INDEPENDENT MAGAZINES

1. Why celebrate independent magazines?
Mike Koedinger: Independent magazines are at the heart of innovation in print media. Their unusual use of freedom of expression promotes excellence in writing, editorial design and visual arts. It’s where the future trends of print media are made.
Jeremy Leslie: Independent magazines are celebrations in their own right, celebrations of the passions and obsessions of their creators. They are creatively- rather than financially-led projects and at their best represent the desire to experiment and develop the magazine form in a way the mainstream is unable to risk.
Andrew Losowsky: An explosion of independent publishing has emerged in recent years. A result of advances in desktop publishing and printing technology, coupled with a fall in the costs of producing a magazine, have led to an unprecedented emergence of independent media all over the world. This emergence of media includes many magazines that are more original, imaginative and serving their audiences better than many mainstream titles. While many people predict the end of magazines, thousands of people around the world are proving otherwise.
Secondly, creating an independent magazine can be a very lonely pursuit. It’s about time that some of the leaders in the field were recognised, and that an event allowed the people behind these magazines to meet, share ideas and cross-pollinate some of their creativity.

2. What is the difference between an independent magazine and a mainstream magazine?
MK: Mainstream media are mostly 100% marketing products, aiming to produce the highest return for investors. Independent magazines are published and produced by the owners themselves. Their motivation is a passion for quality and the expression of their own voice.

3. Where do all these independent magazines come from? Are they a new phenomenon?
MK: Today independent magazines come from all over the world although mature media markets produce more independent publications than, say, African markets. Andy Warhol’s Interview certainly was amongst the pioneers in 1969, but it was only after the influence of British i-D, The Face and Blitz in the eighties, and the revolution of DTP in the early nineties, that the “independent magazine” became a phenomenon.
JL: They are an age-old phenomenon. They are how magazines first began, an experimental new form of media inspired by individual passion. They come from people’s desire to communicate, to have a voice. Many now develop from their creators online presence.
AL: Yes and no – although the desktop publishing phenomenon is a more recent one, the energy behind these magazines is the same as that which brought us fanzines and brings us blogs – a desire to put a distinct voice out there, to be imaginative and creative, and to find an audience. And they come from anywhere and everywhere that someone has a story they want to tell, through the medium of magazines.

4. Who makes independent magazines and why?
MK: Creatives with as many different backgrounds and motivations as there are different magazines. Designers publish magazines as a showcase for their work, mainstream editors and journalists publish independent magazines in search for self-expression, illustrators publish zines to find an audience… for a few it’s a way to get on the guestlists of exclusive cocktail parties, and finally some intend to make a profit from their venture and become fulltime magazine publishers. All good reasons, don’t you think?
JL: Anyone could make a magazine, but they tend to come from people with an element of media experience/engagement: designers, writers, photographers, artists. People who want to promote their passions for a particular subject. For the individuals concerned a magazine is often first made as a trial, an experiment. And they fall in love with the process.

5. Who reads independent magazines, and why?
MK: People looking for inspiration who know where to find it.
JL: To an extent it is a closed world of magazine lovers/collectors. The Colophon crowd – us! Most titles can never hope to reach beyond this small international group of city-based creative types. Magazines have always been ideal for recording and reflecting new creative trends and now the mainstream has become an extension of the PR business the independents provide that under the radar detail.
AL: The same people who consume any other media – that is, anybody who is interested in something in particular. Independent magazine themes range from the economy to fashion, art to saving the planet. Independent magazines often provide a different, original take on the same issues that affect everyone – love, life, money, death.

6. How do independent magazines make enough money to survive?
MK: Most often, they don’t.
JL: They rarely do. That’s the conundrum. Get successful and the pressure to maintain and grow that success can suffocate the original idea as you begin to rely on distributors and their advice. Its not an issue of selling out, its an issue of being directed down the mainstream path. Few have managed to make the balance between creative idea and success work. Unless they’re very lucky, they don’t make money.
AL: Many don’t. Others aren’t profitable, but continue anyway as a hobby. And still others do make money from advertising, sales, distribution, sideline projects – the same as any big media company.

