Ben Fehrman-Lee and Julia Novitch’s Balcony considers editorial design as a cinematic exercise

Launched in June 2021, biannual arts magazine Balcony covers contemporary creative discourse – collating together art, design, photography, writing, filmmaking and more – providing a platform for the artists’ voice in favour of criticism or review. With the content focusing on the notion of the everyday, Balcony seeks to challenge the perspective on high and low culture, as well as our commonplace relationship with art. This whim also directs the conceptual and aesthetic decisions behind the magazine’s design and art direction, a task accomplished by creative duo Ben Fehrman-Lee and Julia Novitch. Leading the magazine’s design is Facit Plakat, a typeface Fehrman-Lee and Novitch commissioned solely for the edition. Originally found in Otto Piene’s 1970 MIT Press artist book ‘More Sky,’ and digitised with type designer Wei Huang, Facit Plakat makes up every piece of dialogue or conversation across the magazine, sitting alongside Optimo’s Antique Legacy, which is used for the essays. The choice to use this combination of typefaces came from Fehrman-Lee and Novitch’s cinematic approach to the design, in which they considered the magazine as a film. “We conceived of interviews as screenplays, photographic sequences as videos, and magazine issues as episodes,” Fehrman-Lee and Novitch tell us, suitably relating the aesthetic form of a screenplay with the inclusion of creative conversation in Balcony.