Graphic design magazines are an underrated resource today. Books on design can be become renowned, hallowed even, while most people would now struggle to name a reputable graphic design magazine. It wasn’t always this way. Titles such as Emigré and Grafik were legendary in their own time but their names are meaningless to anyone who hasn’t been in the industry for years.
As it happens, graphic designers today have never been better served with books and magazines on the subject. Both are great tools, but magazines are more agile and attuned to changes and developments in design matters, so let’s look at what we think are the most useful. Full disclosure – we’ve seeing a falling off in sales of both books and magazines in 2026 caused by fast-track adoption of AI tools. Against that, our business is based in a two-university UK city with numerous agencies and studios (that’s why we go heavy on the subject) and we’re hearing from two groups – designers and copywriters – who have struggled for work over the last year but who are now experiencing a bounce in work offers as early results from a changing, AI-impacted landscape continue to underwhelm both commissioner and client. It’s going to be long settling in period and you’ll find that most of the following straddle both digital and print channels pretty well.
Eye is the most analogue on this list and loses nothing from it. It tackles all areas of graphic design, being essentially aimed at both practitioners and design students but always offering plenty of pop/cultural and historical contextualisation to make it an accessible as well as informative read for anyone interested in design and visual culture. The magazine is technically a quarterly but issues seldom run to schedule, with frequent long gaps between releases so when they appear it’s very much a case of delayed gratification. Eye was founded in 1990 by Rick Poynor, a respected writer on graphic design and visual communication. The current issue is edited by John L Walters, only the third editor after Max Bruinsma (1997-1999). It has continued to attract contributions from respected and longstanding industry voices for well over three decades now, an indication of its enduring merit and appeal.
Slanted is a biannual German typography magazine and the print extension of what is now a major European digital portal and forum for news and debate on graphic design and typography issues. Other print releases include typography yearbooks and plenty of books, some of which are classics (see Flexible Visual Systems). So it is, as such, a large, immersive environment for type and design freaks. Like the portal the magazine is an evolving project that began life in 2005 to complement the blog with a survey of typography, graphic design, illustration and photography. The first 20 issues examined specific typographic classifications before a new phase dominated by issues that explored typographical and graphic design in relation to different countries and cities. These covered not only the likes of Paris, New York and Berlin but less obvious but type-significant destinations such as Helsinki, Marrakech, Warsaw and Cuba, underlining the magazine’s curiosity about international type design. It continues to publish location-led issues but these are more evenly blended with issues on more general areas (fashion, sex) and releases that attempt to keep pace with developments in the modern workspace and the digital environment (Digital Tools, Experimental Type, AI).
IdN is a design showcase of sorts and a well-kept secret despite having been around for a while. The title is an acronym for International designers' Network and it’s one of two titles from Hong Kong among our picks. The ‘network’ in the title is global and the work featured is international but with a bias towards its own regional scene, and that’s a good thing. Each issue is devoted entirely to one area of design that is often usefully outside the usual categories with releases on data visualisation, event/festival identities and wayfinding in addition to regular surveys on poster design, character design, typeface design and the like. Its value lies in bringing you quickly up to speed with what other studios are generating in specific design areas, and very time you put an issue on the shelf it feels as though you’re building a resource library. And you are. Because it’s our bestselling design title we keep the back issues alive as long as we can as IdN is slow to date, although other retailers have woken up to its popularity and stocks are not what they used to be.
TYPEONE is dedicated to type design and typographic culture. The whole TYPE01 (that’s publisher and platform) journey is worth travelling if you’re looking for new ideas, energy and a commitment to expanding what type can do and who can do it. TYPEONE first appeared in 2019, wholly invested in the idea of establishing creative type as foundational and tangental to discussion and developments in design. And it’s gone a long way to achieving this, with the publisher expanding beyond the magazine to operate two independent type foundries (one dedicated to showcasing the work of women type designers and other under-represented groups) and running both a type design service and a type tutorial series. The magazine is up to 10 issues now and highly recommended.
Our last recommendation is BranD, another magazine from Hong Kong that surveys design across a wide range of disciplines in themed issues. These include visual art, advertising, architecture, graphic design, product design, packaging design and more, all examined with an eye toward creative branding. Some releases can relatively conceptual or issue-driven, but they always provide a degree of specialisation that allows for valuable in-depth analysis and insights crucial for anyone involved in the creative industries. Whereas IdN is more of a showcase BranD takes a more instructive approach that makes content as accessible to those just starting out or thinking about working in any of these areas as it does to established practitioners. Recent themes have included designing for music, using foreign typefaces, working with limited colour combinations and setting up a studio. BranD is produced bi-monthly by one of the largest art book and packaging publishers in Asia Pacific which explains the inventive packaging add-ons and frequent inclusion of freebies such as posters, stickers and foldouts.