sabato is led by simplicity and space

Produced in both Dutch and French for Belgium’s leading business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo, the weekly supplementary magazine Sabato that reports on arts and design is far from a simple task to design. In need of a facelift, the editorial team behind Sabato reached out to Alex Hunting Studio, the London-based creative agency founded by Kinfolk Design Director Alex Hunting, to elevate the quality of the magazine and find its position in the luxury magazine market. In consultation with the in-house design team, Hunting worked from the ground up, rebuilding the magazine from scratch, including its typographic and grid systems, physical and editorial format, image treatment and logotype. This came with an enormous set of challenges, both from the audience-focused perspective, accommodating Saboto’s existing readers whilst trying to appeal to a new younger congregation, as well as the logistical side. “The real considerations were around text lengths (when an article in one language might have a longer character count than another),” Hunting explains, recalling the issue with designing for multiple languages. “We had to provide a really comprehensive set of templates, with multiple character count options for each type of article/page,” Hunting tells us, explaining the extended issue with translations. He adds that “certain feature openers work with a particular headline in one language, but don’t work with the same headline translated, so again lots of variations of feature opener templates were needed.”