When Patrick and I started working on this issue, we were hopeful that the worst effects of COVID on global logistics were behind us, but prices for printing, packaging and shipping have continued to surge, while delivery time frames have remained erratic. We could potentially recover some of these new costs by increasing our cover price, but that would make the magazine even less accessible and it also wouldn’t save us from further unexpected price hikes in the near future.

The transition to Patrick as the lead editor and publisher of Offscreen hinged on the idea of him running Offscreen together with Sentiers as his main jobs, providing a somewhat predictable income based on previous years. That’s currently just not feasible and so we put the transition on hold for now, too.

It’s a disappointing end to a challenging year, but we decided to make this difficult call now, before we invest a substantial amount of money in the production of issue 25, only to realise later that getting the magazine to readers and retailers would leave us with a financial hit.

As initially planned, Offscreen will go back into stand-by mode and I will reconsider our options when/if the impacts of COVID have subsided and prices have somewhat stabilised.

Subscribers, please note: If you’ve already prepaid for issue 25 as part of your subscription, we can either refund this issue now or leave it in our system as a pre-order. For a refund, simply contact us with a short ‘Refund for #25 please’ and we will initiate the refund to your credit card ASAP and cancel your subscription.

Despite the devastating news, we are both immensely grateful for the many kind, encouraging words from you all in the last few months. We wish all of you a restful break and a great start to the new year!

To stay in touch with Patrick and me, you can subscribe to our respective newsletters: Sentiers and Dense Discovery.

Best,
Kai (and Patrick)

I first came across Patrick’s work when he co-published The Alpine Review, an acclaimed, book-sized magazine that unpacked important issues through slow, reflective journalism. Patrick has since become better known as the synthesist and curator behind the excellent Sentiers, a weekly newsletter with insightful links and commentary on futurism and technology.

I can’t think of a person that’s better suited to take over Offscreen’s reins than Patrick. Over time, he will inject fresh perspectives and new ideas while caring as much as I do about its loyal community of readers and its independent voice.

Patrick and I will work closely together on this upcoming issue 25, after which I slowly transition into more of an advisory role, ensuring Patrick settles in comfortably over the next two to three issues. I will share some more thoughts on this transition in a later post. For now, let me hand over the mic to Patrick...

[PT] Back in 2012, when we started putting together The Alpine Review, Kai was just an issue ahead of us with Offscreen and yet the publication – and Kai’s willingness to share his process ever so transparently – was already an inspiration. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it is a true honour to now get the chance to lead Offscreen’s editorial direction.

In our long conversations, Kai showed once again how unwavering he is in his respect for the time and intelligence of his audience. Every decision is scrutinised around what’s best for the reader.

It was also great to hear more about how Kai’s evolving views led to a shift in the magazine’s overarching theme from ‘the people behind the pixels’ to a broader, more critical perspective that highlights ‘the human side of technology’. As a long-time reader myself, I really enjoyed this repositioning of Offscreen as a critical, fiercely independent counterweight to the typical tech stories that occupy much of the conversation online. Giving a diverse range of people who work on important issues and opportunities in the tech sphere a voice and an audience will remain the publication’s main objective.

As such, don’t expect any major changes, at least not for now. It will still be the magazine you know and love. As for the future, I don’t have a detailed map drawn up yet. It’s more of a compass that – along with your feedback, I hope – will help me chart Offscreen’s future direction. The only goal I’ve already set for myself is to return to publishing three issues per year and rekindling a monthly newsletter to keep in touch with you in between issues.

But first and foremost, let’s start a conversation! Kai and I are looking forward to your comments and questions. Simply email us (both of us will see your responses) or contact me directly on Twitter.

We will be in touch again in the coming months with an update on the release of issue #25. (We’re currently aiming for a January release!) If you aren’t a subscriber yet or have a lapsed subscription, now is a great time to start or renew your subscription. Subscribers remain the crucial backbone of a small indie magazine like Offscreen!

I feel equally humbled and excited about what lies ahead and can’t wait to get started.

