Ukrainian Creative Frontline: Magazine

Welcome, dear ladies and gents, to the first and the only entry of Approval Studio magazine.

I do not remember when, but at one point, Mary and I decided that we wanted to create a magazine to celebrate Approval Studio’s 5th anniversary. Frankly though, it would be a bit of a stretch to call it a firm, settled decision: it was more like an idea put into our backlog task list that we thought might be too hard to implement. We figured it could be fun to create a detailed roadmap with our tool development story, best articles, and cooperation with our lovely clients and put it all into some digital pages, not just a blog entry. It would be engaging both for our readers and us, we thought, and it would also put us (more Mary than me, really) into a designer’s shoes, making us tackle some work on the layout, colors, fonts, and many a thing that we constantly write about. A fun but pretty challenging task, so we waited and were unsure if it could come to life.

The bitter irony is that we did make the magazine, but not quite like the one we imagined. With the war against Ukraine started by russia, we decided to do a 180 on our content ideas and create something less brand-oriented. There are many ways people can help Ukraine fight for its very existence, and we thought if there’s something we could do that relates to our work, we definitely should. The best possible solution was obvious: we had to make a new Creative Talks entry with Ukrainian artists and designers and dedicate it to the topic of war. Little did we know that the response would be so sincere and overwhelming that putting it into just a blog post would seem too narrow and unfitting. The rest is history… and a couple of months of hard work in-between other tasks that is finally done.

I do not think I need to expand further on the magazine’s contents. It is the new form of the same material you could see in Part I, Part II, and Part III of our articles with lovely Ukrainian creatives who shared their thoughts and emotions about their work during the war. I just want to thank them one more time for their honesty and encourage you to read their stories and share this collection of works if you think this is something important. Honestly, it would mean a lot to us.

Together to victory. Glory to Ukraine!