Works That Work magazine

The Slovakian graphic designer and typographer Peter Bil'ak is planning to launch a new magazine to inspire fellow creatives, and you can help. Works That Work has been planned out, will be published twice a year, and is looking for backers - make a pledge of €8 and you can receive the digital edition, €16 for the print copy, and so on.

Based in The Hague, Bil'ak has designed a typeface especially for Works That Work, but what he really wants to emphasise is the content. The magazine aims to look beyond portfolios, seeking out unexpected creativity in the real world. "Practical, positive, detached from artists' egos, showing just works that work, from around the globe," says the online manifesto.

The pilot issue promises a variety of stories via which Bil'ak hopes to change reader perceptions. There's the history of the digital curve, which was invented by the automobile industry, and also a look at the dabbawalas - a distribution network for home-made foods in Mumbai is far more efficient than comparable, but vastly more costly and wasteful, Western logistics operations.

There will also be articles on beauty and the Pope's speech at the Sistine Chapel, the design of translation guides for US soldiers in Afghanistan, and Amsterdam airport's urinals - they're 80 per cent more efficient than regular models, apparently.

'National Geographic of design'

National Geographic is one of the only magazines from which Bil'ak has drawn inspiration: "I consider myself a curious person," he says, "but I lost interest in reading most design publications because they seem to be fairly repetitive, covering well known people and their projects.

"I was considering what would be alternative to this, something which would confront me with stuff I have no idea about, but would still be relevant to my work. Something that broadens my mind, and exposes me to completely different ways of thinking.

"The only magazine that was fitting this criteria was National Geographic, so I used it as a metaphor - with the ambition to make a kind of National Geographic for design," he explains.

Watch out for our interview with Peter Bil'ak in an upcoming issue of Computer Arts Collection.