– Patrick (and Kai)

The ‘tech world’ is the world I grew up in. It’s where I made lasting friendships and a rewarding career. It’s given me so much since I first ‘logged on’ in the late ’90s. But today it’s a world I struggle to relate to. I stopped getting excited about new startups, apps or gadgets. Even genuinely interesting projects leave me feeling blasé as they often come wrapped in a language and a business model I find off-putting.

If you’ve been reading Offscreen since its early days, you would have noticed a change in attitude. As I recently wrote in the introduction of my newsletter: “The naïve optimism for tech – the notion of ‘technology equals progress’ – has been replaced by a deep-felt scepticism about fixing social problems with technological solutions.” Seeing tech-billionaire space cowboys having a blast while the world burns and inequality explodes makes it difficult for me to not let that sense of scepticism turn into full-blown anti-tech cynicism. It’s certainly not the kind of energy that leads to hopeful tech stories.

That said, the magazine’s contrarian viewpoints – as told through the many voices speaking up against the Silicon Valley narrative – at the very least offer a way to make sense of it all. Still, it increasingly feels futile. I often ask myself: what’s the point of putting so much effort into a publication that preaches to the converted?

That’s not to say that I don’t value the amazing community that has grown around Offscreen. Hardly a week goes by without a heartfelt, constructive note from a reader arriving in my inbox. Offscreen managed to bring together some of the most considerate, smart, kind and generous people in the tech world – as contributors, interviewees, sponsors and, of course, readers. An utterly humbling experience and a rare source of hope for which I’ll be forever grateful. What it lacks in size, it makes up in enthusiasm and goodwill – the Offscreen community is strong enough to support another 24 issues. I know that. I just don’t know if I have it in me to make it happen.

Is this a farewell post? Honestly, I don’t know. As you can tell, my head isn’t in a space for more tech-focused magazine-making right now. It hasn’t been for a while. Though, it doesn’t really feel like the end of Offscreen yet. For now I will – once again – put Offscreen in a holding pattern.

When I think about Offscreen’s future, I feel a strong sense of responsibility. There is no future scenario in which I would consider selling ‘the brand’ to some media company. I wonder whether there is a like-minded editor out there interested in taking over my role as editor, while I stay on board to help with all the other tasks involved in keeping Offscreen afloat. If this is you or someone you know (most likely an Offscreen reader?), please get in touch.

There’s still a good chance that in a few months I’m back, hungry for more Offscreen. Right now, I’m in the lucky position to just about cover my living expenses by publishing Dense Discovery which has been a surprising source of motivation and, frankly, a welcome outlet for some of my world-weariness of late.

For now, dear readers, sponsors and supporters: thank you! I’ll be keeping subscribers abreast of any updates via email, as usual. (For those who have recently subscribed and thereby pre-purchased the next issue: rest assured that your purchase will be refunded if indeed Offscreen issue 25 does not see the light of day.)

With much love and appreciation,

Kai Brach
(Publisher/Editor)

International shipping in COVID times is still very much a mixed bag. There will be some delays, especially with shipments going outside the EU. We appreciate your patience!

In issue 24 we touch on a lot of timely, meaty topics:

• Ali Alkhatib
  The expert on human-computer interaction explains why Big Tech’s algorithms are inherently unjust and offers some refreshingly simple perspectives on how to improve tech.
• Jutta Treviranus
  It was an absolute delight to hear Jutta speak about her immense body of work in the field of Inclusive Design and how our default notion of ‘designing for the majority’ makes all of us more vulnerable.
• Xiaowei Wang
  A fascinating deep-dive into Chinese (internet) culture and the surprising connections between rural China and Western tech hubs like Silicon Valley.
• Jillian C. York
  The activist and writer highlights the many free speech challenges we face as a society deeply entangled in a system of surveillance capitalism.

As usual, we relied on the generous support by our sponsors to make this issue happen: DNSimple, Bakken & Bæck, MAD, MetaLab, SiteGround, and Dovetail. And of course, a big ‘thank you’ to all Patrons of this issue.

