More than a decade ago, I bought a series of magazines by this German designer that were a great inspiration in my career. Today, I received a copy of Jan Schwochow latest edition in my mailbox, in which I had the great honor of participating in.
One of my pieces in this magazine has a very personal touch.
As a child in Costa Rica, I remember seeing the cow pastures filled with dancing lights. At night, my town was very dark, and on a moonless night, on a nearby creek, you could clearly see the edge of the Milky Way merging with the lights of the fireflies dancing all around you… magic.
It doesn’t look like that anymore, and not just in my town, but all over the world.
That motivated me to visualize the phenomenon to spread the message of what we are losing. My 17-year-old son has never seen what, for me, was the most impressive immersive light show. If you’ve never seen anything like it, you may never see it, or not anytime soon, if our cities continue to get brighter every day.
The piece shows areas around the world where some species of fireflies are disappearing and, at the same time, where city lights are brighter today than they were 20 years ago. It is designed on a dark background, and some of the text is blurred, a metaphor for what we are losing.
In a way, these pages are a portrait of what is fading into the void in the face of our progress as a species.
However, if you know me, you know I can’t be serious for very long.
Ingraphics Magazine is somehow a white canvas, and Jan has managed to create a great diversity in this latest edition of the magazine. He even opened the door for me to sneak in one more page with something I’d wanted to do for a long time.
It’s a page about onomatopoeia, and it shows how, even though we speak different languages around the world, there are many things that bring us together; in the end, we’re not so different after all.
For this piece, I spoke with several people who are fluent in languages other than English and Spanish, and although it’s based on serious research, it also has a touch of humor. –I hope you can enjoye it as well.
Ingraphics Magazine means a lot to me. In fact, more than a decade ago, I bought other books by Jan just to enjoy the pages and their beautiful design, even though they were in German, a language I don’t speak, and back then, Google Translate wasn’t an option.
Being a part of this revival of the magazine is a great honor, there are people with brilliant pieces and it’s truly an honor to be alongside people who have been an inspiration in my career, such as Frederik Ruys, John Grimwade, Jaime Serra, Nigel Holmes, and Nathan Yau.
If you are a fan of graphics or just want to see the new magazine, you can get a copy here: https://schwochow.shop/products/ingraphics-magazine
Thanks for reading!
Marco Hernandez 