In 2013, Robert Priest and Grace Lee — two editorial design veterans whose combined portfolio included stints at Esquire, Newsweek, and O Magazine — decided to leave behind the soccer magazine they had helped co-found, Howler, and build something entirely their own. Working out of Brooklyn, they launched EIGHT BY EIGHT, a large-format quarterly named after the dimensions of the goalmouth: eight feet high by eight yards wide, the silent frame around every dramatic moment in the game.
The result was a publication that looked nothing like conventional sports media. Each double-page spread read like a billboard designed by people who happened to love football — bold typography, lavish illustrations, striking caricatures of global players, and a deliberate refusal to rely on the usual match-day photography. The Society of Publication Designers took notice almost immediately, naming EIGHT BY EIGHT its Magazine of the Year in 2015 out of more than six thousand entries. MIN's Media Industry Newsletter had already listed it among its Hottest Launches of the Year from nearly eight hundred new titles.
What made the magazine matter, though, was not just its design ambition but its editorial stance: treating football not as a sequence of scores and transfers but as a culture with its own history, aesthetics, and storytelling traditions. From Totti to Guardiola, from the Premier League's great clubs to America's burgeoning programmes, EIGHT BY EIGHT gave the sport the kind of long-form, design-forward attention that the best literary and cultural magazines bring to their subjects. The goalposts stand there, eight by eight, waiting for the moment. The magazine stood there too, ready to tell you about it properly.
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