Shipping & price changes

The disruptions of COVID have not just made shipping times harder to predict, it also led to a range of changes in shipping rates by postal services around the world. Sadly, we were informed by our shipper last year that the cost of sending magazines to the US has (in some cases) more than doubled! Prices for shipments going to other countries outside the EU have also increased.

Since shipping is included in the price of the magazine, it means our profit margin decreased substantially for the majority of our sales since our last issue. Offscreen is already a fairly pricy publication – too pricy to reach readers from certain parts of the world – and so we’re very cognisant of the fact that increasing the price will make the publication less accessible.

While the subscription price remains the same for now, we did increase the non-subscriber price by $2 to now $22 in order to at least compensate for some of the additional costs. We’ll keep a close eye on our shipping costs with this issue, but we might not be able to avoid a small price increase for all readers in the future.

Needless to say, your ongoing support means a lot!

View the details of issue 24 here →

Enjoy these shots of issue 24 being produced at our printer in Berlin:

Of the 185 books Bill Gates has recommended on his blog over the past eight years, only 12 are novels. During Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘year of books’ in 2015, when he crunched through twenty-three worthy tomes, works of fiction cropped up only three times.

I’ve made it something of a personal project to ask the tech people I meet in my day job to name-check authors they love. Peddlers of neuroscience, behavioural economics, and organisational theory feature highly. Peddlers of make-believe do not. When I ask them why they read so little fiction, their answer boils down to the same question: why would anyone waste time on made-up stuff when there’s so much real stuff to learn about the world?

Life is indeed stranger than fiction, as recent global events have proven all too well. It can feel indulgent, if not irresponsible, to spend my evenings romping through a novel about glass-blowers in fifteenth-century Venice when there are so many urgent present-day technological developments and political dilemmas to understand and have opinions on.

I think we can all agree that what the people creating new technology need more of right now is the ability to step into the shoes of others who don’t think, look, or live like them. I wonder what would happen if tech folk spent less time skimming trend reports and explainer journalism and more time truly trying to understand the perspectives of others. Might we finally see more diverse and nuanced products and platforms emerge?

Science tells us that this is one area in which make-believe can actually help. Several studies have proven the link between fiction and empathy. Probably the best known, conducted by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano in 2013, found that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions. ‘What great writers do is to turn you into the writer,’ Kidd explained. ‘In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others.’ Perhaps what we need to fill the empathy gap is imagination, not information.

In my own experience, fiction is also incredibly effective in helping people pay attention to the world. This may sound contradictory – after all, you’re not out there smelling roses if you’ve got your nose stuck in a book. But the best writers have a way of making you consider the mundane details of everyday existence with fresh eyes. And when you consider that many of our smartest startups have offered a new approach to prosaic things we used to take for granted (taxis, dinners, periods), you start to see how this sort of defamiliarisation might be the ultimate disruptor’s gift.

Of course, some of the techies I talk to do love novels. But their reading seems heavily, if not exclusively, skewed towards science fiction – just like every one of Gates’ and Zuck’s fiction picks. I’m also a massive fan of that genre. In fact, I’ve just published a novel set in London’s startup scene that has been described as ‘stealth sci-fi’, and a short story best explained as ‘near-future sleep-science meets Macbeth’. Many of our current technologies and ideologies were vividly predicted by writers such as George Orwell and William Gibson, and their works can indeed act as a potent gateway drug for lapsed fiction readers working in tech.

However, we all know that true creativity springs from unexpected connections. So if innovators really want to create something world-changing, they might want to aim for a more varied fictional diet. That fifteenth-century glass-blowing novel I mentioned? It’s teaching me deep lessons about the perennial preoccupations of Silicon Valley: hierarchy, belief, ethics, power. The best crime novels can offer a rigorous neural workout, exercising our brains’ pattern-recognition abilities. Even romantic beach reads can provide an insightful window onto a particular generation’s aspirations and anxieties.

