Eye Magazine

In 2001-02 Schostok, who is based in Germany, created twelve issues of a pdf magazine titled Beast. Its style was explosively grid-less. Beebe, an American, describes himself as a design school dropout who always wanted to be an art director. He spent years in local government and bureaucracy before moving to Alaska in 2024 to work in the National Park Service.

Beebe and Schostok want Plastikcomb to bust loose from the ‘orderly grids of contemporary magazine design’ and respond graphically to the artwork they feature. Well conducted interviews are the main content, each one assigned to a different designer, including guests. In issue 8, Chris Bigg – former partner of Vaughan Oliver in v23 – designs the pages for Chris Ferebee, photographer, furniture designer, graphic designer … and fan of Chris Bigg. Typographically, these uniform columns of unvarying type form the most restrained pages in the issue.

In other features, the designers let rip. In an interview with Raphaël Vicenzi, a collage-maker from Brussels, who boasts the name Mydeadpony, the type reads in three directions, requiring constant turning of the pages. The type styles are mismatched (by conventional standards) and everything is set in uppercase. Some possibly contentious words are crossed out, though still readable. Paul B. Drohan, the designer, jigsaws together patches of type comprising questions and answers with scrawled graffiti, collages by Vicenzi composed mainly of fragments of models from fashion magazines, and other graphic shapes. The pages are denser and more scrambled than even the wildest layouts in Ray Gun, but the ‘grungy punk aesthetic’ (Vicenzi’s term and aim) is not impossible to navigate with a little effort.

In the absence of an underlying grid, Plastikcomb’s organisational principle is collage. Anything can go anywhere if the designer feels it works. This was the method used by Ray Gun, Blah Blah Blah (designed by Chris Ashworth, Neil Fletcher and Amanda Sissons), Speak magazine (Martin Venezky), and many lesser 1990s projects. The artists’ collages Plastikcomb often showcases become fragments in the multi-page editorial collages that constitute the features. This allows for some striking variations in mood. The interview – designed by Schostok – with artist / architect Sameena Sitabkhan (a first generation Indian-American based in Los Angeles) has quieter typography, more white space and a sumptuous sensation of colour. Sitabkhan’s collages, using the name Pink Tank, collide influences from punk, grunge, Bollywood and the LA streets.

Issue 8’s most enigmatic contribution, ‘The Collage Machine’, steps back and takes a meta-level view of its surroundings. The author, Jeffery (‘Mr.’) Keedy, another key figure in the 1990s (see Eye no. 20 vol. 5), uses a collage from 1984 as a starting point for some characteristically sardonic observations about a medium that is never truly new because it is always recycling the past, but ‘perfect for generating novelty’. If the computer is a collage machine, he proposes, then artificial intelligence is its language, and recursion (being trapped and limited by a program’s rules) is the inevitable outcome.

That gloomy prognosis suggests the pleasure we continue to derive from collage, once a revelatory avant-garde technique, is unlikely to last. Eventually everything will be ‘smoothed over’ (Keedy’s prediction) and drained of any last dregs of meaning. To designers who see their task as imposing structure and order, Plastikcomb might look like a wilful surrender to confusion and discord. That would be a misreading. A magazine cannot offer concrete resistance to the world as we find it, but it can express a yearning for a different or better reality and offer readers a sustaining artistic refuge. Plastikcomb does this with defiantly ramshackle aplomb.

Rick Poynor writer, Eye founder

First published in Eye no. 108 vol. 27, 2025

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.