Austria my love

The independent magazine landscape in Austria is narrow and specific. It demands a genuine editorial position — a point of view on Austrian culture, design, and daily life that is legible enough to build a readership around and distinct enough to justify existing alongside the international titles that already occupy the lifestyle shelf. A publication that does not have this position is not a magazine. It is a printed object that resembles one. LIKEIT was the latter. The visual language was inconsistent. The editorial logic was unclear. The relationship to Austrian cultural context — the thing that should have been the publication’s defining asset — was present in name but absent in practice. The magazine existed in the market but did not yet know what it believed, and that uncertainty was visible on every page. Redesigning a struggling publication is a different problem from designing a new one. The name stays. The audience stays. The category stays. What changes is everything the audience actually reads — and the risk is that a redesign that does not go far enough looks like cosmetic repair, while one that goes too far loses whatever trust the publication had accumulated. The surgical precision required is not aesthetic. It is diagnostic.

The question was not what was wrong with the design. The design was a symptom. The question was what the publication believed — and whether it had yet discovered that it needed to believe something specific. Austrian lifestyle publishing has a particular challenge that most lifestyle publishing does not: Austria is a country whose cultural self-image is in active, sometimes uncomfortable negotiation between its historical weight and its contemporary appetite. A publication that reaches for international lifestyle register loses its specificity. One that retreats into Heimat aesthetics loses its relevance. The viable position — and the genuinely interesting one — is neither: it is the publication that takes Austrian culture seriously as a subject, that reads local design, local craft, local creative practice, and local ways of living with the same intellectual attention that international titles bring to Paris or Milan or New York. LIKEIT had an Austrian readership that wanted exactly this. It was not yet giving it to them — not because the intention was absent but because the editorial and visual language had not yet been sharpened to the point where the intention became legible.

The decision that structured the transformation was editorial before it was visual: to give the magazine a clear position on what Austrian lifestyle actually means — not as a theme but as a lens. Every issue would look at creativity, design, and daily life through a specifically Austrian perspective, with the same rigour and the same visual intelligence that any strong lifestyle title brings to its subject. Austria not as a limitation. As a frame that produces a particular quality of attention. This decision resolved the visual problems immediately, because the visual problems were really positioning problems. Once the editorial voice was clear — curious, quality-driven, rooted in local cultural context — the design language followed. The look and feel was not a stylistic preference imposed on the content. It was the visual register of a specific editorial position: clean enough to be taken seriously, warm enough to be read at home, specific enough to belong to the place it comes from. The profile-sharpening work moved across every layer simultaneously — visual identity, content direction, structural logic, section architecture — because in a magazine, none of these can be resolved independently of the others. A better cover does not save unclear editorial structure. Better typography does not compensate for a readership that cannot tell what the publication stands for.

Extended strategic and creative collaboration with the editorial team. Visual identity refinement and design language development. Editorial direction and content strategy. Conceptual development of the publication’s Austrian positioning. Profile sharpening across all visual and editorial touchpoints — look and feel, section architecture, typographic system, and the overall logic that holds each issue together.

A publication that did not know what it was became one that did. The transformation was not primarily visual — though the visual was transformed — and not primarily editorial — though the editorial became sharper. It was a question of integrity: the alignment of what a publication claims to be with what it actually delivers, page by page.