NINETEEN NINETY THREE! HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS BY WAY OF CAMDEN MARKET

AND MTV. THIS IS PHAT MAGAZINE. HOT STUFF FOR HOODLUMS. THREE ISSUES THAT TOGETHER DELIVER

THE BEST WORST DESIGN

AND ART DIRECTION YOU COULD EVER DARE TO

BRING BACK AGAIN.

There were only three issues. Somewhat unsurprisingly the British skate mag with the strapline 'Hot Stuff For Hoodlums' did not transcend this particularly gnarly mash up of Beavis and Butt-Head, Tank Girl and the toys for boys section of the Argos catalogue. Teenage Gangsta was the first issue. Cover line: Shopping With Satan. And a gun on the cover! 

Issue No.2. Notable for many, many things not least the introduction of the word 'produx' in vaguely Prodigy font and the girl in the pink top and pushed back sunglasses being Sofia Prantera from Aries :)
 

Under the flammatory (word we have made up) covers the mags are, in part, really good on skateboard stuff and skaters and have genuinely fresh art direction. 
 

Sometimes genuinely horrible art direction too! But these graphix are all the rave now. This is what we get asked for. And rarely is it so (not) well done. 
 

This inside back page advert so charming and kind of innocent. 
 

This one rather less so! Compare and contrast that with our own SORRY / I DON'T WORK HERE hats :)
 

Reference material. There are pages of this kind of stuff. And it all needs ripping!
 

We are big fans of the FREE JURASSIC PARK TATTOO WITH FIRST 1,001 ORDERS hookline. 

So many lessons to be learned from these three issues. The whole not sorry episode is well summarised in a 2005 blog posting that Google has preserved: 
 

When R.a.D magazine (1987-1993) was sold to a new publisher, the team who produced it decided to strike out on their own. They produced three issues of a new type of magazine called Phat, which got caught up in an explosion of outrage about teenage culture and was pulled off the shelves.
 

Like we said, historic documents. We have one set of all three issues (complete with a few loose pages) on the button below.