Perhaps there’s a gender issue at play here too. Fiction is read by more women than men, and as we all know, in the tech industry, men predominate. But to dismiss novels, poems, and short stories as ‘sentimental’ or ‘irrational’ is surely to miss the point. Sentiment is the source code of humanity. Irrational instinct has more influence over our behaviour than cold hard logic. And fiction unscrews the circuit board of being, so if you want to hack the system, I reckon there’s no better place to start.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

While most shipments still get through at the moment, there are long delays in some countries. Sending a new issue to 1000+ readers around the world with that much uncertainty makes little sense. So I’ve decided to pause the publication until there is a light at the end of the COVID tunnel.

In the meantime, our online shop remains open and we fulfil orders as usual (much appreciated!) – just expect some COVID-related shipping delays.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via email.

In the early days of this pandemic, a wave of appreciation for the internet washed over us. Confined to our homes, we figured out how to use our digital tools in earnest – to check in on each other, to stay informed, to work and play together. Some heralded it as the internet that we were supposed to get: one that elicits connection, not conflict.

During the weeks that followed, the internet morphed into an existential lifeline for many. With no access to public physical spaces, we found ourselves relying on private virtual spaces. Suddenly all of our interactions and transactions occurred on the backbone of just a handful of privatised services. A dream come true for Big Tech.

Social isolation perfectly complements Silicon Valley’s business model of ‘frictionless convenience’. Endless entertainment, news, shopping, and socialising, all without having to navigate the insanitary physical world – a risk we outsource to low-income gig workers. Eliminating reasons to go outside was already a winning strategy, but even the most bullish growth hackers couldn’t foresee the boon from a society in quarantine.

In panic mode, our governments, too, have turned to tech solutionism. In what writer Naomi Klein calls the ‘Screen New Deal’, hastily signed public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection promise to bring us out of isolation and into a ‘smart’ future, one where our health records and location data could be blurred into our shopping personas and search profiles.

I know this sounds very cynical. There is no denying that technology is helping us get through this. But anyone who benefits from this tidal wave of fear and uncertainty deserves intense scrutiny. Big Tech’s relentless drive to expand their influence, often at the cost of smaller competitors and our public institutions, has just accelerated. On the back of this global health crisis, tech monopolies don’t just see a business opportunity, but a chance for redemption: when public systems falter, Big Tech is here to save the day. So goes their argument.

This virus offers us a glimpse into a post-spatial future in which we rely on a few conglomerates to navigate a largely privatised, digitised world. The path to a different, more human future depends in no small part upon technologists willing to defend and promote the benefit of the public over that of the private – designers and developers who see the internet as a public utility, not as a vector for disaster capitalism. Now more than ever, as Bruce Schneier eloquently argues in this issue, we need ‘public interest technologists’ who can help revitalise and strengthen our public institutions for the many challenges of the twenty-first century.

Please note that due to COVID-19 many shipments, especially those going outside the EU, will take longer to arrive!

In issue 23 we share thought-provoking conversations with:

• Rachel Botsman
  As an expert on trust in the digital age, Rachel highlights the precarity of navigating today’s low-trust environments – on- and offline.
• Bruce Schneier
  The leading expert on cyber security offers a stern warning of the fragility of our interconnectedness and calls on a new generation of public interest technologists to step up.
• Seth Godin
  We pick the brain of author, marketer, and entrepreneur Seth Godin about his latest thoughts on digital marketing ethics and nurturing an online audience.
• Genevieve Bell
  The esteemed professor and anthropologist examines our human-computer relationships and raises important questions about our role in an AI-driven future.

As always, we relied on the generous support by our sponsors to make this issue happen: Float, Bakken & Bæck, DNSimple, SuperHi, SiteGround, and Basecamp. And of course, a big ‘thank you’ to all Patrons of this issue.

