blueprint

Coded Communication.
Peter Maybury has enlivened Dublin's graphic design scene with his startling work for the magazine .
By Michelle Ogundehin.
Controlled maelstroms of text and pictures reverberate around invisible lines of tension; letterforms and
headlines dance carefully orchestrated ballets through otherwise quiet layouts; images of circuit boards,
binary codes, hands, dots and dashes are liberally sprinked across spreads. Such devices characterise the
graphic design of 27-year old [!] Irishman Peter Maybury. It is in his art direction of Code - the Dublin-based
underground magazine of popular culture - that the sophistication of these visual tricks shows most clearly
and distinguishes the magazine from the plethora of low-budget culture-zines in Great Britain...
Although the subject matter of Code is diverse, its look is uniformly complex. Since Maybury designs
intuitively, his ideas are often conceived in response to the everyday, the copy he reads, or gut instinct...
Maybury encourages connections between features. Occasionally it is difficult to tell where one features
ends and another begins (he also designs the majority of its adverts) - not because the text is illegible,
but because the junctions between them are negligible, especially without the visual pauses provided by
clear advertising breaks .
[His] work is underpinned by a pragmatic yet playfully intelligent rigour... He often often creates a tension
in his work by hinting at a set of rules to divide and allocate the white space of a design, then deliberately
breaking those rules by shifting the margins, pictues or text - the results are less a crisp one-liner than a
complex and creative visual sampling of ideas.