MAGAZINE INDUSTRY

7. Are magazines only ink and paper?
MK: CMYK and RGB have become friends.
JL: In the truest sense, yes magazines can only be a physical item. The language of magazines can be transferred elsewhere but I haven’t yet seen a really successful transfer. I’m sure there is a way of applying the editorial and physical language of the magazine to a digital environment and am excited about some recent developments. But I don’t know if we’ll call them magazines.
AL: No – they’re an edited collection around a theme, appearing in a series of numbered editions. That could be online, downloaded, could be a poster, could be graffitied onto a wall.

8. How much longer do print magazines have left?
MK: Maybe not as long as the human race, but longer than most of us would expect.
JL: Magazines will always exist but the magazine industry as we know it may never be quite the same again. The massive broadening of niche markets over the past decade will contract. There will be fewer publishing companies as the simple quick buck – catch a trend, sell the ads, make a mag – proves no longer viable. But high end and small-run magazines will always exist.
AL: As a medium, I’d say an indefinite amount of time. However, in ten, twenty, fifty years’ time, there will be far fewer than there are now.

9. How is the current financial crisis affecting magazines?
MK: Magazines that depended on advertising will have a difficult time, but many independent magazines are published as bi-annuals or quarterlies, and so might survive a 12-18 months crisis easier than, say, mainstream weeklies.
JL: Mainstream magazines are now suffering very badly as the advertising revenue dries up post credit crunch. Weaker titles are already struggling and the closures have begun. It is the perfect storm scenario: less ad revenue, fewer sales, internet usage soaring, paper prices rising, concerns about the environmental effect of production and recycling being unviable…
AL: Badly. Advertising is down, and as a result, many titles are closing or being put on ice. Others that were once profitable, or close to being so, aren’t any longer. Some say that this is only hurrying the inevitable move to digital; I don’t think we’ve seen the last big magazine launch yet, though.

COLOPHON

10. Who is Colophon aimed at?
MK: Creative people from around the world. Magazine professionals, students and of course magazine-loving readers.
JL: Creative people who enjoy/value the independent magazine.
AL: Everybody who is interested in creativity, imagination and an independent voice.

11. Choose five words to describe Colophon.
MK: Celebrating the independent magazine.
JL: Independent. Enthusiastic. Positive. Social. Sharing.
AL: Creative. Inspiring. Surprising. Networking. Magazines!

12. What did you learn from the first Colophon in 2007?
MK: Among many things, that for the duration of a weekend, the Colophon-crowd can party all night long and still attend about 10 hours of talks a day. Amazing.
JL: I learnt we are not alone – many other people love magazines too.
AL: That creativity breeds more creativity.

13. Why is Colophon different from other graphic design/print industry events?
MK: It’s the mix of the audience. Of course many designers attend the symposium, but you’ll also find publishers, editors, writers, photographers, illustrators, advertisers, professionals from cultural institutions, teachers, students and, last but not least, passionate readers.
JL: Its not a trade show. Exhibitors aren’t trying to sell you digital repro services. Colophon is to mainstream events what the magazines are to their mainstream – the alternative. The people behind it share a love of independent magazines and not a professional conference company. We started it because we wanted to attend it.
The event encompasses design but also covers content.
AL: Because it isn’t set in a giant anonymous hall, filled with paying stands. Because it doesn’t have sponsors leaping over each other to hand you the best freebie. Because it’s created by magazine makers, not professional exhibition organisers. Because it sets its attendees creative challenges. Because it’s all about the magazines. Because of the atmosphere and the people.

PERSONAL

14. What do you look for in a good magazine?
MK: I want it all, but first I want to be surprised. I expect very strong visuals, well-written good stories and interviews, as well as an individual, fresh concept. I like the use of carefully selected paper and of course I do appreciate high-end production, both in printing and binding.
JL: I want a magazine to surprise and engage me, to bridge the gap between familiarity and uniqueness.
AL: A unified purpose in design and content. Thoughtfulness, appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the medium. Something that makes me smile, something that shocks me, something that makes me think. Something that forces me to keep that issue in my cupboard, and not add it to the recycling pile. Imagination.

