Jordan Maier

designer
illustrator
p-bass enthusiast

Felix Culpa magazine

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Felix Culpa

brand identity | typography & layout | illustration | pre-press design

An autodidact is a self-taught person. But autodidacticism is also an attitude. It's curiosity and self-motivation. It's a willingness to fail and even an enthusiasm for failure. It's a radical openness to all avenues of new thought, and it relishes a diversity of ideas.

In a world where specialization is the aim of education, how can we pique the curious reader's interest in a variety of new topics?

Felix Culpa is a monthly magazine for the autodidact. It explores concrete skills (pragmatic, artistic, and novel) and liberal-arts topics (history, science, philosophy). The purpose of Felix Culpa is to help its readers gain an ever more complete education.

Timeframe:

16 weeks

Tools:

Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign

see my process...

Felix Culpa vol. 1

a spread introducing a feature article about Seaplane racing in the Mediteranian

A magazine spread about the forces of flight

a spread with original illustrations

a spread with custom typography introducing a series of articles on English grammar

A magazine spread about standard English

spreads showing a layout for a feature article

A magazine spread about fixing a bike tire

a spread for a front of book article

Process

Felix Culpa's tone

Quirky, funny, off-beat, light-hearted. Irreverent and intellegent. A Kurt Vonnegut-style mixture of mid-western sincerity and acerbic humor.

Felix Culpa's readers

an image showing the flatplan for a magazine

a portion of the flatplan for Felix Culpa vol. 1

Typography

The typeface used for all headings (except for feature articles that use custom display fonts) is Quasimoda, a friendly sans-serif with lots of different weights. If you've made it this far into my portfolio, you've probably noticed that I'm a big fan of sans-serifs like these. But to prove that I'm not some kind of fetishist for sans-serifs, the body copy for all of Felix Culpa is the indomitable Caslon, a serif font with a long track record.

Colors

The colors for Felix Culpa tend to be solid primary colors. There's a dark blue that gets used in the masthead and illustrations. I wanted the colors to feel warm and have a kind of a naïve simplicity.

masthead design and sketches for a magazine's branding

Masthead design and sketches for Felix Culpa's branding

the moodboards for Felix Culpa

Special thanks to Jill Vartenigian for her feedback on this project

Colophon

The entirety of this website was set in Outfit. Designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida for Smartsheet Inc., Outfit is a geometric sans-serif based on the wordmark of its namesake company, outfit.io.