Domus was founded in 1928 by a very young Giò Ponti, the brilliant Italian architect and designer whose work had a profound influence on 20th-century design.
The following year, thanks to an open-minded young publisher called Gianni Mazzocchi, the Domus publishing house was born and the eponymous magazine was distributed throughout Italy. A few years later, the same publisher would take over the Turin-based magazine La casa bella and turn it into Casabella, now one of the most iconic and oldest Italian interior design magazines. Mazzocchi and his publishing group would later go on to launch some of the most famous Italian magazines, including L’europeo, Il Mondo and Quattroruote.
Because it spans a century of Italian history, it is fascinating to see how Domus has remained profitable and authoritative despite the political and social upheaval that Italy experienced throughout this period: the magazine managed to morph from an advocate for rationalist architecture, which meant it was more or less accepted by the Fascist regime, to a magazine discussing architecture and broader society in the post-war period. Early contributors included Alberto Moravia and Elio Vittorini, and from the seventies onwards, it carried influential articles and columns by the likes of Ettore Sottsass, Pierre Restany and Alessandro Mendini, as well as having a series of editors who, particularly over the last 30 years, have made the magazine a global leader in its field.
Contents
Domus is regarded as one of the leading international publications on architecture and design: promotes innovative ideas and provides a forum for debate in this space.
It’s longest serving editor, Giò Ponti, lent the title international authority; following his death, various successors have left their mark on the magazine, keeping it dynamic and in step with the times.
Today, the print magazine focuses on features, close readings, debates and criticism, while Domus’s online presence is slanted towards news, trends and experiments.
Graphic design
The magazine’s strong international reputation has been built on and maintained by quality content and top-notch graphic design by some of the world’s best designers.
The magazine’s traditional 245 x 325 cm perfect-bound format provides ample real estate for text and images.
A page count of around 100 and thick paper give the magazine a broad spine that makes it easy to find and consult on shelves and in archives.
Design and architecture magazines tend to be weighty, as if their physicality were directly proportional to the importance of their content.
The inside pages have always been arranged in clear modular grids: Domus is by no means an experimental magazine, so its pages have never featured daring asymmetries or dispensed with grids. Rather, the graphic design dynamically manages text arranged as columns and images which always run right up to the bleed and often occupy the whole page.
As we touched on before, over the past 30 years, a succession of editors has resulted in various makeovers.
The biggest redesign came in 2011, overseen by the Salottobuono design agency: this involved not only graphics, but paper choice too, with the adoption of thicker and glossier paper with an uncoated effect, which was used for both the inside pages and the cover. Salottobuono opted for a 12-column grid that allowed a highly flexible page layout. It was also decided to keep photos within page margins so that they weren’t covered by readers’ fingers as they flicked through the magazine.
The choice of typeface broke with the rationalism often associated with this sort of content, with the trio of fonts employed including one from Zuzana Licko’s Emigre type foundries, widely regarded as one of the world’s most inventive.
Domus has also previously undergone a redesign by Alan Fletcher, founder of Pentagram Design in New York, one of the most influential design studies of the last century.
COVERS
Covers are crucial to a magazine’s success. For a monthly publication releasing 11-12 issues a year, eye-catching covers are essential, especially if it’s competing on the international market.
The editorial team at Domus have always been acutely aware of this, which explains why they have produced so many iconic covers.
While until the fifties both photos and illustrations were used, in later years Domus became more minimal and design-oriented, with bold type and architectural photos. Among the most experimental from this period were the covers created using photos by William Klein, a long-standing collaborator.
At the start of the eighties, under the leadership of Alessandro Mendini, and in keeping with the editor’s avant-garde philosophy, covers became more experimental, with more complex compositions, portraits of starchitects and lots of colour.
The Alan Fletcher years had brought new creative freedom to the magazine from across the Atlantic, where covers were conceptual, lively and entertaining. One of the most iconic covers from this era is the drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, sketched in Indian ink by Fletcher himself.
With the return of Alessandro Mendini to the helm in 2010, all covers were designed by Italian illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti, who produced a series of vibrant portraits of starchitects and other influential figures such as Sigmund Freud, all framed in elegant ovals on a white background.
When Nicola Di Battista took over from Mendini, he gave the magazine the strapline “Città dell’uomo” (City of Man) and opted for imageless two-tone covers.
In subsequent years, Domus would once again use photos and graphics, which were not always connected to the architectural world and included evocative and conceptual images, as well as, from time to time, illustrations and drawings (like the cover created by Tadai Ando in 2021).
On the Domus website, you can find every cover ever published by the magazine, organised decade by decade: https://www.domusweb.it/it/cover.html
Takeaways
Domus is without doubt one of the greatest international magazines, proof that Italy is still able to produce titles with global influence and reach.
In 2016, the magazine celebrated issue 1000, making Domus one of the world’s longest-running titles.
The quality of its content, both textual and visual, make it an essential case study for anyone who wants to understand how to design a magazine well. Having been published for almost 100 years now, it allows us to understand how printing and printing technology has changed, along with global trends in graphic design.
Our advice is not only to buy the latest print copy of the magazine or read it online, but to also pick up old paper issues, which can often be found in flea markets, to better understand this key piece of graphic design history.
SOURCES
Sources: https://www.domusweb.it/
Domus 1940s covers
https://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=3975
Various William Klein covers
https://www.domusweb.it/it/arte/2000/11/10/william-klein.html
2011 redesign by Joseph Grima and Salottobuono
https://www.domusweb.it/it/interviste/2011/05/16/intervista-a-salottobuono.html