15. Do you have a large collection of magazines? If so, which are your favourites in your collection?
MK: I’ve loved and collected magazines since the eighties, but I’m not a huge collector. I guess I have about 3,000 magazines, including some eighties classics (i-D, The Face, Blitz, Interview, Details, Tempo, Wiener) and of course a large range of today’s best mags. Although I’m a visual person, in the end it’s the magazines that I read that I spend most time with and finally prefer – for example, the Paris-based “Magazine” from Angelo Cirimele and the German “brand eins”.
JL: I have a largish collection. Favourites include a piece of wood called Nice magazine, Econy, early issues of The Face, a copy of Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine, early Grazia, Fantastic Man, Carls Cars, …
AL: Yes! My favourites vary depending on what’s on my mind at any one time… I love my old Nests and Flairs for their ambition, Portfolio for what it represents, Eros for what it was and what it did, and I have a tube filled with glorious IS/NOTs that will one day wallpaper my toilet.

16. Which current magazines do you enjoy?
JL: Kasino A4, OK Collections, Carl*s Cars, Wired, Fantastic Man, Monocle,
AL: All of the Colophon ten from this year and from 2007! Also, some editions of: Monocle, Wallpaper*, Creative Review, New Yorker, Portfolio, Foto8, UK Esquire, the Economist, Esopus, Fantastic Man, New York, Below the Fold, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Dumbofeather, Lemon, Russia!

17. In no more than 20 words, write what you think will be the future of magazines.
MK: Magazines will always be a source of pleasure and inspiration.
JL: Magazines will continue to be published but the focus will shift from quantity to quality.
AL: It will involve digital, print, ink, paper, hitherto uninvented devices and amazing creativity. Beyond that, I don’t want to know.

February 2009, © Colophon 2009 – International Magazine Symposium

Colophon 2009 Kick Off at Press Conference in Luxembourg with (from left to right): Mayor Paul Helminger, producer and curator Mike Koedinger, Casino Luxembourg Manager Jo Kox and Minister for Communications, Jean-Louis Schiltz. Missing on the picture: Jeremy Leslie (UK) and Andrew Losowsky (USA), the two co-curators.