Addressing Offscreen’s diversity problem

As a publisher guided by strong ethics on inclusivity, I recognise that I have failed to live up to my own standards. While I have taken steps to diversify our overall list of contributors in recent years, the people we interview have still been overwhelmingly white, with this issue featuring an all-white interviewee line-up.

As I described in my newsletter (see issues 90 and 91), it took recent events in the US to make me realise how much I have neglected to truly educate myself about racism. Sadly, it has taken twenty-three issues of Offscreen for me to come to see how my shortcomings as a publisher have contributed to systemic and institutionalised racism in our world.

As a concrete, immediate step, I will donate 10% of net sales of issue 23 to The National Justice Project, an Australian non-profit that takes strategic legal action to advance social justice, with a focus on First Nations communities and asylum seekers. I have already made a donation of $1,712 based on sales of issue 23 to Offscreen subscribers (receipt here). I will publish another update later this year with the amount of additional donations made.

As I now try, like so very many people – including countless colleagues, friends, and Offscreen readers around the world – to more fully educate myself about racism through the many resources and tools available, I’d like to make a public commitment to do better: there will never be another issue of Offscreen with an all-white interview line-up.

I’m grateful to the Black voices who so clearly and powerfully demand that we learn how much we have been part of the problem. It is well past the time for us to assume our moral responsibility to take definitive action to combat the racism that is so firmly embedded in our societies and cultures.

But this is not just about adding people of colour to our list of interviewees. Diversifying Offscreen also means going beyond our Western-centric view of tech and giving voice to cultures that don’t share the Silicon Valley worldview. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Ijeoma Oluo’s book and – more specifically relevant to tech – from this interview with her:

‘The way in which tech is utilized in Nigeria is completely different than the way it’s utilized here. In Nigeria it’s about utility first and foremost. And about bringing people together face to face, to make African businesses run more smoothly, to help undo legacies of colonialism that have taken away physical infrastructure. To build that infrastructure online so that it can exist somewhere... Look at what it looks like when you’re creating the internet in a society that values the group over the individual. What does the internet look like then? Because it’s not the dream of extreme independence in Nigeria, that’s not what the internet’s built for, that’s not a goal, that’s not what you want for your kids or your family, that’s not what you set out for. So then, what does the internet look like when you have a different social structure? When you think that maybe it isn’t the idea that we’re all here pulling ourselves by our bootstraps, maybe we’re pulling our communities up, what does it look like then...?’

To reiterate my commitment: there won’t be another issue of Offscreen unless our interviews include more voices from underrepresented groups, and in particular from people of colour.

I also want to reaffirm here what I said in my newsletter: public pledges that respond to current events change little if there is no sustained effort to continue to educate ourselves and others on the issue of racism. I’m committed to doing just that through my work as the publisher of Offscreen and Dense Discovery, now and in the future.

As always, my inbox is open for your comments and suggestions.

Our first fully illustrated issue

As a magazine about the human side of technology, the photography in Offscreen has always played an important role in helping our contributors come to life for our readers. Getting a glimpse of another person in their home or work environment is a big part of what helps us relate and connect to them.

Just as I started working on this issue, the world went into pandemic lockdown. With self-isolation and social distancing becoming the new reality, commissioning one-on-one photoshoots was suddenly out of the question. Not knowing how long these restrictions would be in place, I had two options: either delay the release of this issue indefinitely, or find a solution that didn’t require photography. So I began to talk to our go-to illustrator, Agnes Lee, to try to imagine what a fully illustrated issue of Offscreen could look like.

Working from existing photography sourced from this issue’s contributors, Agnes produced the fifty-six illustrations spread throughout this issue in the span of a few short weeks. Her illustration style beautifully captures the feel and spirit of the original photos, while adding a wonderful playfulness and that sense of liveliness unique to drawings done by hand. I’m immensely grateful for Agnes’ work, and I hope you enjoy this unusual-looking issue of Offscreen – made in unusual times.

