Every so often a project lands that we want to keep a copy of on the shelf in the office. The Signal: Shadow Play is one of those. It is a one-off football magazine about what happens when states start buying football clubs, and it is a stunningly designed piece of graphic design and social commentary. We printed it 297 x 215mm, perfect bound, on silk throughout, with silver foil on the front and back covers.
The Signal is a current affairs publication, and this is Extra No. 4 — a standalone print edition given over entirely to one subject. It is an eye-opening, compelling look at the role foreign governments and dubious actors now play in football, built on the idea that everything might not be exactly as it seems. The cover says it in one image: a green chessboard pitch, a knight and a pawn, and the shadows they throw across two footballs.
What makes it work as an object is the tone. The graphic styling is pure retro arcade — heavy outlined display type with hard drop shadows, checkerboard borders, Subbuteo figures photographed like match action. It looks back to when football was still fun and we all had the naivety of youth, then uses that warmth to land some genuinely uncomfortable reporting. The silver foil on the cover adds a final layer of kitsch. If you are planning something in this space, our magazine printing service covers everything from a modest first issue to a job like this one.
The brief arrived asking for high quality paper stock, and the team were right to push on it. They had originally specced 120gsm uncoated and moved to 130gsm silk because they wanted vibrancy, which was the correct call for a magazine carrying this much full-bleed colour. Silk rather than gloss keeps the images rich without throwing glare back at you across pages of long-form text, and 130gsm is heavier than the usual magazine text stock, so the dense inks on one side stay put and do not ghost through to the other.
The cover is 300gsm silk with matt lamination to the outer face, which does two jobs at once. It gives the board a soft, low-sheen surface that stops fingerprints showing, and it provides the perfect matt backdrop for the silver foil to sit against. Foil on a matt laminated cover is one of the most reliable ways to make a magazine feel expensive, because the contrast does all the work — no glare competing with the shine. Everything is four colour CMYK throughout, and at 76 text pages it perfect binds to a 4.14mm spine.
For the record, the team also considered die-cuts across two sections, a heavier centre section on 170gsm silk, and a Panini-style kiss-cut sticker sheet. We quoted all of it. They chose to spend the budget on materials instead and make a straight-up premium fanzine people would want to keep — which, having handled the finished thing, was the right decision.
The checkerboard is the detail we keep coming back to. Every section carries a vertical checkerboard bar down its outer margin, and each one is a different colourway — yellow and black, green, pink and green, blue, gold. Flick the magazine and those bars turn the fore-edge into a colour-coded index. It is a genuinely clever piece of design that costs nothing extra to print and makes a 76-page magazine feel navigable in the hand.
The imagery is doing a lot of heavy lifting too, and it makes a visual supporting case for the editorial rather than just decorating it. Matryoshka dolls painted as a succession of footballers. A king of spades dropped into an aerial shot of desert. A Victorian team photograph with a cartoon mascot spliced in among the moustaches. Subbuteo players lit and shot like the real thing. Each one carries an argument, and on silk they all reproduce with the punch the design needs.
Then there is the pacing. The magazine alternates hard between dense two and three column text pages and full-bleed spreads that stop you dead — a duotone crowd scene in pink and green, a portrait with the mouth taped, a gold-washed feature opener. That rhythm is what keeps a long read moving, and it is worth studying if you are laying out your own title.
This one started with a phone call rather than an order form. The team came to us with production ideas rather than a finished spec, so we got on a Zoom with the client, the creative director and the designer and worked through the options together. They had very specific ideas about what they wanted to achieve, and our job was to tell them honestly what each of those ideas would cost in money and in calendar days.
From there the spec moved, a lot. The page count travelled from an estimated 48 to 60, up to around 100, then settled at 96, then 84, then 80, and finally 76 text pages after the editor cut two spreads. The trim went from 297 x 220mm to 216mm and finally to 215mm, because the designer had been working to that width from an early conversation and for the sake of a millimetre it was simpler to follow him than to make him redraw. Each change moved the spine — 5mm, then 5.2mm, then 4.14mm — so we reissued the cover template each time with the new spine measured through the centre, and confirmed the back cover hinge at 6-7mm so the front cover artwork could wrap round the spine and land exactly where they wanted it.