Colophon is an international biennial which brings together in Luxembourg, during the weekend of March 13 to 15, 2009, a public from around the world to celebrate excellence and innovation in the independent magazine industry.
With a circuit of fifteen exhibitions spread across Luxembourg City and approximately forty hours of conferences, creative roundtables, presentations and workshops, Colophon reaches out to a number of different audiences. The symposium attracts an international crowd hailing from the four corners of the earth. For this second edition, the organisers are planning to transform the entire city for the duration of this one weekend in March. In addition to the symposium, which addresses both professionals and students, the Luxembourg general public and that of the Greater Region will be able to visit the many exhibitions, participate in the daytime workshops intended for children and attend the nightly festivities.
Initiated in 2005 by Mike Koedinger, Jeremy Leslie and Andrew Losowsky— three media professionals—, Colophon was born within the framework of “Luxembourg and the Greater Region, European Capital of Culture 2007” and in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain. Its success was instant with visitors coming from 25 different countries.
Political support
“For the City of Luxembourg, its trades people and its cultural players, Colophon 2009 is set to have an important economic impact, because it will be beneficial for consumption, especially if you consider the 2,000 nights of hotel bookings which it will generate,” says Paul Helminger, Mayor of the capital and ‘patron’ to the symposium. “But beyond this economic impact, it is also the positive impact on our brand image and the promotion of the City of Luxembourg throughout the whole world which is of interest to us.” And promotion there certainly will be, because if the event’s main purpose is to celebrate the independent magazine, the magazines return the favour  with gusto with more than one hundred of them offering up an advertising campaign diffused throughout 35 countries of the world at a value of approximately 450,000 €. To this effort can be added the related reports in the international press, newspapers, blogs and digital magazine sites on the Internet.
“It’s an event that perfectly articulates Luxembourg’s ambition to continue developing its role as a centre of excellence for the associated activities of the media and ICT. Colophon is a fresh illustration of the dynamism of the sector and helps to position Luxembourg on a new and promising axis,” declares Jean-Louis Schiltz, Minister for Communications and ‘patron’, within the Government, of the symposium.
“The independent magazine is at the centre of innovation in the written press”, explains Mike Koedinger, initiator and one of the curators. “It is a place of freedom and excellence in creation; where media professionals can express themselves without constraints. It is here that they create for themselves the trends of the international market.”
Exhibition Circuit
As far as the exhibitions go, a veritable circuit is proposed which winds its way through the capital. First stop is the Luxembourg Casino – Forum of contemporary art, to pick up the Colophon programme (10 € including its map of the city and valid entry to all the venues) and to see the first major exhibition “WE MAKE MAGAZINES” which allows you to discover 110 independent magazines, from 30 countries, in interviews, in pictures, and of course, to flip through.
Next, ten cultural venues – from gallery beaumontpublic to the Chapel of the Abbey Neumünster Cultural Arts Centre while passing by the Musée d’Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg or the kiosk of the AICA — will host the exhibitions for “TEN GUEST MAGAZINES”. From Berlin, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris and even from Mexico, these magazines, originating in ten different countries, will appropriate these Luxembourg cultural venues over the period of one weekend. Here one will find, among other things, Sang Bleu (subcultures and tattoos), Good (a magazine “for people who give a damn”), Kasino A4 (melancholic magazine), Volume (architectural project) or BabyBabyBaby (contemporary cultures).
Direction Mudam for “BEYOND KIOSK – MODES OF MULTIPLICATION” where Christoph Keller assembles 500 selected publications originating from his archives of 6,500 artists’ books, magazines, videos and catalogues. This itinerant and evolutionary show presents “the most relevant independent editions of contemporary art” and has been shown in twenty institutions since 2001. For its passage in Luxembourg, the installation of the publications is entrusted to Italian designer Martino Gamper.
Next, drop in at Extrabold to see the installation of Australian magazine SNEAKER FREAKER before going to the Carré Rotondes for the two “Luxembourg” exhibitions. DESIGN BACKSTAGE where the Design Luxembourg association is showing samples of work from a score of its members to demonstrate the importance of design beyond its aesthetic aspect. “Good design solves problems and adds value to products and services,” underlines president Guido Wolf. And to finish, tribute to CAFÉ CRÈME, the first international magazine published in Luxembourg. “During our ten years of existence, from 1986 to 1995, we displayed the work of approximately 150 contemporary photographers,” explains Paul di Felice and Pierre Stiwer, the founders of Café Crème.
All the exhibitions will be open throughout the weekend, but they can also be visited during the NIGHT OF THE MAGAZINE Friday March 13 when all the locations will welcome visitors until 10 PM, after which the party continues at the Carré Rotondes.
The symposium
A hyper intensive programme encompassing forty hours of presentations and discussions spread out over the three days of the symposium in two distinct spaces at the Luxembourg Casino – Forum of contemporary art.
And just like any real magazine, the symposium will be informative and diverting at the same time. Thus, it will propose many formats: panel discussions, lectures, on stage interviews-dialogues, Pecha Kucha presentations (presenting an idea in 20 images, each one has the screen for no more, and no less, than 20 seconds) or markets for photography portfolios and graphic illustration that bring together a hundred creatives.
And how, with all these magazine lovers united in one place, could they not want to launch the creation of a new magazine together? The three curators take up the challenge and invite the public to collaborate and carry out, together, a 100 page magazine over the course of the three days. To facilitate this, a “newspaper office – graphic studio” workshop will be installed at the Casino Luxembourg and, through periodic multiple briefings, the missions will be given out to interested parties. At the symposium closing, during a ceremony with the participation of Minister Jean-Louis Schiltz, the digital version of the magazine will be shown on the big screen at the Philharmonie.
To prolong the pleasure, a film cycle dedicated to media is on the programme at the Municipal Cinematheque during the month of March, and a kiosk of magazines of the world will be installed at the Luxembourg Casino in collaboration with Fellner Art Books.
In spite of the fact that the financing is not yet entirely in place, Mike Koedinger remains optimistic a few weeks before the event: “We have succeeded in gaining the confidence of the Government, of the City of Luxembourg, and of many cultural institutions and private cultural players as well as private partners. We have succeeded in getting all its actors to collaborate in making Luxembourg the place of excellence to accommodate this international event. And today we ask that Colophon be perennialised to become ‘Colophon – International Independent Magazine Biennial’ in Luxembourg.”
Colophon 2009 – International Magazine Symposium from March 13 to 15, 2009 in Luxembourg City across fifteen venues. Programme detailed and updated regularly, information and inscriptions here

