3 images showing three different issues of Equis Magazine

Equis Magazine, Cristóbal Ayala Roche, Pedro Resendez, 2024 BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, UAL

University of the Arts London

UAL Showcase Collections

Shelf Life

A person holding up a book with a red page on the left, and one with an illustration of tomato and eggs on the right.

TOMATO EGG is a zine that blends the cultural narratives and creative works of the Chinese diaspora in London through the universal medium of food, exploring the traditional dish of tomatoes and scrambled eggs and using it as a metaphor to delve into broader themes of identity, nostalgia, and home.&quot;This is a lovely little zine using food to reflect on Chinese culture in London and the West. It&#39;s very personal, but uses that perspective to discuss more universal cultural curiosities, so it becomes more than just nostalgia or individual memories. It shows me a view of the world as I&#39;ve not seen it before, and I love it when a magazine is able to do that.”– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

TOMATO EGG Zine, Issue #1

image of two magazines one on top of the other. 

Dishwater places the mundane front and centre, encouraging audiences to directly consider often-overlooked aspects of everyday life. &quot;This project is fun but not playing for laughs. Magazines are often associated with glamour, and I like the fact that someone&#39;s gone the other way here. They&#39;ve come up with a solid conceptual idea, but then they&#39;ve also figured out how to express that in a way that feels appropriate to the idea behind it. It takes some level of skill to be able to present a photo of a toilet in a way that looks attractive. It&#39;s got a certain curiosity to it that I like.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Dishwater: a Mundane Magazine & Ordinary Objects

These are displays of some of the pages of the book I designed, I used diffuse style to de-blur the colours to give a healing effect.

The Herbal Compendium provides young audiences with a comprehensive understanding and opportunity to try Chinese herbal medicine, thereby promoting the inheritance and development of Chinese medicine culture. &quot;This publication is beautifully made and looks like it has been carefully researched. It uses lovely illustrations to communicate a sense of what makes these herbs more than a set of ingredients.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

The Herbal Compendium

Chapbook is a bilingual Arabic/English book subscription series presenting curated selections of translated works from the Arab world. Each edition covers a different theme and features regional artists, aiming to preserve and promote Arab heritage while serving as an educational tool for language learning and cultural exchange. This presents a nice idea of using print to preserve Arab heritage while also communicating it to a new audience, with English text running one way, and Arabic text running the other. That’s something I’ve seen done in magazines like Safar and Al Hayya and it works well here too. I imagine it’s also useful to have both languages side by side, so if you’re able to read in both you can appreciate the particular decisions made by the translator.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Chapbook

dhamaka magazine with some of its pages displayed.

dhamaka is an independent print magazine exploring South Asian culture and nightlife from the point of view of people from mixed, first and second-generation and third-cultural backgrounds, based in the UK.
“This magazine expresses the energy and explosive enthusiasm of ‘dhamaka’ and feels like an accessible and inclusive representation of South Asian culture and nightlife in Britain. It has a kind of explosiveness that comes through on the page.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

dhamaka

Seize is a collaborative magazine founded by Nataliya Belova and Lucy Siegler, covering the cutting edge of London’s young creative scene. &quot;Seize Magazine is rough and scrappy, but feels like it’s creating a specific aesthetic. As a student, you probably don&#39;t have amazing access to big stars, but maybe you do know a bunch of people who are doing interesting things. I really like the way that their definition of ‘creativity’ includes dry stone wall restoration. They clearly decided that it deserves a place in their magazine, and that’s all it takes for the story to be included. I also like the design; it works with the kind of subject matter they&#39;re covering and embraces its messiness.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Seize Magazine

An open spread and the cover page of a magazine about graffiti.

