What's ego [n]
We made ego[n] because we love books. Beautifully designed books, books crammed with ideas and visual inventions, books that we read and read again, with ever-new pleasure. In this video-infested multimedia-connected cellphone-ruled age, we still love the tactile qualities of paper, the unexpected results of crazy printing techniques, the pleasute to explore concept-driven publications that are playful gardens for our deranged minds. ego[n] magazine is neither a book nor a magazine: it's a pet monster, kept in our cellar with a pop culture diet and a never satiated hunger for the wonderful. Like all monsters it's incomplete and redundant at the same time: some pages are left blank, other are printed in eight colours and filled with images. There are cutouts, stickers, even a playful gadget, a dripping marker holding enough ink to black out all the 350 pages of ego[n]. Half art book half book of wonders, ego[n] tries to please the weird fetishes of every book lover. Its main theme, incompleteness, is physically expressed in the form of the magazine itself, a collection of unpublished issues, fragments from longer, untold stories. Inside, twelve fragments, different points of view on contemporary graphic design and on the global themes that influenced it. From the relationship between business and creativity to visual reflections on the 9/11 attacks, from a compilation of designers’ sketchbooks to a fake annual report on the www porn business; from the history of the Ascii set to an inquiry into Florence’s graphic design scene... The idea of creative collaboration is central in the production process of the magazine: in ego[n] it is possible to find young designers next to masters like Jonathan Barnbrook, Ed Fella, KesselsKramer, Karlssonwilker, and the late Alan Fletcher. Moreover, every issue of ego[n] uses original fonts by studioKmzero that are provided in the DVD togheter with a user license. Printed on the quality papers supplied by Polyedra and including a tag marker sponsored by Graffbay, ego[n] promises to be "yet another overdesigned, completely useless, totally self-indulgent, inventively packaged, gadget-packed and expensively printed graphic design magazine that’s good only for diehard book fetishists and geeky collectors".