Spell Magazine
A lifestyle publication that needed to grow up without losing its personality.
Art Direction • Editorial design
Spell was a lifestyle magazine created by Feme to sit alongside their hair brands — beauty, fashion, culture, and identity for women of colour. The approach was deliberately soft-sell: weave the brands into a publication people actually wanted to read rather than push products directly.
The problem was the design was working against that ambition. It was visually overloaded — at least five colours per page, a fluorescent special colour used throughout, and decorative elements like stars and hearts scattered across layouts. It looked like it was aimed at teenagers. The actual target audience was women 20 and up, and the feedback confirmed it: a reader survey and conversations with hair shop owners — where the print edition was distributed — both pointed to the same thing. The magazine felt too young.
I led the redesign — editorial system, type hierarchy, and layout. I also proposed moving the digital edition onto Issuu, which is where the impact was most measurable.
The redesign wasn't about making the magazine look serious — it was about making it look considered. I stripped back the colour palette to near-monochrome, which immediately made the publication feel more mature and shifted the focus onto the photography and writing. The decorative elements went entirely. I built a flexible type system with a clear hierarchy that could work across different story formats — long features, short columns, image-led pieces — without needing individual decisions on every page.
The 40% increase in digital reading time confirmed what the visual changes suggested — people were actually staying to read it.