Vandal is a reclamation of a title that was once used to devalue the artistry and work of graffiti artists for so long. Composed of a typeface inspired by the streets of London and a publication, the project aims to highlight the rich history of graffiti and allow people to learn about it in the style of a magazine, and the meaning and culture surrounding many of the vibrant works lining our streets.&quot;I like that this person got their idea from walking past these particular shutters on the way to college each day. Something made them curious and they wanted to look into it more. I want to read about that and what they think about it! They&#39;ve also made a custom typeface, which they&#39;ve used for the magazine&#39;s logo. I think both the typeface and cover look really good.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Vandal

Graduate Awards 2024

LESBIAN SLANG IN CHINESE is a queer feminism publication project. It includes an A6 folded zine and a dictionary-style publication, both printed with risograph orange and green ink on Crushcorn paper. &quot;This is an unassuming little riso-printed project. It&#39;s a simple concept that&#39;s clearly expressed, but also looks like a lot of work has gone into it. It feels like it has its own totally unique identity. I didn&#39;t know anything about lesbian slang in Chinese before I read this, and I still don&#39;t really know that much about it after reading, but I like that I feel I&#39;ve come close to something.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

LESBIAN SLANG IN CHINESE

Puta Diaries is a series of feminist zines that explore the experiences of women, and those identifying as women, living in a patriarchal society. &quot;This looks like good use of riso-printing, with the contrast and these colours and the kind of scrappiness that they&#39;ve worked into it. It feels like a lot of work and thought went into it, and the fact they’ve published it across three issues suggests that they took their time to get their heads around what this magazine should embody.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Puta Diaries

This publication has two cover that can be read from both sides.

To Stand On Shifting Ground is It&#39;s Freezing in LA!&#39;s Special Edition, curated in collaboration with the BA Culture, Criticism and Curation final year students.&quot;I think this is brilliant – I really like It&#39;s Freezing in LA! and I think it makes total sense that students would do something like this where they can contribute and get to work alongside people who actually do this over several issues. It&#39;s a really good idea to get them involved.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

To Stand on Shifting Ground

Copy of page 3 magazine lying flat on a white table with the cover and back-cover on top.

Page 3 is a publication based in London. It focuses on the theme of identity, exploring concepts such as &quot;Identity as a Performance&quot; and aims to build a community through its website, magazine, and social media platforms, offering exclusive content.&quot;Page 3 is an attention-grabbing magazine. I like it when something subverts its source material. I don&#39;t know the people who made this, but I imagine they were not massive supporters of Page 3 when it existed. Taking a version of sexuality which is very objectified and disempowered and using it to present a version which is much more active and empowered is just a nice idea.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Page 3 - Independent Print and Digital Publication

PULSE is a free magazine created for 3AM, a craft beer brand dedicated to championing UK arts and subcultures.&quot;PULSE is a brand magazine that is really characterful. Great photography and playful graphic design communicates a sense of the arts and music scene it covers. Loana&#39;s idea of making a customer magazine like that could be quite limiting, but I think she did a good job making something that feels like it fits with a brand, but also genuinely explores artists and topics that she&#39;s interested in.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

PULSE

Four encyclopedia's each open, each spread is one of the first four letters of the alphabet.

This project explores left-handedness, aiming to educate people on the bias towards left handers, from the historically negative use of the word ‘left’ in many cultures all the way up to current design.&quot;Being left out in a right world is a gently humorous magazine that communicates the experience of left-handed people feeling the world isn’t quite made for them, even including a typeface created by left-handed people writing with their right hand. I think you can see somebody hit upon a little thing that means a lot to them, and they spent time thinking about it and digging into it, and managed to make a really nice product out of it.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

Being left out in a right world.

Riso printed magazine featuring a blue and red dragon-like entity spiraling. 

EQUIS Magazine is a collaborative riso-printed magazine expanding the perimeter of culture, introducing and overlaying the work of multidisciplinary, emerging and established voices.&quot;EQUIS presents a range of subjects in an attractive riso-printed package. I really like it when you see a magazine develop and change from issue to issue – that’s something print does really well. There&#39;s a misconception that publishing online gives lots of flexibility, when actually websites and digital platforms tend to have quite a lot of rigid rules for the type of content that’s allowed, and how that content can be presented. But with print you literally start with a blank page every time, and you can do whatever you want with it. So for example, in its first issue, the name EQUIS was front and centre, but in the second and third issues the name seemed less important. I like that the third issue looks like it&#39;s called &#39;Erotismo&#39; – this is the sort of whimsical, experimental publishing that independents can play with.&quot;– Steven Watson, Director at Stack Magazines

EQUIS Magazine

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