1. 032c: A small Berlin culture title that has caused a storm in design circles with its recent ‘ugly’ redesign. Its use of system fonts and garish colours stand out in a market full of stylised modernism. www.032c.com

2. Monocle: The global business magazine reinvented as a lifestyle title, using a bookish design system that communicates ‘this is different’, while at the same time being unusually understated. www.monocle.com

3. New York: Beautiful typography and info-graphics make this recently redesigned NYC weekly a modern classic, featuring the care and attention-to-detail usually found only in a monthly. www.nymag.com

4. Fantastic Man: Unashamedly gay in outlook, this men’s fashion magazine employs a monochrome lo-fi design that looks back past ‘GQ’, ‘FHM’ and ‘Loaded’ to a time when page designs invested their subjects with a quiet dignity. www.fantasticmanmagazine.com

5. The Guardian: A daily newspaper completely re-engineered to complement its digital presence, borrowing design techniques from websites and magazines to create an era-defining model. www.guardian.co.uk

Jeremy Leslie is group creative director at John Brown Group and co-curator of Colophon.

032c

Monocle

New York

Fantastic Man

The Guardian

We Love Magazines

Designer: Jeremy Leslie
Editor: Andrew Losowsky
Publisher: Mike Koedinger
Language: English

Release: March 2007
Price: € 35,00 / $ 55,00 / £ 25,99
Format: 16,8 x 23,7 cm
Features: 392 pages, full colour, softcover
ISBN: 978-3-89955-188-4

We Love Magazines explores magazines and magazine culture with groundbreaking visuals and editorial contributions from around the world. The book features in-depth analysis of various aspects of magazine creation while, as the title reflects, celebrating with genuine pleasure a medium that continues to entertain, inform and surprise. We Love Magazines also contains the most comprehensive directory ever compiled of 1,100 international pop culture magazines and the shops in which to buy them.

In addition, readers are introduced to ten pioneering, independent magazines that have created their own chapters for the book. These are: Carl*s Cars (Norway), Coupe (Canada), Frame (The Netherlands), Omagiu (Romania), Rojo (Spain), S-magazine (Denmark), Shift! (Germany), Streets/Fruits/Tune (Japan), thisisamagazine.com (Italy) and Yummy (France)

In keeping with the independent spirit of the magazines featured in the book, We Love Magazines has been published with ten slightly different covers. All have the same title graphic and background photo but feature ten different drawings in blue foil block by Mio Matsumoto. The drawings portray ten different readers, who each represent one of the ten contributing magazines listed above.

The book We Love Magazines was created as an accompaniment to the Colophon2007 magazine symposium, which takes place in Luxembourg on March 9-11, 2007.

Dive inside the book…

by Rick Poynor, the contributing editor of PRINT.

