I. The Kitchen Window
Light behaves differently above a sink. It has witnessed too many dishes to hurry.
FIG. 02
A QUARTERLY FIELD GUIDE TO THE MIDDLE OF THINGS
MMIDDL
a magazine for the
curious, the patient,
and the faintly romantic.
SECTION ONE · A LETTER
FROM
FROM
THE MIDDLE
OF THE ROOM.
Welcome, dear reader, to the inaugural issue of MMIDDL — a modest publication devoted, as its ungainly name suggests, to the middle of things. Not the beginning (over-photographed) nor the end (over-eulogised), but the messy, fecund middle where sketches become something, where afternoons curdle into ideas, where a paragraph finds its verb.
We have assembled eight spreads, a centrefold photograph, and a small handful of numbers that will not quite add up. This is intentional. MMIDDL is not a magazine of certainties. It is a magazine of suspicions — typeset beautifully and printed in warm ink so the suspicions feel more trustworthy than they are.
Read the spreads in order, or don't. Skip the data if numbers bore you. Linger on the centrefold as long as you like. The binding is entirely metaphorical. — The Editors
— J. A. Holloway, ed.
FEATURE · No. 1
SHARP ANGLES, WARM PAPER.
Six brief essays on geometry, intimacy, and the quiet violence of a well-placed diagonal.
All design is an act of aggression toward neutrality. Nowhere is this clearer than in the angle — that moment when two lines refuse to be parallel and choose, instead, to argue.
The magazine spread has always understood this. The horizontal is safe. The vertical is tidy. But the diagonal is a shout: it cuts through columns, slices past gutters, and asks the reader to tilt, if only for a second, their relationship to gravity.
Pick up any issue of a 1970s supplement and run your thumb down the page. You will feel it before you see it: the typographer has arranged the columns so your attention falls diagonally, drawn by a slim rule line, a kerned headline, a cropped photograph.
The web, in its obsession with the rectangle, has largely forgotten this trick. MMIDDL, obstinately, remembers.
SECTION TWO · A PORTFOLIO
FOUR
FOUR
SMALL
OBSERVATIONS.
II. An Unhurried Hill
We climbed it because it was there. We stopped halfway because the view was already enough.
FIG. 03III. A Borrowed Library
The spines disagreed on everything except that dust was acceptable company.
FIG. 04IV. A Garden, Eventually
The tomatoes were late. The sun, patient. The kneeling, good for the shoulders, apparently.
FIG. 05
SECTION THREE · AN INDEX
BY THE
BY THE
NUMBERS,
MORE OR LESS.
0
of creative breakthroughs, by one estimate, occur in the unloved middle third of a project.
0
baseline grid, in pixels, upon which every line of this publication is patiently hung.
0
the year a Heidelberg offset press, somewhere in Basel, taught a photograph to dream in dots.
0
columns in our grid — the classic editorial backbone, never compromised.
0
the minimum angle at which a diagonal begins, in our view, to have a personality.
0
the gutter width — the quiet canyon between columns that lets the ink breathe.
SECTION FOUR · A COLOPHON
COLOPHON
COLOPHON
& GOOD
NIGHT.
MMIDDL is set in Commissioner, a variable sans-serif designed by Kostas Bartsokas, from the widths of which we have shamelessly asked too much. Accents and drop-caps are set in Fraunces, a soft serif with inktraps so warm they practically steam.
The paper is metaphorical; the grain, pure SVG noise. The colour palette is honeyed neutral, drawn from parchment, sage, sienna, and one well-aged jar of honey photographed at golden hour. No pixel was harmed in the making of this issue — merely lightly teased.
Built by human hands in HTML, CSS, and unfussed JavaScript. No frameworks, no trackers, no popovers asking for your email. You are welcome here as long as you like.
— Good night, and mind the middle.
❧