Lucy Nurnberg and Lydia Garnett met at art school in Brighton, where they studied photography and illustration respectively. A year after graduating, they went travelling together for three months, driving around the south-west of America and Mexico. They met incredible characters, took photographs, heard stories, and realised that no magazine was publishing the kind of narratives they kept encountering — the lives of people who had pushed themselves beyond convention and had remarkable experiences to show for it. So they came back to London and made one.
accent began in 2014 as an online quarterly, deliberately designed to feel more like a print magazine than a blog. Each issue was treated as a self-contained edition with hand-drawn type commissioned from a different illustrator, giving it a visual identity that changed with every instalment while maintaining a coherent editorial voice. The founding idea was simple: find the extraordinary people that mainstream media overlooks — the free spirits, the eccentrics, the people who take pride in their own strangeness — and tell their stories through personal writing and documentary photography.
After three years online, accent made the leap to print with a 112-page glossy magazine that brought its digital sensibility into physical form. The writing style owes something to New Journalism — rambling, intensely personal, built around the texture of individual experience rather than the polish of conventional profiles. The magazine's subjects have included a trans opera diva, an urban cowboy, Kia Labeija the drag queen, Izaak Adu (the son of soul superstar Sade and a trans role model), and Kala Kala, the self-styled Guru of Soho who dedicates his life to spreading peace and love on the streets of central London in spectacular multicoloured outfits. Issue four took the form of a celebrity gossip magazine, profiling what it called alternative A-listers — everyday superstars making the world brighter simply by being themselves.
The stories come from everywhere. Many arrive through word of mouth — photographers who met someone unforgettable, friends who know someone who deserves a platform. Nurnberg has described accent as the kind of magazine where almost everyone responds by saying the same thing: you should meet this person I know. That instinct — the urge to celebrate someone in your life who goes against the grain — is the engine that drives the publication. It is a storytelling magazine about the superstars of the everyday, built on the conviction that the most interesting people in the world are rarely the ones with publicists.
The design is as bold, diverse, and exuberant as the subjects. Photography dominates, and the visual identity shifts with each issue while maintaining a warmth and openness that makes the magazine feel like a generous invitation rather than a curated gallery. accent is not interested in cool detachment or ironic distance. It celebrates its subjects with uncomplicated affection, and it expects its readers to feel the same way.
In a media landscape that tends to sort people into demographics and sell them products that match, accent does something refreshingly uncynical: it finds people who live by their own rules, sits down with them, and listens. The result is a magazine that reads like the best conversation you have ever overheard — intimate, surprising, and impossible to walk away from.
Explore accent at <a href="https://www.accentmagazine.co/" target="\_blank">accentmagazine.co