An NME editor, a rejected proposal and a self-funded launch.

The Face grew out of the music press. English Wikipedia’s article on the magazine says its founder, Nick Logan, had edited the NME for five years before leaving in 1978 to launch Smash Hits for Emap, the magazine arm of the printer East Midlands Allied Press. In the autumn of 1979 he proposed a new title to Emap: a well-produced, well-designed and well-written monthly with music at its core but room for fashion, film, nightclubbing and social issues. When the directors passed, Logan and his wife decided to fund it themselves, and he named it The Face.

The debut issue appeared on 1 May 1980, according to the same article. It carried a logo designed by Steve Bush, who had worked with Logan on Smash Hits, and a cover portrait by the photographer Chalkie Davies of Jerry Dammers of The Specials. Logan initially worked out of the Smash Hits office in Soho and set up a small independent publishing house, Wagadon, to run the title.

Logan’s own description of the magazine has been recorded by people who worked for him. Reviewing a National Portrait Gallery exhibition in Eye no. 108 in 2025, the writer Steve Taylor, an associate editor in the early 1980s, recalls Logan calling it “the NME’s colour supplement”, aimed at the music paper’s readers as they moved into their twenties and their interests broadened into style, film and the wider culture. Taylor notes that “Rock’s Final Frontier” was briefly the magazine’s strapline, and that music was combined with fashion from the early issues, shot by photographers such as Sheila Rock.

The working conditions were modest. It’s Nice That, interviewing the author Paul Gorman on 1 December 2017 about his book The Story of The Face, published by Thames & Hudson, quotes Taylor comparing the operation to Vogue being produced from a room above a kebab shop. The same feature reproduces lines from Logan’s pitch letter, which promised a glossy, attractive magazine built around strong photographs and feature writing of a kind not found in the weekly music tabloids. It also records that Lesley White, a receptionist in 1982, was asked by Logan to start writing the introductions section in each issue.

Wagadon, Emap, Bauer, Wasted Talent and C86.

Under Logan the magazine stayed independent for almost two decades. Wikipedia credits him with a November 1983 issue, “New Life in Europe”, produced with continental magazines including France’s Actuel, and with the 100th edition in September 1988, whose fold-out front showed the covers of every earlier issue. In the 1990s Logan became editorial director at Wagadon, with Sheryl Garratt as editor of The Face and Dylan Jones editing the companion title Arena. Later editors listed in the same article include Richard Benson, Adam Higginbotham and Johnny Davis, who took over in spring 1999.

The art directors who followed Brody shaped the magazine’s photography. Wikipedia names Robin Derrick and then Phil Bicker, who worked with photographers including Corinne Day, David Sims and Juergen Teller, and later the team of Stuart Spalding and Lee Swillingham. Bicker’s cover for the July 1990 issue, “The 3rd Summer of Love”, featured Kate Moss. Taylor’s 2025 Eye review notes that Swillingham co-curated the National Portrait Gallery show, “The Face Magazine: Culture Shift”, which ran in London from 20 February to 18 May 2025.

Ownership then changed several times. Wikipedia says Logan sold Wagadon to Emap in July 1999, that Neil Stevenson became editor in 2002, and that Emap published the final issue of the original run in May 2004, closing the magazine. Rights to the title passed to Bauer Media Group when it acquired Emap in 2008, and in 2017 they were bought by Wasted Talent, the independent publisher of Kerrang! and Mixmag. The same article says the relaunch went online in April 2019 under the editor Stuart Brumfitt, and that the debut print issue of the new quarterly came out on 13 September 2019.

The second run also paused. The Impression reported on 31 March 2026 that the Spring 2026 issue would be the last in the magazine’s current form, quoting Wasted Talent’s chief executive Jerry Perkins, who said the company was using the pause to regroup and reimagine the brand. On 26 May 2026, Bandwagon reported a joint statement confirming that C86 Holdings, founded by the Singapore entrepreneur Kuok Meng Ru, had acquired The Face from Wasted Talent. C86 Holdings has owned the title since May 2026.

A masthead, a type laboratory and a rule-breaking grid.

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.

Steve Bush’s logo and Neville Brody’s typographic experiments.

The magazine’s look is tied to two designers. The masthead dates from the launch: Wikipedia credits the logo on the 1980 debut issue to Steve Bush, and Taylor’s 2025 review in Eye lists Bush among the designers represented in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. The longer story belongs to Neville Brody. In an interview published in Eye no. 6 in 1992, conducted by Rick Poynor, the magazine’s biographical note says Brody studied at the London College of Printing from 1976 to 1979, worked as a freelance designer mainly of record sleeves, and became designer of The Face in 1981, where he carried out typographic experiments. It adds that he went on to art direct Arena, the Italian Per Lui and the French Actuel.

Wikipedia’s article on the magazine says Brody drew on early twentieth-century movements such as Constructivism to build a stark new visual language. Its article on the designer dates his work for The Face to 1981–1986 and for Arena to 1987–1990, and lists typefaces he designed, among them Industria, Arcadia and Insignia. In the 1992 Eye interview Brody describes a change of direction on Arena, where he moved to simple Helvetica headlines, trying, in his words, to force a typeface he disliked to be emotional. The same piece records that in 1991 he helped launch Fuse, a disk-based magazine of new typefaces, with Jon Wozencroft, and that The Graphic Language of Neville Brody was published in 1988 alongside a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The pages have since become museum material. Wikipedia says The Face entered the permanent collection of the Design Museum in London in 2011, and lists three Victoria and Albert Museum exhibitions that included it, in 2011, 2012 and 2013–14. It’s Nice That’s 2017 feature describes Gorman and Logan visiting the 2012 V&A show, British Design from 1948, and finding notebooks in the gift shop printed with covers credited to Brody as art director from 1981 to 1986, while Logan’s name did not appear in the exhibition or its catalogue. Gorman told the site that the episode prompted him to write the book.

For a design guide, The Face shows how a magazine identity can sit with an art director as much as with a masthead: Bush’s logo stayed on the cover while Brody’s constructed lettering and broken grids set the tone inside. Compare it with its London contemporaries i-D and Dazed. For this guide we use cover red, Soho brick and ink black with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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