What’s Up #48: Kenn Goodall

Bearded magazine is a curious beast [beardedmagazine.co.uk]. It’s design is part of very recent trend by young editorial creatives for something that goes beyond ‘The Unspectacular’ [linefeed/331] to something I don’t really want to tag as ‘Recession Chic’ but that’s going to have to do for now (see also: War [warmagazine.com] & Buck [buckstyle.com]). It’s Kevin Summers’ [thisismakebelieve.co.uk] ‘bare bones’ direction that gives centre stage the lush illustrations sprinkled throughout the magazine and the very earnest editorials. A lazy comparison would be Plan B magazine [planbmag.com], although when you compare the two you really can see how much visual clutter Bearded has had stripped out (including any paragragh spaces).

To help relaunch Bearded, Kevin has commissioned Kenn Goodall [bykenn.com] to produce this striking illustration of the band, Animal Collective, to adorn the cover. Kevin and Kenn have collaborated on a number of projects together before — Kevin’s cards for Kenn are particularly ace and they have recently produced a full colour zine-style affair known as Trouvé available via Kenn’s blog [bykenn.blogspot.com/trouv].