Lead Magazine

Even the taxi drivers in Eindhoven are full of information about their “European creative capital”, which they love to already call it. They talk about Strijp X, the artists, design week and the academy. Now the city has its own magazine to help give the creative industries more recognition.

By Gabrielle Kennedy /asdf 05-11-2009

Edhv (the international abbreviation for Eindhoven) is a graphic design company started up by Remco van de Craats four and a half years ago. It now employs seven and has just launched its first magazine, Lead with the aim of putting Eindhoven’s creative industries into a global context.

Eindhoven has always been in Van de Craats heart. He grew up close by and graduated from the Design Academy back in 2000 with a project about social networking before social networking became the phenomenon that it is today. It was called “Etroplois” with an E for Eindhoven.

A magazine is something that Van de Craats and his team had wanted to do for some time. “We are all based here and feel very connected with the environment,” he says. “Eindhoven has an enormous amount of creative energy and it’s not just design and architecture, but creativity in general.”

The magazine’s concept is a clever and fresh take on traditional journalism. A lead is the first two paragraphs of a typical newspaper story designed to get a reader hooked. The magazine opens with five interviews with various Eindhoven creative ambassadors. From that interview, a journalist selects various comments or random sentences to use as a lead in a spin-off feature story that appears in the second half of the publication. “So when we start, we don’t actually know what the magazine’s content will end up being,” says Van de Craats. “It entirely depends on what comes out of the interviews.”

For the first issue the interviewees include chemist Bert Meijer, musician Frank Veenstra, director of the Van Abbemuseum Charles Esche, director of the Design Academy Eindhoven Anne Mieke Eggenkamp, and director of Dutch Design Week Hans Robertus.

“This is a new formula for a magazine,” says Van de Craats. “Magazines are always so time specific according to when they are published, but we want this to be timeless.”

After graduating, Van de Craats himself spent two years with AMO, the research arm of Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture. “I decided graphic design was too limited and that I wanted to move into something more multi-disciplinary,” he says.

Lead was made possible by help from the local government who offered to buy the first 1500 copies in advance. The government also helped Edhv to make all the necessary industry connections. The plan is to have two issues a year – summer and winter.