The Social Gathering – Volume One

As the country ground to a halt in March 2020, iconic London music venue The Social shut its doors and became a magazine. The Social Gathering began as an online attempt to carry on the conversations that happen every night in the venue; spiralling narratives that form beautiful and strange shapes as evenings progress. After nine months of hugely varied content, The Social Gathering decided to print a one-off magazine. We set about collating 50 pieces from the site to create something that felt inspiring like a perfect night in the bar. The site was run on a shoestring, so the magazine needed to be cost effective too. Design had to reflect the different voices and themes in the content, and draw all those disparate conversations together into a cohesive collection from a unique year. It needed to be easy to read but also covetable enough that it would be stashed on a bookshelf as a reminder of these strange times. The individual pieces each look subtly different to the next, like different voices around a pub table, a sans serif next to a slab serif next to a monospaced font, but the stark colour palette unifies them together under one roof. The cover (a usually busy road at the height of lockdown) reminds us that we are connected by our individual isolations and the new language that 2020 brought with it.