GUM #14—Digital Edition

Published at irregular intervals since 1997 by the Department of Design and Art at Hochschule Bielefeld, GUM is a magazine dedicated to conceptual design. Its first digital edition addresses the future of design practice through a question that is both formal and conceptual: How can an analog magazine be translated into a digital editorial form?

GUM #14 presents itself as both laboratory and discursive space. Drawing on a carefully curated selection of outstanding student projects and degree work, it examines the intersections of transdisciplinary design pedagogy and asks how experimental practice might be documented, reframed and extended through editorial means. Structured as a seemingly endless spread, the issue tests the spatial, temporal and typographic conditions of digital reading while reflecting on the design culture that has shaped the department over the past five years.

For the first time, GUM appears not in print, but as a hybrid of magazine and platform. The premise was to transfer the logic of a classic editorial layout into a digital environment while exploiting specifically digital affordances: vertical scrolling, motion, sound, interaction and moving image. Deliberately, the publication is not optimized for mobile. This refusal is programmatic. Rather than submitting to the functional defaults of contemporary interface culture, GUM #14 insists on the screen as a site for formal invention, editorial pacing and typographic articulation.

Contributions from digital media, photography, communication design and fashion are brought into a shared framework in which design practice and theoretical reflection are closely interwoven. Text and image do not simply coexist; they intersect, overlap and generate new readings. In this way, the issue proposes digital publishing not as the remediation of print, nor as the reproduction of familiar patterns of use, but as a medium capable of producing its own visual rhetoric and editorial syntax.

Emerging from a laboratory context, GUM #14 does not claim to offer a universal model. Its emphasis lies on experiment, on testing the limits of format, and on developing a distinctly digital typography that resists standardized web aesthetics. The result is both a reflection on contemporary design education and a proposition about where editorial design might move next.

Read it for free here.

GUM #14

Art Direction: Johannes Nathow
Editorial and Layout: Johannes Nathow, Nina Michler, Lars Vieth
Development: Malte Michels
Editorial Assistance: Aliya Amangeldi, Marius Gieske, Laura Kolik, Juyeon Ko, Lars Vieth, Samuel Wiebe
Concept: Juyeon Ko, Lars Vieth
Texts: Rafael Dernbach, Nina Michler, Claudia Rohrmoser, Samuel Wiebe
Design Contributions: Students and alumni of the Department of Design and Art, Hochschule Bielefeld:
Julia Autz, Darius Bange, Madlin Bentlage, Paul Düstersiek, Sandra Eden, Sarah Fyrguth, Daniel Götz, Roman Girsikorn, Fritz Grögel, Ronja Hempel, Hanno Hlacer, Mirko Israel, Janice Jensen, Kaan Kanbur, Lovis Knechtel, Karsten Kronas, Alina Lutz, Kati Lübeck, Sonja Mense, Fabia Meyer, Isabel Pallas, Patrick Pollmeier, Karina Reich, Katrin Ribbe, Samuel Cerqueira da Rocha, Tim Rodenbröcker, Raphael Helmut Schmitt, Maik Symann, Luisa Summe, Tilman Kunkel, Paulina Zoe Tillmann, Sihyun Woo, Anke Warlies
Publisher: Dirk Fütterer

Institute for Book Design | Hochschule Bielefeld

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© 2025 Institute for Book Design | Hochschule Bielefeld