Publications

Having been a lifelong book and magazine tsundokist (not an actual word), having co-edited a print magazine, and now writing Sentiers, I’m always paying attention to various publishing models and experiments. With Walden Pond popping up a few weeks back, then Robin Sloan launching his Sloanstarter, and finally following an exchange on Twitter about zines, I changed themes for this Dispatch and decided to share some of the publication formats and concepts that have drawn my attention over the last few years.

It’s a broader mix I've included here but one of the centers of gravity around which these publications orbit is where communication possibilities (the internet, really), the tools of the web and the tools of print touch and overlap. Feeling and understanding the “grain” of the web, publishing content on the web, has a metaphorical and actual connection with feeling and understanding the grain of print publishing. You’d be surprised how many indy print magazine publishers were once or even still are web designers and developers, there’s a certain and recurring need for various people to bring their online content and skills to a printed artefact. In the opposite direction, there’s a curiosity and thirst by many print curators and artisans to leverage the toolsets of the internet.

Remote communication and collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and Google Docs are now also both pretty much indispensable for all publishing processes, and were enablers for many indy publishing projects, the “shop” where you prepare your publication is now often a bunch of files and email, until you print your proofs and look at paper samples.

To use a term more often seen in interaction design; web and print people are keen to explore and better understand the affordances and limitations of both mediums, and how they might be remixed. I’m always drawn to intersections and hybridity, this one is a definite favourite and worth exploring.

Materials

There’s an at least decade long discussion on how practitioners can approach technology, the internet, and then the web specifically as a material. Here are a couple of quotes to give you an idea of this view, to provide some context on how I’m approaching this selection and why some specifics grab my attention.

To make art with technology, one does not use it as a tool; one must understand it as a material. Technology is not always a tool, an engineering substrate; it can be something to mould, to shape, to sculpt with.

Materials have desires, affordances, and textures; they have grains. We can work with that grain, understanding what the material wishes to be, wishes to do – or we can deliberately choose to work against it. We must understand that grain and make a deliberate choice.
—Tom Armitage, Technology As A Material

For centuries we’ve worked with wood, metal, glass, ceramic, paper, textiles. More recently, new materials have emerged; plastics, fiberglass, silicon, and more. We understand their limitations, their affordances. We can fold, heat, manipulate and warp some of these materials. But the Internet and the Web are still very new to us. We don’t fully understand them as a material.

What does this mean for the Web? What are the properties of the Web as a Material?

We have lost the apprentice / master relationship in the digital world. Spending years getting our hands dirty with an expert, learning slowly and really understanding the material rather than the framework. We need to be asking ourselves what sacrifices should we be making for the convenience of our customers rather than shortcuts for ourselves.
—Material 2020

Sidenote → This is adjacent to the idea of the “post-digital.” If it’s not something you are familiar with, I wrote a piece on the topic in 2012 (!!), Edge of Eversion which can point you in a few directions to explore the topic.

Publications

Lets start with some of my favourite hybrids showing the craft of making publications while understanding the “material” they are working with.

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Bruce Sterling once said that “conferences are the new magazines.” For a while lots of events produced one-off magazines, now these things are even more mixed together.

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Zines are used quite often as quickly executed artefacts of a project, and for writing or design experiments. They also have a long history as a creative output and a magnet for communities.

“Zines [we]re where you found out about stuff before any of your friends. New bands, new ideas, new movies. And not the stuff that everyone else liked, but the weird stuff. The dangerous stuff. Zines were, and amazingly continue to be, markers of fringe communities. They’re the social networks those communities use to communicate with each other.“
—Mike Monteiro

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If you go to the more structured or recurring model, there are a number of great book publishers and independent magazines out there.

I’ll only give a few examples, for more on magazines in general, have a look at the grand daddy magCulture, Stack independent magazine subscription which shows off some great mags, or Monocle’s The Stack podcast. If you get the print bug or are just curious to learn more about the economics of publishing an actual magazine, the always pertinent Kai Brach made Indie Magonomics, which you can download free.

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If you want to try your hand at printing something, you can start super simple with a bunch of webpage urls and get something done with print.are.na, you can get a little printed zine made up of your Pocket un-reads with Walden Pond, and there are various browser extensions available to create PDFs from a selection of webpages.

To go a couple of notches more serious, you can use Newspaper Club and get a nice newspaper or magazine-like custom job done, or get some notebook-sized booklets done with Scout Books (loads of beautiful examples on their blog).

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These days I’m especially interested in the “born-digital” publications, so send your examples my way, and I hope you enjoyed this quick tour of multi-form publications!