Lisa H. Moura is the daughter of a German mother and a Portuguese father, born and raised in sunny Portugal on a farm with horses and an adolescence spent playing GTA. She studied communication design in Lisbon, worked for three years in a São Paulo architecture studio, earned a master's degree in Spaces and Communication at HEAD-Genève in Switzerland, and returned to Lisbon to found her design studio, Frau im Mond — named after the 1929 Fritz Lang film about a trip to the moon. Somewhere along this itinerary, the word alien began to follow her around.
The word has multiple lives. It describes extraterrestrial creatures in science fiction. It is also, in English-speaking legal systems, the official term for foreigners, migrants, and tourists — anyone who does not belong. Moura became fascinated by this duality during her master's studies, and after graduating she received a grant to turn her research into a publication. Alien Magazine was the result: an independent editorial project that explores, twists, and reinterprets what it means to be alien in all senses of the word.
The magazine's first open call for submissions invited contributions under the theme Aliens of Extraordinary Ability — a phrase borrowed directly from US immigration law, where it refers to individuals who can demonstrate sustained national or international acclaim. The irony was intentional. Through visual and written essays, interviews, and investigative reports, Alien Magazine invites readers to reconsider the social norms and labels that determine who belongs and who does not, regardless of shape, size, colour, profession, creed, or planet of origin.
Moura designed the magazine herself, and the design is as conceptually loaded as the content. The display typeface, Avara, is a classic serif with deliberately rough edges. The cover paper has a strange, almost unwelcoming texture, while the interior pages are soft and inviting — a tactile metaphor for the experience of being an outsider. Traditional blocks of text are interrupted by freely curved lines that want to be seen but are sometimes barely legible. The website applies the same logic, using simple scroll features broken by unexpected functionalities. Everything in the design underscores the magazine's central theme: the tension between fitting in and standing out, between belonging and being kept at the margins.
The project is produced by an ever-changing team of collaborators — each, in their own way, alien — and it is driven by what Moura describes as love. It is a passion project in the truest sense, made by a designer who uses her work as a medium to speak for herself and who believes that the questions of belonging, community, and collective identity are too important to leave to bureaucrats and border officials. Alien Magazine provides a safe haven for all those who feel they have none. In a world that keeps drawing lines between us and them, that is not a small thing.
Explore Alien Magazine at <a href="https://www.alien-magazine.com/" target="\_blank">alien-magazine.com