The foiling took the most care. It started as three positions on the front cover, then grew to include the back cover and the spine. We foiled the front and back, but advised against the spine: the type there was both too small and not ideally positioned, and the honest answer was that it would not repro cleanly. Our foiling team also flagged that the word SIGNAL was set in print underneath the foil of the same word, where any movement on press would show. The designer came back and explained he had deliberately made the printed shape thinner than the foil to act as a clean black inline, so we agreed to run it with the black bed. The magazine’s cartoon mascot in the bottom corner was the other gamble — very fine linework for a foiling process — so the designer thickened the lines, and we went ahead on the understanding that we would pull it if it did not hold. It held.
At preflight we found a run of images across the text pages sitting under 150dpi. Some of that could easily have been a deliberate aesthetic, so rather than guess we screengrabbed every one, marked which pages they fell on, and sent the lot over for the team to judge. They replaced them. “Thank you so much for flagging those images; we are so glad we changed them!”
The deadline was the real pressure. Copies had to be in Oslo for a conference, with the editorial team spread across the UK and the United States and artwork arriving late in the day. When they asked what a faster courier to Norway would cost, we quoted it — and then came back the next morning having thought about it overnight to say we would rather they did not. The uplift was enormous and the risk was worse: neither of us wanted to spend a week chasing couriers around Europe. Sticking to the original schedule and the standard service was the calmer, cheaper answer. Proofs went out, the US team stood by to approve them the same afternoon, and the job went to press on time.
Then it split four ways: Oslo, Washington DC, a distributor in the south east of England and the publisher’s own address in Cambridgeshire. We sorted the pallet and the customs paperwork for Norway, took the EORI details for the import, and tracked both international consignments several times a day until they landed. “My copies of the fanzine have arrived, and looking really great! Thanks for your help in getting us to a really great output.”
Three things mattered on this job. First, quoting the ambitious version properly — die-cuts, centre sections, sticker sheets — so the team could see real numbers and make a real decision rather than quietly dropping ideas because nobody had priced them. Second, saying no where it counted: no foil on the spine, no express courier. Both would have cost them money and neither would have made the magazine better. Third, keeping the technical detail moving at the speed of a design studio in its final week — new cover templates within hours of every page count change, preflight reports with screenshots rather than error codes, and proofs turned around the same day.
If you are working on something similar, our perfect binding set-up guide and this rundown of magazine printing paper will answer most of the early questions. For more in this vein, our football art publications portfolio is worth a browse.
1) Spend the budget on materials before special finishes. This team dropped die-cuts, a pull-out and a sticker sheet and put the money into silk stock and cover foil. The result feels more expensive than any of the gimmicks would have.
2) Silk beats gloss for image-heavy long reads. You keep the colour saturation and lose the glare, which matters when readers are working through columns of text under a lamp.
3) Matt lamination is what makes foil look like foil. Silver on a gloss cover fights the surface. Silver on matt lamination pops.
4) Foil needs room and weight. Very fine linework and very small type are where foiling struggles. Thicken it, enlarge it, or leave it printed — and ask us before you commit the artwork.
5) Your spine changes every time your page count does. Do not build a cover until the pagination is final, and ask for a fresh template each time it moves.
6) Design a colour system into the margins. The section-coded checkerboard bars cost nothing on press and give the finished magazine a fore-edge index. Free ideas like that are the best kind.
7) Build the shipping into the schedule, not onto the end of it. International freight is slower and far more expensive to rush than printing is. Work backwards from the date copies must be in the room.
Planning an issue of your own? Start with the Printed Project Builder to map out format, extent and paper, and we will take it from there.
