Clear Magazine Story

Clearly fearless,

                    Clear magazine pushes the publishing envelope with the
                    Adobe® Creative Suite 2, including Adobe InDesign® CS2

 

 The first thing you notice about Clear magazine is its clear cover. You may remark on its daring exploration of different lands, customs, tastes, and languages. You may also be surprised to learn that one issue of Clear was printed entirely on plastic, or that Clear is the first international fashion design magazine located in the Midwestern United States. Clear breaks new ground on several levels, including its own innovative graphic design with sophisticated type effects and eye-catching imagery that make it stand out from other fashion and design magazines. The technology Clear magazine uses to marry words, fonts, and imagery on its pages is the Adobe Creative Suite 2, including Adobe InDesign CS2 software.

“We switched over from QuarkXPress™ to Adobe InDesign, and it’s literally the best thing we’ve ever done,” says Emin Kadi, co-founder of Clear magazine. “It’s just incredible what we can do with InDesign CS2 from a creative standpoint. The software is friendly to use, and the sky’s the limit with InDesign CS2 as far as page layout.” What began as the vision of co-founders Kadi and Ivana Kalafatic has grown into a stunning success. Clear magazine literally jumps off newsstand shelves—where 80% of its readers purchase the magazine. “It’s amazing and exciting to start a magazine out of thin air,” says Kalafatic. “Especially being located in Detroit and making it onto the international stage.” New ideas, new media Driven by its stunning content, design, and photography—created by Kadi, Kalafatic and the magazine’s design staff—Clear now has an international circulation of 100,000 in 26 countries including Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Japan, Australia, and Mexico. Kadi and Kalafatic are creating their 20th issue, and have big plans for the future. They will continue featuring articles about luxury items, combined with exceptional photography and clean, eye-catching layouts. And, although the primary medium for Clear to date has been print, Kadi and Kalafatic plan to take Clear to new places and new media.
“Clear could be content on a cell phone, or a clear pocket on a pair of jeans,” says Kadi. “Clear is a palette for creativity and interaction that people can use to get excited, inspired, and hopefully elevated.” Pushing the publishing envelope Clear prints its own magazine from cover to cover and experiments with what Kalafatic deems off-thewall elements. The plastic issue of Clear won two major international design awards and has become a hot collector’s item. “You couldn’t tear it. You could actually take it in the pool or in your bathtub with you,” says Kadi. “I actually met a famous designer because he was reading the magazine in his bathtub, just dunking it in the water, and he called us up and said ‘who are you guys?’”

issue, because of the tremendous response to the first one, despite the fact that the first one was incredibly difficult to produce. “You can’t really stack plastic too high,” explains Kadi. “Otherwise, it does something called bricking, where you can’t pull the pages apart. I remember our entire storage facility was full of these little stacks of Clear everywhere. It felt good. But it was also scary.” According to Kalafatic, the next plastic issue will incorporate more plasticized products produced by Clear and its partners. “There’s a lot of leveraging of opportunity that we love to do for ourselves and for our partners and our friends, which is what we consider all of our advertisers,” says Kalafatic. Clear has been fearless in other ways as well. The print quality of the magazine goes beyond beautiful, verging on unbelievable. The magazine is printed using stochastic printing, a method in which extremely tiny dots of ink are randomly scattered across the printing surface, similar to the grain in photographic film. The technique produces rich color halftones with exquisite detail. “The sheer creative joy of seeing each magazine issue come off the presses can’t be overstated,” says Kalafatic. “Each issue is like an animal or a child that we’ve created and nurtured.” Clear was also the first magazine to use magnetic paper. The inventor of the specialized paper approached the co-founders of Clear and asked them to pioneer printing on his new medium. Clear designers created collectible artwork that was printed on the magnetic paper and could be torn out of the magazine and stuck to objects like refrigerators. Clearly the best software With the motto, “Don’t pollute the product” Kalafatic and Kadi are careful about who touches Clear from editorial, advertising, staffing, and design standpoints. They are also fanatical about having complete creative control over the end product. Design considerations are first and foremost, which is why the pair rely on the Adobe Creative Suite 2. “We’re always excited to see a beautiful form come to life on a page through the marriage of a word and a font,” says Kalafatic. “Nothing compares to InDesign CS2 when it comes to creative control and tools for enabling us to achieve typographical finesse.”