InDesigner: Vince Frost

One look at Vince Frost’s designs for the international literary magazine Zembla reveals that this is a man who clearly loves type. “Zembla is about ideas. I wanted bold, strong typography,” Frost says. “The tag line of the magazine is ‘Fun With Words’ — that’s what I wanted the design to convey.” Editor Dan Crowe asked Frost to design a new magazine that would signal a departure from the usual dry, text-heavy look of established literary titles. Frost and his team of designers used InDesign to create a publication that’s hip, witty, and smart in tone and visually rich enough to attract top-drawer advertisers like Gucci and Mercedes-Benz.

“Designing a magazine from scratch is very exciting,” Frost says. “There’s no history to it. You start with a blank page and begin playing.” Not surprisingly, unlimited undo ranks as one of his favorite InDesign features.

In the initial design stages, Frost riffed on the word “Zembla”— a legendary frozen island in the Arctic mentioned in the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov—then explored different ways of presenting literary content.

For example, strong display type marches across pages, then disappears behind paragraphs. Words are cut off at the paper’s edge as if interrupted mid-sentence. Interviews appear in sloping columns in which the two speakers literally face off in type, the text itself forming graphic shapes that mimic the diagonal cut of the letter Z.

Formerly an associate partner at Pentagram in London, Frost runs his own design studio in London yet lives in Australia where he is co-creative director of emeryfrost with Garry Emery (Zembla is actually produced in three offices: the editorial offices are in London while emeryfrost has two locales in Sydney and Melbourne). Prior to moving Down Under 18 months ago, Frost

was principally a QuarkXPress user. “When I arrived in Australia I was handed a Mac G4 laptop, which was great, but there was no QuarkXPress on it, only InDesign,” he remembers. “It scared the hell out of me.”

With a project due, Frost had no choice but to dive into InDesign. “People told me that it’s just like Illustrator and Photoshop—but I had never used those, either. I didn’t even know how to start a new document at first.” Now Frost uses InDesign almost exclusively, as does his studio where InDesign classes are frequently held to keep young designers’ skills sharp.

“InDesign is simply a better program,” he says. “Now when I sit down with QuarkXPress I think, ‘this is so limiting.’” Frost adds with some glee, “I still don’t need to know Illustrator or Photoshop because I can just use InDesign for everything.”