Antje Mayer-Salvi spent years as a freelance journalist reporting from Eastern Europe, making documentaries, writing books, and teaching the Master Class in Communication Design at the Graphische in Vienna. She relaunched the magazine for Doctors Without Borders Austria, worked as its editor, and along the way developed a conviction that the traditional magazine format — with its obligatory fashion section, celebrity chef recipe, and editor’s choice page — was ripe for dismantling. In 2016, undeterred by the chorus of “Print is dead!,” she launched C/O Vienna.
The magazine began as an online publication before expanding into an annual print edition in 2018 — over 240 pages, bilingual in German and English, printed in a run of 5,000 copies and distributed from Europe to the United States. Each edition is themed: The Private Issue, The Beauty Issue, The Consumer Issue, The Wasted Issue, The Provinz Issue, Die Lügen Issue, The Animal Issue. The approach is deliberately satirical, questioning why an art magazine should only show art, or why a science magazine should only write about science. Mayer-Salvi’s own secret weakness is astrophysics — her bedside table is piled high with books on the subject. “They calm me,” she says, entirely serious.
The award-winning editorial design comes from Vienna-based studio Seite Zwei, led by Christian Begusch, Stefan Mayer, and Christoph Schörkhuber, and it has earned a shelf of prizes: CCA Gold and Silver for the PS: Unterhose bookazine, ADC Bronze for The Wasted Issue, a Willy Fleckhaus Prize nomination, and multiple CCA Silvers for editorial and communication design. Since 2023, C/O Vienna has also published Books — hybrid book-magazine editions on single themes like Clouds, Scars, and Underwear — with young designers invited to take creative carte blanche.
It’s Nice That once described the magazine as a satirical take on traditional magazines, and that captures something essential about what Mayer-Salvi has built: a publication that takes Vienna’s creative scene seriously precisely by refusing to take the conventions of magazine-making seriously at all. The result is playful, intelligent, and unlike anything else coming out of Austria.
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