Brief: Well known for its strong stable of weekly titles, Italian media group Gruppo Editorale L'Espresso wanted to establish a new presence for itself in fashion publishing. Deciding to launch its first monthly title in 2006, it commissioned Joel to design a style magazine that would address a perceived gap in the Italian monthly magazine market by combining retail advice and high fashion.
Fulfillment: Joel chose a bold, flamboyant style that played upon the contradiction between the magazine's high fashion aspirations and more commercial content. Adopting a large format, he devised a daring mix of typefaces and styles that suggested the robust, stark quality of early twentieth-century tabloid graphics, yet at the same time provided a lavish visual platform for premium fashion photography. To maximise the magazine's potential to function at the highest level, while meeting its ambitious extent of 350–400 pages, Joel put together a team of international photographers that includes Perry Ogden, John Akehurst, Phil Poynter, Enrique Badulescu, Albert Watson, Pamela Hanson and Frederick Lieberath. Launched in NOVEMBER 2006, Velvet, has firmly established itself in the Italian market with a circulation of 180,000–200,000.