Clearly Fearless

New ideas, new media

Driven by its stunning content, design, and photography — created by Kadi, Kalafatic, and the magazine's design staff — Clear now has an international circulation of 100,000 in 26 countries including Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Japan, Australia, and Mexico. Kadi and Kalafatic are creating their 20th issue and have big plans for the future. They will continue featuring articles about luxury items, combined with exceptional photography and clean, eye-catching layouts. And, although the primary medium for Clear to date has been print, Kadi and Kalafatic plan to take Clear to new places and new media.

"Clear could be content on a cell phone, or a clear pocket on a pair of jeans," says Kadi. "Clear is a palette for creativity and interaction that people can use to get excited, inspired, and hopefully elevated."

Pushing the publishing envelope

Clear prints its own magazine from cover to cover and experiments with what Kalafatic deems off-the-wall elements. The plastic issue of Clear won two major international design awards and has become a hot collector's item. "You couldn't tear it. You could actually take it in the pool or in your bathtub with you," says Kadi. "I actually met a famous designer because he was reading the magazine in his bathtub, just dunking it in the water, and he called us up and said, 'Who are you guys?'"

Kalafatic and Kadi plan to create a second plastic issue, because of the tremendous response to the first one, despite the fact that the first one was incredibly difficult to produce. "You can't really stack plastic too high," explains Kadi. "Otherwise, it does something called bricking, where you can't pull the pages apart. I remember our entire storage facility was full of these little stacks of Clear everywhere. It felt good. But it was also scary."

According to Kalafatic, the next plastic issue will incorporate more plasticized products produced by Clear and its partners. "There's a lot of leveraging of opportunity that we love to do for ourselves and for our partners and our friends, which is what we consider all of our advertisers," says Kalafatic.

Clear has been fearless in other ways as well. The print quality of the magazine goes beyond beautiful, verging on unbelievable. The magazine is printed using stochastic printing, a method in which extremely tiny dots of ink are randomly scattered across the printing surface, similar to the grain in photographic film. The technique produces rich color halftones with exquisite detail.

"The sheer creative joy of seeing each magazine issue come off the presses can't be overstated," says Kalafatic. "Each issue is like an animal or a child that we've created and nurtured."

Clear was also the first magazine to use magnetic paper. The inventor of the specialized paper approached the co-founders of Clear and asked them to pioneer printing on his new medium. Clear designers created collectible artwork that was printed on the magnetic paper and could be torn out of the magazine and stuck to objects such as refrigerators.

The inventor of magnetic paper asked Clear to pioneer printing on his new magnetic medium. Clear created collectible artwork that was printed on the magnetic paper and could be torn out of the magazine and stuck to refrigerators. Creativity extends to the magazine's beautiful, cutting-edge graphics and layouts created using Adobe Creative Suite 2.

Clearly the best software

With the motto, "Don't pollute the product," Kalafatic and Kadi are careful about who touches Clear from editorial, advertising, staffing, and design standpoints. They are also fanatical about having complete creative control over the end product. Design considerations are first and foremost, which is why the pair rely on Adobe Creative Suite 2.

"We're always excited to see a beautiful form come to life on a page through the marriage of a word and a font," says Kalafatic. "Nothing compares to InDesign CS2 when it comes to creative control and tools for enabling us to achieve typographical finesse."

Integration among components of Adobe Creative Suite2 is vital to the Clear design team as well, because it removes the barriers to creative exploration. Staff and design collaborators can move fluidly between vectors in Adobe Illustrator CS2 and pixels in Adobe Photoshop CS2 software, and combine elements smoothly on magazine pages using InDesign CS2.

With a computer and Adobe Creative Suite 2, you can create anything you like, says Kadi. "What Adobe has done for us with the Adobe Creative Suite 2 is revolutionary, because it allows us to create an entirely new form of art."

The Clear staff is passionate about innovative design, starting with the clear cover on every issue. Designers on staff can experiment creatively using built-in effects and typographical controls in InDesign CS2 to create stunning covers and spreads. For these reasons and more, issues of Clear are becoming collector's items.

Reliable output, more time for design

Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Adobe PDF are also crucial for prepress and production at Clear. Staff preflights each issue using the built-in tools in InDesign CS2 to check for fonts, linked graphics, and other variables in the file. Clear then outputs the magazine layout directly from InDesign CS2 to Adobe PDF and posts the file to the magazine printer's FTP server for downloading.

"Adobe PDF is the industry standard," says Kadi. "It's awesome when you can transfer a flattened high-res Adobe PDF via FTP at the last minute and go to press with it. It means we have more creative time, more reliable output, and we can work on Clear no matter where we happen to be in the world."

Software for exploration

Kalafatic and Kadi continue to experiment, and they have plans for an issue created using 100% recycled materials. The pair also plans to work with their design staff to create a different page layout for a forthcoming issue to keep people interested and wondering what to expect from the innovative magazine.

"Adobe InDesign CS2 allows us to implement unimaginable concepts with the magazine," says Kalafatic. "Clear is a revolution in itself, but so is InDesign CS2. Clients come to our offices who've never used InDesign before. They sit down, start playing with InDesign CS2 and say, 'I can't believe how easy this is to use, and how much it lets me explore and accomplish whatever I need to create.'"