Pre-Feral, in-house work by Fer Ledesma and Alex Serrano at Editorial Televisa
Fer joined Editorial Televisa as a junior designer, working on the Mexican and Latin American editions of Men’s Health: graphic design, digital illustration, photo selection, and retouching. Alex worked the same magazine as a writer.
The job wasn’t just filling pages. It was making Men’s Health matter to a specific reader, a man who wanted to stay fit and strong, in a magazine market where staying relevant to both that reader and the advertisers chasing him took real, continuous work.
Alex built exercise and nutrition lists, martial arts pieces, and profiles on athletic celebrities designed to be genuinely useful to the reader, not just entertaining, years before listicles became a standard internet format. Fer brought the same instinct to the visual side, earning enough creative trust early on to contribute concepts to the magazine’s 2009 editorial redesign.
That combination, writing readers actually needed and design that carried it well, is what kept the brand relevant on both sides: to the audience, and to the advertisers who wanted access to them.
Fer contributed graphic design, digital illustration, photo selection, and retouching across editions, and helped shape the 2009 editorial redesign. Her consistency and reliability earned her one of the few junior-designer liaisons directly with Rodale’s global headquarters in New York.
Alex wrote exercise, nutrition, and martial arts content built around real reader utility, along with features on athletic celebrities, helping construct a brand identity readers returned to and advertisers wanted to be next to.
Men’s Health Mexico and Latin America held its relevance with both readers and advertisers through work built on genuine usefulness rather than novelty for its own sake.