The new Rouleur magazine, the Design issue, is now available. Editor Edward Pickering tells us what’s in the magazine.
Good design is invisible, so they say. The very best design happens when form and function work with each other to make something that not only works perfectly and looks great, but is just right. Like the iPod, or an anglepoise lamp, or a Wurlitzer jukebox, Or Rouleur. The writer Elmore Leonard, who created the influential ‘10 rules of writing’ summed them all up with an 11th: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it. The same goes for design. If you notice it, it’s not quite done its job.
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Image: The Ribble Revolution pages 136-143
Is there any other sport in which design is so intrinsically important as cycling? Many of us obsess over the latest bikes and tech; many more of us obsess also over old bikes and tech – I still think the best looking bikes of all were those of the 1980s, at that point where they’d worked out that brake cables needed to be made invisible, but before they turned brake levers into gear changers. Then again, some of the modern aero bikes are so sleek, with such clean lines, and function so well that you could argue bike design in its truest sense is currently at its zenith. We also judge the new team kits at the start of every season: Bora-Hansgrohe and Canyon-Sram were the winners this year, while Jumbo-Visma combined panache and success on a racing level at the Tour de France with a terrible race-specific kit that had the dubious distinction of actually being even worse than their usual black and yellow. And design is important with bike races as well: I’m writing this on the day that the Tour de France are announcing their routes for 2023, and we’ll speculate for months about how the route design will influence the racing.
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Image: Tom Ritchey in the feature California Dreaming page 39-47
This edition of Rouleur is taking a deep dive into design. Of course, we could fill several magazines with features only about bike tech, and we’ve got our fair share in Rouleur 115, such as the Enve Melee, the Canyon Ultimate and BMC Masterpiece. But we’ve also looked at race design, how riders plan and put together a victory and interviewed a rider who has a very successful side hustle in F1 helmet and clothes design. We’ve looked at some design classics of the past, talked to the architect of the Vigorelli…