For a medium that is regularly pronounced to be living on borrowed time, the magazine seems to be in a surprisingly perky state of health. If you took the industry’s temperature by scanning the racks in Borders, you might find it hard to credit that there is any problem at all. London branches of the store, like their American counterparts, are awash with titles catering to every conceivable interest and taste. In reality, though, while there are more titles on sale than ever, the total number of sales in the U.S.—366 million copies a year—has remained the same since 1990, so the trend for many publications is downward.

Nevertheless, as the title of a recent book put it, We Love Magazines—the “we” in this case being design people. The book accompanied the Colophon2007 symposium in Luxembourg, an event about independent magazines co-curated by Jeremy Leslie, a British magazine-design supremo at the custom publishing house John Brown. Leslie is also author of magCulture, a survey of contemporary magazines that later became a popular blog. In January, he was at it again, co-organizing a conference with the title “Magazines Are Dead: Long Live the Magazine!” (Maybe there is no revival; maybe it’s just Leslie’s tireless promotional activities that make it seem as if there must be one going on.)

I used to be an obsessive follower of what was happening in magazines, but it’s an expensive and space-consuming habit, and I eventually slowed down. I always took it for granted that the best magazines offered a combination of great writing and great visual appeal, with design as an expression of the content. Lately, the trend has been more and more toward magazines that you look at rather than read in any concerted way, and Leslie’s first magazine survey, Issues, actually began with the declaration, “I don’t read magazines.” Someone else wrote those words, but they set the tone for the whole book. For a writer, the sentiment is a complete turnoff. Apart from art and design titles, the magazines I tend to buy these days are publications devoted to commentary about books, music, film, and politics. While it’s important that they are designed for comfortable reading, they will never be featured in roundups of the latest trendy design.

So I decided to conduct a survey. My method was simple. I went to Borders and bought every youthful, creative, free-spirited, independent British magazine that caught my eye. Many of these titles occupy or extend the style-magazine territory defined by The Face (now defunct), i-D (founded in 1980 and still soldiering on), and later by Dazed & Confused and Sleazenation. Sleazenation is now also departed, and was the last title of this kind I read regularly because I liked its sharp, historical awareness of pop culture and its critical, questioning view of the corporate pressures on contemporary youth culture. In no particular order, here are the titles I took home: Flux, Blag, Fused Magazine, Product, Garageland, Wonderland, Wound, Sublime, Karen, Amelia’s Magazine, Let Them Eat Cake, Nude, Bad Idea, Meat Magazine, and Little White Lies. Most of these titles have arrived on the stands since 2000, and some are just a few issues old, although it turned out that Blag—founded by art student twins and financed these days entirely by sponsored advertorials—has been around in one form or another since 1992.

What I was hoping to find were magazines that convey a sense of necessity. They need to exist because they have something to say that no other publication expresses with the same urgency, excitement, inventiveness, completeness, or precision. They come from a deep sense of commitment, they are propelled by genuine passion, and they offer information and insights that simply aren’t available with the same vividness anywhere else. They express their moment because they participate in it, yet they also stand a little apart from it, showing self-awareness and a capacity for reflection that isn’t possible for absolute insiders. Above all, they define their own agenda.

Design is a significant factor, though it cannot be the sole criterion or even the first consideration. For a magazine to gel, it needs an editorial vision. That vision may come from a designer, if the designer is also the founder, publisher, editor, or an especially potent force in the magazine’s creation, and it may well involve visual ideas and visual expression, but there has to be subject matter—content—before there can be expression. If the content is compelling, the magazine can hold together and engage the reader—note reader—even if the design doesn’t break new ground.

Good examples of this are Nude, which offers “music, graphics, and hip lit”; Bad Idea, devoted to “modern storytelling”; and Little White Lies, a film magazine. All of these journal-like publications, with attractively small pages, have visual strengths—Little White Lies’ illustrated covers, each based on a film image, are particularly effective—but their reason for being is to explore cultural, literary, and cinematic subject matter that their editors and writers know and care about. Although Meat Magazine and Garageland, both five issues old (as is Bad Idea), have yet to show the same coherence, they put a notable emphasis on writing; it would be perverse to buy any of these titles merely to flip the pages. All of them get by, at least for now, with little, if any, advertising.

