Two staples hold most magazines together. Peak Issue 2 has none, and no glue either. It is a stack of folded A3 sheets, 297 x 420mm, nested one inside the next and kept in order by nothing but the fold. Slide a sheet free and open it out, and you are holding an A2 poster of a misty hillside or a cluster of ink caps standing as tall as trees.
That double life is why people want a copy. It was also the hardest part of printing it, because a magazine that comes apart has to be planned twice: once as a read, then again as pictures for the wall.
The catch with a magazine that comes apart
In a stapled or glued magazine, nobody thinks about which pages share a piece of paper. In a nested one, it decides everything. Fold a pile of sheets in half and tuck them together, and only the centre sheet opens as a continuous spread in reading order. On all the others, a page from the front half shares paper with a page from the back half.
So the poster you pull out is rarely the spread you just read. An image designed across two facing pages can end up split over two separate sheets, while two pages that were never meant to meet sit side by side on somebody’s wall.
Then there is the paper. At A3, a sheet has to survive being unfolded and pinned up, yet the whole stack still has to close neatly round itself without bowing open on the table.
Planning Peak in sheets as well as spreads
Before anything went on press, we talked James through how his layout would behave unbound: which pages would end up sharing a sheet, and where they would meet once a sheet came out. That let each page work inside the magazine and still pair up as intended when lifted free.
Readers get a small game out of it, too: working out which pages join into a full poster once the issue is in pieces. Our studio notes picked out that interactivity as one of its best tricks.
Planning a poster magazine of your own? Draw the sheets before you draw the pages. Fold and nest some scrap paper, number the sides, then open it out. A few minutes with a pencil shows you which images land together, so you can design those pairs on purpose rather than by accident.
Why 120gsm uncoated, cover and all
We printed the issue four colour on 120gsm uncoated, the cover included, one of the stocks on the menu for the magazines we print. For a nested A3 magazine that weight sits in a useful middle ground. A page has enough body to be opened out and pinned up, and it stays supple enough to wrap round the sheets inside it. Go much heavier and the fold starts to fight back.
Running the cover on the same stock keeps the issue light and even. It also means the cover sheet becomes a poster too, with the chrome masthead on one half and the dark woodland of the back cover on the other.
Uncoated was the natural paper for an outdoor title, and our notes called it “extremely befitting”. The matt surface has the earthy character of a well-thumbed map. The greens and greys of moss and mist sink into it instead of sitting on a sheen, and a page on the wall throws back no glare. Our guide to picking a paper weight for a magazine covers the stocks either side of this one.
Pictures big enough to make you hesitate
Opening Peak is a slightly intimidating moment, and we mean that kindly. At A3 there is nowhere to hide and the images are enormous. The edit kept us hooked to the back cover; we liked this one a lot.
The front cover throws “PEAK” at you in swollen, liquid chrome bubble letters over a cloud-lit sky, with a figure on a grassy clifftop beside a crochet blanket. Flip it and the mood darkens: a lone walker heading into the trees under a small outline of the logo.
Inside, the edit swings between climbing and outdoor photography, sweeping landscapes and abstract close-ups. A crowd of walkers climbs a misty hill. A model in a 1796 knit waits on a city train platform. Alex Valentina’s World of Wonders opens with a big serif headline above a grid of glossy, petal-like forms, and later spreads float amber and ice-like shapes against a bright blue sky, curious finds that look like the haul from a scavenger hunt. Peak’s own description of the issue promises communities, an alternate universe, foraging “but this time not for food” and a country girl searching for peace in a hectic city.
Watch how the layout switches between two modes. Some images run off every edge, like the dusk landscape stretched across a full spread. Others float in broad white borders, framed like prints, which is handy, because prints are what they turn into. If you expect readers to hang certain pages, give those a white margin. It acts as a mount for free.
Re-quotes, a tight schedule and a camera on the ceiling
James got in touch about Issue 2 with a bigger page count in mind. As the issue took shape the extent moved, and each time we turned round a revised quote and clear timings so he could decide quickly. The schedule was tight, so we planned production round it and delivered on time.
When we asked to photograph it for our own pages, we hit a practical snag and had to strap the camera to the ceiling. That is how big Peak is.
The title has carried on growing. Independent shops such as Public Knowledge Books stock the series, Charlotte Street Magazine lists Issue 2 as sold out, and James returned for later issues, including the A3 Issue 4 we printed after this one.
Got photographs that want wall space? Price your own A3 issue in our quote calculator and see what a stack of loose, poster-ready sheets would cost.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
