Angela Lorenzo, Drew Litowitz, Lauren Traugott-Campbell, and Sarah Mohammadi met on Rhode Island School of Design’s graduate graphic design programme. Before RISD, the four had careers outside design entirely — but at RISD they discovered a shared passion for iterative, community-based learning, the kind that happens when a group of people sit in a studio and push each other’s thinking until something unexpected emerges. After graduating and going their separate ways, they each felt themselves slipping into what Mohammadi described as a binary approach to design. They missed the studio. In 2019, they decided to recreate it — as a magazine.
feeeels — the extra letters are deliberate — is a publication that explores art, culture, politics, history, and emotion through the lens of one tactile adjective per issue. The debut, Fuzzy, tackled the concept from every conceivable angle: fuzzy politics, foggy memories, language shifts, playful interactions between strangers, clashes between modernism and cultural tradition. Contributors came from art, design, medicine, history, and — in one memorable case — the world of sports mascots, hailing from seven different countries. Jack Halten Fahnestock designed a custom typeface for the issue: an extremely fuzzy font that set the tone for a publication where the physical object is part of the argument. The second issue, Slick, continued the format with an entirely different aesthetic and material vocabulary.
Named one of nine design magazines everyone should read by It’s Nice That, feeeels occupies a space between art journal and design magazine, between critical publication and sensory object. In an age when tactility is disregarded in pursuit of supposedly immaterial digital interactions, the founders argue that touch — the most powerfully intimate of the senses, relying on physical proximity in ways completely at odds with digital culture — is exactly where understanding begins.
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