Almanak

Almanak is a magazine built on a constraint: the articles come from the free encyclopedia, and the design has to make them read like a magazine rather than a web page. Issue two, December 2024, takes on sustainable architecture across twenty pages, moving from the origins of the discipline to the detail of how a building actually spends energy over its life.

The issue is structured as a real publication. An opening section on the history of bio-ecological building leads into the general principles — sustainability, life cycle, eco-balance, compatibility, wellbeing — and from there into the concrete elements: energy sources, rational use of water, bio-ecological materials, regionalism, recycling and reuse. It closes the way a printed magazine does, with numbered notes, etymologies and a full list of picture credits, from the Bosco Verticale on the cover to Löyly in Helsinki and the Mountain Dwellings in Copenhagen.

The design pairs a serif for reading with a geometric sans for the masthead, set on a justified two-column grid with a running footer on every spread. Photography carries the argument next to the text: some pictures run at full strength, others fade out underneath the columns, and full-page colour title cards mark where one section ends and the next begins.