Epiphany is a literary journal that champions boundary-pushing fiction, poetry, and essays and supports writers at every stage of their careers. After over two decades, the magazine needed a refresh that honored its history, but brought its identity into the present moment. The new brand is built around their back cover index, a long-running, slightly irreverent feature that becomes both visual metaphor and editorial compass. The identity layers organized archival structure with the nostalgic warmth of collaged fragments, annotations, and marginalia, creating an experience that feels like wandering through a friend’s well-loved library.
The logo embraces restraint and literary authenticity. Built around the semicolon (the one element the team wanted to keep from their previous identity), the new wordmark is effortless, appearing as if it could be lifted directly from a paragraph of exceptionally laid out prose.
Rather than treating the semicolon as decorative ornamentation, the design integrates it naturally into the letterforms, using it as punctuation in its truest sense. It embodies the Joycean philosophy at the magazine’s core: the semicolon as a pause followed by shift, a confluence of multiple ideas, something both within language and outside of it.
The design trusts that simplicity will carry more weight than complexity, revealing itself quietly like the epiphanic moments the magazine seeks to publish.
History underpinned a lot of the design choices. The Dial of the 1920s was one of the first magazines to integrate artwork into its literary contributions, so it felt necessary for each piece in the magazine to have a single, strong visual companion. Imagery runs the gamut from custom illustrations in the new, irreverent Dial style to classic editorial photos and historical ephemera.
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The brand’s foundational ivory color was sampled directly from historical scans of The Dial, while elements from 19th and 20th century periodicals—serif headlines, dividing lines, decorative arrows, ornaments, and two-color illustrations—ground the digital design in its print heritage.
Each monthly themed issue introduces a new accent color, creating visual variety while maintaining the magazine’s cohesive aesthetic.
