Three friends, two cities and a trial issue nobody bought.

Apartamento is named after a flat, and its founders say it began in other people’s. English Wikipedia describes it as an interiors magazine founded in 2008 in Barcelona, published twice a year, about people, their homes and the lives they lead inside them. AIGA’s Eye on Design, in an interview by James Cartwright published on 16 June 2016, said the magazine “began in homes”: its three makers were always travelling for work and stayed in friends’ houses, on their sofas or in their spare beds, and the spaces they ended up in became the subject.

The three are Marco Velardi, Nacho Alegre and Omar Sosa. It’s Nice That, introducing Velardi and Sosa as speakers on 4 May 2016, named Velardi as editor-in-chief and Sosa as art director, and said the two worked on the magazine together with Alegre. Eye on Design said that Velardi is from Milan and was by then living in Berlin, that Sosa, from Barcelona, was by then living in New York, and that Alegre had stayed resident in Barcelona while travelling for fashion clients.

Each brought a different trade. Velardi told Eye on Design in 2016 that Sosa had experience designing magazines and Alegre had experience making fanzines, while he himself had been working with the publisher Nieves and with magazines in Milan, including 032c, and helped with press and distribution. He said he set out how advertising and distribution should work and argued for launching the magazine in Milan.

Before the launch there was a trial. It’s Nice That wrote in May 2016 that Apartamento #00, dated 2007, was made for internal use only. The founders told the site they wanted to test their ideas on paper, to touch the thing and make it real, and that at the time they had little experience of publishing.

The public launch followed in 2008. English Wikipedia says the magazine made its debut at Milan Design Week that year, that the trio started it from Barcelona, working at first from Alegre’s apartment and mostly over Skype and MSN chat, and that the first issue appeared in April 2008. That issue, it says, featured the musician Mike Mills of R.E.M. and members of the English band Mystery Jets.

The magazine was not anyone’s full-time job. Eye on Design reported in 2016 that for each of the three Apartamento was a side project, tended between their own day jobs, and that this left little time for long stretches together in one studio. Velardi described the editorial mix as a matter of luck and randomness, with each founder bringing his own stories to the table.

An everyday life interiors magazine.

The magazine’s own line for itself is short. It’s Nice That wrote in May 2016 that Apartamento bills itself as “an everyday life interiors magazine,” and Liv Siddall quoted the same phrase in an interview with Omar Sosa on 30 October 2014. English Wikipedia frames the idea as a reaction to the sterile, impersonal-looking homes often shown in interiors and architecture magazines, and says the founders wanted rooms with a lived-in feel, full of character and personal expression.

The way stories are chosen follows from that. Sosa told It’s Nice That in 2014 that he, Alegre and Velardi relied on their contributors to bring new stories each issue, and that they liked to look at people who did things they admired, now or in the past, and who had not been much exposed lately. He said the tone of each interview changes with the interviewer and the person interviewed, because the magazine prefers to curate its many voices rather than impose one house voice.

Longer stories rather than more of them was a deliberate choice. Sosa said in the same 2014 interview, around issue #14, that the magazine had grown much thicker since it started while the number of stories in each issue had barely changed, so that each story could run longer and go deeper. That issue carried portraits of the artist Raymond Pettibon, interviewed by Leah Singer, and a feature by Alegre and Sosa about ice. Sosa said the two of them try to make a feature about one simple element in every issue, as a way of collaborating on the magazine.

Famous names are handled in the same way. In the Eye on Design interview of June 2016, Velardi said the magazine had recently featured Martha Stewart but had not put her on the front cover, because it did not want to promote a particular famous person; the interest, he said, lay in understanding her. Sosa added that she met the magazine’s usual test of a self-made person with a strong interest in her home.

The making of each issue is split. Sosa told Eye on Design that he is responsible for laying out the whole magazine and putting the stories in order, usually alone in the studio, and that Velardi then often argues to change the running order. The magazine reached issue #17 in May 2016, according to It’s Nice That, and turned ten in 2017, according to Eye on Design, which said it had kept the same recipe over that decade with only minor adjustments.

Print stays at the centre. Eye on Design reported in 2016 that Apartamento had for years existed mainly as a printed object, with a sparse website, and that the team had launched an app showing a handful of stories from the archive at a time, each replaced after a few days. Sosa said he worried that the internet gives too much away and that print’s limits on space are part of its value. The founders also said a book was on the way.

A plain name, a changing spine and long stories.

A magazine meets its readers on the newsstand and the shelf, so much of its identity sits in three places: the masthead, the cover and the physical format. The masthead is usually a single word or short title in a fixed typeface. English Wikipedia says the Artforum logo is a bold, condensed version of Akzidenz-Grotesk, a German grotesque that was hard for an American publication to obtain in the 1960s, and AIGA Eye on Design reported on 21 December 2021 that The Paris Review replaced its serif nameplate with a bold wordmark in Founders Grotesk from Klim Type Foundry when Matt Willey of Pentagram redesigned it.

Cover conventions and format do the rest. A magazine can give its cover to one image, as Artforum often does with the work of one artist, or to an emblem and a list of contents, as The Paris Review did with the eagle drawn by William Pène du Bois in the top left corner of its 1953 debut. The size and shape of the page can matter as much as the logo: Sotheby’s, in an article dated 26 July 2019, said Artforum had set itself apart with a square format since its first issue in 1962, and Eye on Design said the 2021 Paris Review moved to a smaller trim, recycled paper and a spine carrying the issue number in large type. When reading a magazine’s identity, look at the nameplate, at what the cover is allowed to show, and at the size, paper and spine of the object itself.

A plain word, an artist’s spine and a magazine shaped by its makers’ homes.

Apartamento’s identity starts with a plain word. The Spanish word means a flat, and Eye on Design wrote in June 2016 that the magazine, as its name indicates, began in homes. English Wikipedia keeps the same frame: a magazine about people, their homes and the lives they lead inside them, founded in Barcelona in 2008.

The spine changes every time. Omar Sosa told It’s Nice That on 30 October 2014 that the magazine usually asks an artist featured in the same issue to design its spine, sometimes adapting an existing work and sometimes making a new one, and that for issue #14 the spine came from the artist Peter Halley.

The design is held by one art director. It’s Nice That named Sosa as the magazine’s art director in May 2016, and he told Eye on Design the same year that he lays out the whole magazine and sets the order of its stories. In 2016 Velardi, the editor-in-chief, was working from Berlin and Alegre, the third founder, from Barcelona, according to Eye on Design, which described the three as itinerant.

Its rooms are shown as they are used. English Wikipedia says the founders wanted homes with a lived-in feel, and Sosa told Eye on Design in 2016 that keeping one place in the world that is yours, with your things in it, was why he wanted to make the magazine. Velardi said, half joking, that the founders were perhaps more voyeurs than guests, and that what brought them together was the imagery of the places they stayed.

The rhythm is twice a year. The magazine appears twice a year, English Wikipedia says, and Eye on Design reported that it had kept the same basic recipe from 2008 to its tenth year in 2017, adjusting rather than redesigning. Sosa said in 2014 that stories had grown longer while their number stayed steady.

For a design guide, Apartamento shows how a single word, an artist-made spine and patient, lived-in photography can carry a magazine without a fixed cover formula. Compare Kinfolk, another independent magazine, founded in Portland and now based in Copenhagen, or Monocle, a London monthly launched in 2007. For this guide we use terracotta, brown and walnut with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Apartamento’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.