Fashion-led titles play by different rules, so here we have no choice but to flip. The 11th issue of Wonderland is clotted with ads from Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Gucci, and DKNY, followed by pages of tedious, narcissistic fashion shoots. The design has a kind of informal monumentality that quickly becomes repetitive. Yet whenever I was on the verge of tossing Wonderland aside, an intriguing article would pop up about shop-window dummies, the continuing relevance of cut-and-paste collage-making, or the found photo artworks of Canadian artist Steven Shearer.

The second issue of the bizarrely titled and even fatter Wound—the name comes from a line in a Robert Frost poem—shows greater signs of wanting to have it both ways by serving the commercial fashion system while coming on like a fire-breathing, free-thinking radical. “There’s an underground renaissance around the corner,” says a designer. “There’s a lot of us out there ready for change.” If they threw out the interminable fashion spreads and kept the well-researched features about androgyny (the issue’s theme), synth punk, and the use of color in architecture, it would make an engagingly eccentric arts mag—it already reads like it’s been hijacked by art-school lecturers. As it stands, Wound goes to a lot of editorial trouble for something that’s bound to be treated as a flipbook. Let Them Eat Cake, the best-designed title in my informal survey, is much lighter on its feet, making this fresh-faced fashion newcomer one to watch, although it has a long way to go to match the editorial confidence and panache of The Face or i-D, which were always worth reading in their heyday.

Most of these magazines are small-scale, intimate ventures in which the presence and personality of the people who make them is evident. Amelia’s Magazine, a lavish, ultra-feminine, relentlessly patterned and curlicued production—reading it feels a bit like being smothered in a pile of floral cushions—is the creation of publisher–editor–art director Amelia Gregory, a one-woman, home-publishing powerhouse. Issue eight is as thick as Vogue: This one may go far. By contrast, Karen is an agreeably petite, restrained, and almost poetic meditation on everyday life and ordinary experience in words and pictures, put together by someone who may be called Karen. It’s about as close to a personal blog as a magazine could be.

Leslie argues that the future of magazines (such as it is) lies in becoming even more magazine-like and supplying distinctive, design-led experiences that you can’t get from the web: unusual paper stock, page formats, special extras, freebies. These British independent magazines, which usually depend on a symbiotic relationship with a website, certainly cater to an enduring need for tactile, smell-the-ink, hold-it-in-your-hands “thing-ness.” While none of these titles could yet be called a classic, several of them—Bad Idea, Little White Lies, Karen—do convey a sense of real necessity. They also confirm that the urge to publish a magazine, even now in the age of immediate online dissemination, comes from seeing thoughts and opinions given the tangibility and satisfying permanence of ink on paper. Adventurous ideas have always required words for their fullest expression. Magazines will surely wither without good writing.

More information about PRINT: http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/observer_not_dead_yet/tabid/360/Default.aspx

by Jeremy Leslie

Here are some pictures from the Colophon room at the 8 Festival for Fashion and Photography last week. There was lots of interest in the exhibition, which was curated by my Colophon colleague Mike Koedinger and featured a selection of independent magazines including Kasino A4, Vorn and B East. The hanging mechanisms worked well – people could flick through the magazines but not remove them.

The exhibition and accompanying talks took place at the Haus Wittgenstein, a beautifully maintained modernist villa with the tall ceilings that seem typical of Vienna. The city is one of those smaller European ones that effortlessly maintain their historical architecture while adding stunning modern buildings, the Haus Wittgenstein being an older example.

The theme of the festival was magazine culture, and I gave the opening talk, an overview of current independent magazines. To give it some structure I presented an alphabetical selection from Amelia’s Magazine to ZingMagazine. There’s a QuickTime movie of my slides below. The choices aren’t a list of my favourites, but an attempt to present a varied selection of independent titles. And yes, I did cheat for X.

Video at:
http://magculture.com/blog/?p=1901#more-1901