Twenty-five issues in, COUNTERPOINT has earned a reputation that its modest format belies. Each edition is risograph-printed in Leith, Edinburgh, using just three inks — red, yellow, and teal — and the constraint is the point. The limited palette forces both illustrators and designers to think harder about colour, composition, and the space between them. The result is a magazine that looks unlike anything else on the shelf: vibrant, textured, and unmistakably handmade in a way that only risograph can achieve.
Every issue revolves around a single theme, and the themes are deliberately unexpected: Sleep, Flight, Treasure, Failure, Pets, Long. Within each, COUNTERPOINT pairs original writing — essays, interviews, reported features — with commissioned illustration, giving artists the space to interpret the theme visually rather than merely decorate someone else’s words. The contributors are a rotating cast of writers, illustrators, and journalists, from Katie Hawthorne and Heather Parry to Gemma Correll and Bethan Woollvin, and the magazine has a particular talent for finding the surprising angle on a familiar subject.
At 36 to 54 pages per issue, it is compact enough to read in a single sitting and beautiful enough that most readers pin their favourite spreads to the wall afterward. The magazine encourages this: its tagline invites readers to read it, rip it, and put it up. Stocked at Artwords in London, Frab’s in Italy, bookshops in Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon, and online outlets as far as China’s Jiangsu Province, COUNTERPOINT reaches a global audience from a studio in Scotland. Independent journalism, brilliant illustration, unexpected perspectives — printed with love, care, and exactly three colours.
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