View the details of issue 23 here →

Hi Kai,

I wanted to send a note of thanks for the work you’ve created and shared. I’ve sticky-noted so many things in my Offscreen issues over the years. 🙂

Personally, the last year has been filled with a lot of questions and thinking about life decisions. I decided to quit my job near the end of 2019 mainly to take a break from the ASAP-ness and noise of the tech world, and now I’m in that transitional stage of looking for a new team to work alongside. Offscreen’s content is something I go back to often when thinking about my next steps.

When I was getting into the web development world in a professional sense (2015), I remember seeing ‘People Behind Bits and Pixels’ on the cover. Then Issue 16’s cover had ‘The human side of technology’ on it. There was always a focus on people and their experiences. It was a nice contrast to some of the companies I came across. When it was time to choose my first employer, I knew I wanted to be part of a company whose team valued and work exemplified traits like kindness, empathy, connection and communication. Reading the stories within Offscreen was part of that decision.

I think it’s safe to say that recently sometimes it feels quite heavy, globally. The last few issues have felt charged with a certain energy. A combination of a call to action, a call of warning, a call of urgency, a call to slow down, etc. They’re a good reminder that there are definitely things we need to change in not just tech, but as a collective society. They’re also a lovely reminder of hope for the future, and things that people have done/are doing to move the needle.

There’s a few folks I donate to/‘patronize’ on a regular basis. Every once in a while I take some time to think about why I’m supporting these people to make sure I’m allocating resources to causes I still believe in, but I never really have to think about why I’m an Offscreen Patron. It’s an automatic ‘continue to support’. I always know that I’m supporting quality – especially of the calibre and bent that we need more of at this time.

Thanks again + hope you’re well,
Emily

In this issue we share thought-provoking conversations with:

• Cennydd Bowles
  The designer and ethicist with a strong call for a new ethical awakening in tech and design, led by individual and collective action.
• Jenny Odell
  The artist and educator provides a less capitalistic perspective on productivity, one that values observation, care, and maintenance.
• Paul Ford
  The author, programmer, and CEO talks about his journey from idealist to realist, critically examining the power dynamics that shape our current understanding of ‘technological progress’.
• Anab Jain
  The designer, futurist, and film-maker creates visceral experiences to showcase what our shared futures may look like.

As always, we relied on the generous support by our sponsors to make this issue happen: DuckDuckGo, Harvest, MetaLab, Hover, SiteGround, and Postmark. And of course, a big ‘thank you’ to all Patrons of this issue.

Editor’s Note of Issue 22

As a sneak peek, here’s this issue’s editor’s note:

If you practiced digital design in the early 2000s, you may recall fighting for a seat at the table where business decisions were made. ‘Take design more seriously!’ was a common plea from designers at a time when our discipline’s contribution was often seen as superficial – a nice-to-have.

Two decades later, design has spread its wings. Designers are no longer just polishing up interfaces – we conduct research, study behaviour, and employ psychology. We put the desires and emotions of users at the centre of everything we do to make products more captivating, more efficient, and immensely profitable. Design is big business.

Actually, design is now so deeply intertwined with business goals that in many cases it’s become nothing but a slave to perpetual growth-market dynamics, dismissing any idea that doesn’t involve ‘solving customer problems’. With such a narrow-minded focus on one outcome – customer happiness – designers have turned into one-dimensional problem solvers who ignore possible consequences for anyone or anything else other than the customer. The business of design has made us oblivious to the complexities of the world. We now relentlessly prioritise individual needs over those of our communities, our societies, and our planet.

The looming threat of environmental and societal breakdown confronts us with some difficult questions: can we still justify putting the needs of humans at the centre of solving problems when the solutions we come up with are incompatible with a sustainable future? Is it time to move beyond our unidimensional thinking and encourage a new design philosophy that considers not just the best outcome for humanity but accounts for our interdependence with all life on earth? Does design need to break free from the shackles of efficiency and compliance, and strive for more speculative, provocative solutions – many of which may clash with the capitalistic conventions of today?

