“What you hold in your hands is a new Ninety Nine U magazine, a quarterly design publication brought to you by Adobe Creative Cloud. In these pages, Ninety Nine U invites you to explore the creative world through the lens of design and learn about some of the extraordinary people shaping it.”
This was the card that accompanied my first issue of Adobe’s quarterly print magazine Ninety Nine U.
“At Adobe, our commitment to empowering the creative community goes beyond building the best creative apps and services. We also strive to bring you smart, effective and inspiring content to enhance your creative journey,” the card continues.
For many, Adobe is the poster child for working digitally. And yet it’s too easy to forget that a huge amount of the work going on in Adobe’s creative cloud space will end up in print – in magazines, books, posters, marketing materials, catalogs, etc.
True to Adobe’s brand, the magazine has a minimalist look and feel, and a heavy emphasis on the editorial content. And it works best in print. As Fabio Sasso noted last year, print offers a platform for this kind of design that doesn’t translate well onto the Web.
“I have an admiration for the minimalism and elegance achieved by designers when they put together a simple layout that communicates the message very well,” he writes in his blog post about the magazine. “I have been trying to bring some of these editorial design concepts to the web on every new release of Abduzeedo, but it’s quite hard, especially the typography with an overlap of text and imagery.”
In print, and especially in the hands of the Adobe design team, it works beautifully.
“The 99U Magazine delivers our best insights on making ideas happen in a premium-edition printed magazine, lovingly designed by our incredible creative team. Each issue comes packed with practical advice on idea execution, including in-depth profiles of artists, designers, and entrepreneurs, the latest research on getting shit done, and road-tested tips for building your career,” notes the 99u site.
If you’re a designer, and especially a magazine fan, you can’t help but love this one. At $15/issue, it’s well worth the price of admission. You’ll want this one for your own.