ZEN

AND THE ART OF MAGAZINE PUBLISHING

Image There's a School of Visual Arts subway ad with a tag-line that says something like "Follow your passion" beneath an impressionist painting of an empty bank tell. The bank teller's nameplate reads "Paul Gauguin". You might remember Paul Gauguin, the French modernist painter worked in a bank till he was thirty-five, then left it all behind to become an artist. He moved to Tahiti where he lived out his days painting exotic landscapes and women. Here's the Swiss version:
Stefan Jermann did a three year apprenticeship at a bank in Bern (the Swiss capital), then moved to Los Angeles to further his business studies. There he was lured into a life of photography and eventually found himself at the Art College Center of Design in Pasadena. He focused on his new found passion as well as magazine design. Here's the departure from the French story: he returns to Switzerland, lands in Zurich, teams up with Walter Stähli, an art director. Together they form TRUCE a magazine that somehow defies "magazine-ness", but somehow also fulfills it.

"I wanted to create a magazine, something that hadn't really existed, the main focus was creating something that didn't have this commercial edge—you know every fifth page an advertiser... I wanted it generously designed, a magazine where you could begin and stay there for a while."

—Stefan Jermann

" I'd love to do a magazine with materials that stop or come to an end. I want to do something like that with photographic paper— the magazine would come in a black bag and once you opened it, the paper begins to develop in the light and eventually darkens. It means you can't finish the magazine, as with many things in life—so it becomes a metaphor.

—Walter Stähli

All four volumes of TRUCE comprise of insightful texts, conceptually satisfying photography and vivid graphics, but more importantly they possess a distinctive flow almost impossible to pinpoint. Stähli says his vision for the art direction for the magazine is "timelessness". Jermann asserts the need for advertisers sympathetic to the concept of a niche audience. Indeed, one striking aspect of TRUCE is how the advertising pages are almost indiscernible from the content, they vibrate aesthetically with the rest of the layout.

"I wanted to do something I'm not ashamed of in five years, give it a classic approach, avoid trendiness... "

—Walter Stähli

"The thing is, what are you going to talk about, that hasn't been talked about before? It's easy to make a magazine with nice photography, nice illustrations, but how do you come up with a great concept— that goes beyond just pretty pictures?"

—Stefan Jermann

Each issue of the magazine celebrates a theme: Genius, Passion, Korea, Red Hook— thus far, and handled in often unexpected ways: leafing through you stumble onto hitherto unseen Jimi Hendrix; silent luminous street corners of Red Hook, Brooklyn; meditations on discipline by Korean students; photographic profiles of Mexican midget toreros; a gleaming Bladerunner-esque taxi in Shinjuku district, or thoughtfully candid portraits of nuns.

"I wanted it to be more dynamic, sometimes even slower, more detailed... To have feature articles presented in a very different way—more of an encyclopedic approach where you can actually learn something... And then you have pages where you can relax again—which makes the whole magazine seem longer, giving the impression of more content."

—Walter Stähli

"I always wanted to do books and Truce is the in-between-of a book and a magazine."

—Stefan Jermann

"There needs to be a concept above all, like a story

you can tell throughout a business report."

—Walter Stähli

TRUCE diaries are the duo's adventures in book publishing: "Walter and I had this idea that individual artists could keep a diary over a certain period of time and reveal their personal thoughts to give people an insight into their daily life." So far they tested the theory with the cult Swiss band, The Young Gods— it sold out within three months. The Young Gods' diary visually plunges you into the collaged thought processes of the band and is bookended with a limited edition music CD only available with that publication. Next up is the Dutch super-band, The Nits. Stähli thinks the approach this time will be more structured, calm, minimal...

"To be honest, producing TRUCE with such minimal means
is very guerilla style—as stupid as it sounds,
it's really just trying to do it, making all the mistakes that
you can make and learning from it."

—Stefan Jermann

"80% of the day I do business reports for pharmaceutical
companies, tech companies and the postal service.

In my experience there are a lot of possibilities.
More than you would think."

—Walter Stähli

Jermann and Stähli abandoned the serial format of putting out TRUCE several times a year, "we don't just have the capacity—we're a team of four and we all work other jobs a hundred percent. So it's a lot of evenings and weekends...". They've opted for a more organic approach, as Jermann puts it: "whenever it's done, it's done." Even so, TRUCE has garnered an international following, not limited to taste-makers, culturati and designers— people outside of the design culture realm are responsive too, Jermann reports, "I've talked to 65 year olds and 18 year old kids who loved it."