While the interviews in this issue may not provide clear-cut answers to these urgent questions, I hope our conversations will inspire you to think more deeply about the harms of the user-centred design thinking that is so pervasive in our industry. I hope they will help plant seeds for a more regenerative, planet-centric design approach. Because if there has ever been a time to take design more seriously, that time is now.

– Kai

View the details of issue 22 here →

I’m standing in the pristine lobby of a tech company. Elevator bells are dinging, up and down. Young, beautiful people slip past me on either side, clutching silver MacBooks. My heart is racing, though it shouldn’t be. I’m the interviewer, not the candidate! Still, I get nervous every time, no matter which side of the table I’m on. I have no idea what my candidate looks like, but I find him in the small crowd eventually. After confirming his name, I extend my slightly sweaty hand.

“Hi! I’m Lisa,” I say, willing myself to exude confidence. I'm reminded of recent feedback: Speak up! Look confident!

“Who?” he asks, bewildered.

“Lisa,” I say, as my sad little tent of internal confidence collapses.

“Who am I meeting with?” he says.

“Me?”

“I mean the hiring manager.”

“That’s me.” My voice contracts to a squeak. Fortunately the lobby crowd has dispersed.

“How’d you get that job?” he asks. He is older and taller than me, with a salt and pepper beard. His voice booms from above.

I hear my response like an echo from far away. Something about an acquisition. It sounds like an apology. Then I guide him toward the café, offer him something to drink, and politely conduct our interview. Part way through, I have to remind myself that I am not the one who’s supposed to be proving myself in this conversation.

His voice is one among many others that regularly question my presence, at work and in the world. I’m often asked about my accent (though I’m sure I don’t have one), my olive skin, and my last name. To the question where I’m from, ‘Pennsylvania’ rarely suffices as an answer. I’ve been informed, usually indirectly or playfully, that my apparent age, quiet voice, small stature, femininity, and curly hair do not add up to the term ‘boss’.

Even years later, I’m still reflecting on his question. Stripped of its condescending tone, it’s a valid question, and one I'm asking myself: how did I get here, and why does it matter that I am? The answer begins with how far I had to come to get here.

I grew up in a rust belt town of three thousand in Pennsylvania, born to one white parent, one Puerto Rican. My dad did seasonal field work, planting trees and pruning vines. Later he worked in manufacturing. I spent most of my life feeling different and trying to make it seem like I wasn’t – among peers with more privilege, among friends with ‘matching’ parents, and starting in graduate school, mostly among men. It wasn’t until recently that I began to embrace my otherness as a competitive advantage. I don’t just look different, I am different. I see things differently than the majority of my peers in technology, and that different perspective has remarkable value.

Sometimes I think of myself as a blind spot detector. It’s an exhausting role to play, but I can hear one more way in which a turn of phrase may be interpreted, see one more possibility for how a team might proceed, add one more lens through which to evaluate a candidate for a job.

Did you know that female drivers are 47% more likely to die in a car accident? According to a study by the University of Virginia, this is partly due to the fact that vehicle safety features are largely designed for and tested on male bodies. It’s no coincidence that women hold only about a quarter of the automotive jobs in the US, and make up less than 17% of the industry’s leadership. The car industry badly needs more blind spot detectors.

The percentage of women in technology is similar. Our efforts to improve diversity in this industry are often focused on incremental change. One more woman at the table or one more percentage point of people of colour in technical roles is considered a win. We don’t approach our product or business objectives in such an anæmic way. When it comes to diversity, what would radical transformation look like?

How might we create workplaces filled with so many different kinds of people that there would be no ‘type’ – either in particular roles, or in the company as a whole? How might we create workplaces where there is no qualified person who ‘doesn’t belong’? What possibilities might we unlock if all members of a team were remarkably different from one another? A team like that would not require a blind spot detector: it would already be equipped with powerful 360-degree vision.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reads in beautiful print.

