Pentagram has designed a stylish watch supplement for biannual style magazine Port. What was once, in previous iterations, a quiet piece of advertorial was transformed by the team into a 92-page collectable publication that oozes sophistication and elegance, with references to time and hour-markers dotted throughout.
The team began by renaming the supplement and redesigning the masthead. The clever time-based content navigation leads readers through articles that showcase brands such as Bell & Ross, Patek Philippe, TAG Heuer, Rolex and Omega at hours 11:34, 13:50, 19:56 and so on. Uncoated paper gives the front section a more journal-like feel, with the change to glossy stock for the feature imagery.
The design team art directed acclaimed photographers such as Julian Anderson, Andy Barter, Robin Broadbent, Leon Chew and Alexander Kent to capture the watches in unexpected ways. Broadbent shot Bulgari’s black Octo-Finissimo watch in profile against a black background for one of two of Ten Ten’s split-run covers; for the other, Leon Chew shot Cartier’s Santos-Dumont amidst a structure of industrial cables.
Inside the supplement, watches are paired with materials that conceptually align – Alexander Kent pairs watches with fine papers, while in ‘High Graft’, Andy Barter matches watches with slabs of rock, barbed wire and shards of glass. For the ‘High Graft’ still life story, the team went around the streets of London picking up all sorts of industrial materials – bricks, rusted metal, gravel. These were then broken and crushed to wrap the watches around for the shoot. The results are a contrast of the exquisite detail and craft of the watch, with the rawness of the materials.
Ten Ten is not an extension of Port, yet the two publications gracefully coexist. The supplement features the magazine’s logo on its cover and utilises Port’s body text typeface Quadraat to retain visual unity. As the supplement’s editor Alex Doak posits: “In attempting to physically embody and mark out something as ethereal as time, the tiny wristwatch could touch on such a vast array of human experience.” Ten Ten’s redesign does just that.
