It started on a cold September night in 2011, somewhere in Strasbourg, probably helped by a few drinks. Three graphic designers — Marlène Astrié, Marie Secher, and Maxime Pintadu — found themselves debating what a printed magazine should be in an age of infinite scroll. Their answer arrived in April 2013, funded through a KissKissBankBank campaign: Cercle, a 132-page publication devoted entirely to one subject. The first theme was the forest. A Gustave Doré drawing opened the inaugural spread, and interviews ranged from a forest manager to artists and writers, while a custom typeface by Francis Ramel gave the whole thing a voice of its own. When the It's Nice That editors passed it around, everyone commented on how good it smelled.
That one-theme-per-year constraint has become Cercle's defining discipline. Eleven issues in, the magazine has moved from forests to science fiction, insects, costumes, oceans, dreams, volcanoes, ghosts, flowers, parades, and most recently mythology — each explored through the overlapping lenses of art, science, literature, and design. Every issue carries four to six long-form interviews with professionals working on the theme from wildly different angles: for the ghosts issue, the contributors included a historian, a designer, a film critic, and the makers of ghost trains and haunted houses. A central portfolio showcases twelve international artists — some established, some emerging — whose work orbits the theme in unexpected ways.
Each edition gets its own custom typeface, which means the magazine reinvents its visual identity every year. Thomas Bouville designed the lettering for the costume issue; Ariel Martín Pérez created the font for the flowers edition. The covers are events in themselves — the costume issue featured gold foil that the team spent fifteen drafts perfecting. At 200 × 265 mm on uncoated matte stock, Cercle has the weight and texture of a book, and back issues sell out regularly enough that the team once debated at length whether to reprint the very first forest edition. They did.
Published as a non-profit association registered in Strasbourg and now seven members strong, Cercle operates without advertising. The magazine is distributed internationally through KD Presse in Paris and Antenne Books in London, and is published in parallel French and English editions. Louise Cronenberger joined the team in 2020, but the core trio still handles everything from editorial direction to photography to illustration. Cercle Studio, the graphic design practice that grew out of the magazine, now works with clients like the Musée du Louvre and the Musée des Confluences — but the magazine remains the founding project, the reason the studio exists.
For the eleventh issue, Cercle took its mythology theme beyond the page: a collaboration with Athens-based Desired Landscapes turned into a guided walk through the city's urban myths, from dormant local legends to ancient symbols, compiled afterward in a risograph-printed A5 edition. That kind of restless curiosity — the refusal to let a theme stay between covers — is what makes Cercle worth the twelve-month wait. Every issue is an encyclopaedia of a single idea, assembled by people who believe that everything is interesting if you take the time to look.
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