Task A

King Kong Magazine

In the exciting unit “Styling Identity” I have chose the King Kong editorial Magazine as my influence to carry out my final photoshoot for this project. This magazine has been published since 2016 and was founded by Ali Kepenek who lives and travels from London to Berlin constantly and is the original founder and editor in Chief / Creative Director of the King Kong Magazine. This is a biannual print magazine focused on art and fashion. The reason for the magazine to print twice a year is to focus on something timeless rather than reporting on trends which you can get from every second magazine there is.

His good friend Mikel Benhaim is the designer of the layouts, compositions and overall looks of the magazine. He originally was an architect, he didn’t even study graphic design and he now creates designs that are bizarre, chaotic, edgy and off the planet. With his help, King Kong has such a unpredictable and unique way of presenting its content. Me and my group spent a good two days dissecting, reading, following and exploring the magazine to gain knowledge about its genre and its style. He states to the “it’s that Nice” blog that “ The beauty is that i am allowed to do whatever I want.” Which explicitly tells me that King Kong’s content is going to be phenomenal, outstanding and breath-taking. With the apathetic style and mind, the King Kong magazine can reach enormous growth within it’s industry. The culture of music, fashion, art and graphics brings together artists such as models, photographers, set designers and writers together to create content for the media and the youth.

Furthermore, the magazine Vogue has a settled style of being more organised, the photos are right next to the text and it is way more cleaner than King Kong. What is fun about that? The King Kong magazine has text all over the place, the photos are boxed, scattered around the page, filled and spaced unevenly so that it gives the viewer more control over the content.

Every photoshoot/scene/issue carries a specific theme that goes well with the models. Because the photographer has so much control over his photos, they can come up with the most weirdest ideas for shoots and they will still be published as long as they are appropriate with the theme. Additionally, one of the recent prints, issue 6 connect fashion and art together in a an idiosyncratic way that King Kong has made its name for. One of their theme was “Worship” which links to my project about the virgin Mary. The models, actors or people act a certain way to communicate the key element of worshiping. King Kong had an idea of worship and now the photographer can explore and play around that theme to create numerous outcomes such as anarchy, satan, America or worshiping a person. Not a lot of todays magazine publishers allow this amount of freedom however King Kong allows for photographers to express their work in any way they want. Even the magazine’s ethos is “ We never repeat ourselves. Just reinvent” and that is not unforeseen because of how amazing everything looks together.

My project was not performed as the world sees it, Virgin Mary is seen as an innocent, not guilty and fragile person however I take my idea to the next level by performing the opposite. I get a theme and I re create it to make it more extraordinary, more unique so that it is not repeated, but re created. King Kong really has taught me to think outside the box and not to always be limited to bringing new ideas to work. This magazine is getting a far more wider audience each year because of it’s astonishing content, even Mikel Benhaim told “It’sNiceThat” blog that: “people constantly tell me how it’s their favourite magazine and they collect each issue…” He gives a raw experience and excitement to the media that King Kong really worked hard for.

Boxed: Space/portrait/movement/text/logos/Title

I will definitely include boxed photographs in my design, I want to experiment with different photo sizes and with tiles.