There is a good chance you’re working on something new right now: an app, a game, an open-source library. You’re enjoying the challenge and the creative process. The final result, you tell yourself, will be useful to a lot of people. Then, over coffee, a well-meaning friend brings up a discovery she recently made online. “Isn’t this pretty similar to what you’re working on?” You put on a brave face, but your heart sinks.

Back at home, you critically examine your idea’s doppelgänger and confirm that someone is indeed doing something very like what you’re doing. In fact, they seem further along and have already solved a few problems that had you stumped. You take a deep breath as a wave of discouragement passes over you: ‘I’ve poured so much time and effort into this!’ A strong belief in the originality of your idea had fed your confidence, but now it’s just another version of something that already exists.

I recently spent a day with an inspiring book on modern architecture around the world. What struck me was the incredible variety. Just as writers strive to do with words, and artists with paint, architects work to push the boundaries of what’s possible, though they all begin with the same materials and are limited by the same physical laws. Cooking, photography, poetry – and, yes – apps and websites are all similar in that regard. Within artistic pursuits, original, significant expression can sprout from the same ingredients and constraints.

We humans tend to be shortsighted, though, and that tendency is nowhere so obvious as on the internet. Whenever a new project is revealed – whether it’s a prototyping tool, a podcast, or a to-do list app – a chorus of naysayers greets it with, “Do we really need another one of those?”

The answer is ‘yes’. Always yes. The web provides room for endless varieties of similar ideas to take root and co-exist, each with a unique twist. Niches thrive online. There are designers who wonder why there isn’t a prototyping tool that works the way they think. There are people waiting for the to-do list app that finally clicks for them. And there are many searching for a conference that speaks to who they are and what they stand for.

A few years ago, some friends and I started an online community called Uncommon in Common. A social network: how original! As we all know, there have been thousands of such things; some are home to over one billion people. It’s a solved problem, you might say. Well, there just wasn’t one that suited us. We wanted a welcoming, peaceful front porch filled with thoughtful conversation. We wanted a place that encourages a healthy relationship with our screens, a community free of ads and addictive feedback loops. Free of FOMO. We jokingly referred to it as ‘the next small thing on the internet’.

Uncommon isn’t an idea that appeals to a billion people. It may never be home to more than a few thousand. But for the people who stumble upon it, there’s the joy of finding the place they’ve been searching for – a place just for them.

Imagine a band recording its first album. Months of practice and sparsely attended shows have led to this moment. On their way to the recording studio, the car radio plays a new guitar-driven, uptempo song about relationships, eerily similar to theirs. Do you think they would turn their car around in defeat? ‘Well, we thought we were on to something, but it turns out someone else had the same idea.’

Here’s the thing: originality isn’t what sets your idea apart. You are.

Whatever you are working on, you have your own motivations, skills, beliefs, and priorities. You have past experiences that shape your work, and hopes and values that shape its future. Even though something else solves a similar problem or fills a similar gap, the end result will never be the same.

There is room in this world for you and your idea. There is room for another band, another book, another conference, app, game, or community – because only yours is uniquely yours. You don’t compete against someone else’s project. The competition is between you and unfinished. Believe in it, see it through, and share it with the rest of us.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reads in beautiful print.

Issue 21 will start shipping later this week. As always, to be part of the first big batch leaving our warehouse, make sure you order your copy today.

As a subscriber you will automatically receive the new issue, but it’s worth checking your account to make sure that your shipping details are up-to-date. Use the link in your confirmation email from us to access your account or request a new link here: my.offscreenmag.com.

In this issue we share our thought-provoking conversations with:

• Kim Goodwin – The design leadership coach and author who passionately advocates for a human-centred design approach that permeates all levels of an organisation.
• James Bridle – The artist, writer, and ‘tech-philosopher’ who warns of a future in which algorithms cloud our reality and impede the democratic process.
• Renée DiResta – The researcher and writer who was one of the first to uncover the spread of harmful disinformation and conspiracy theories on social media.
• Nathan Schneider – The professor of media studies who advocates for the economic model of cooperatives as an alternative to the robber-baron tech economy.

View the details of issue 21 here →

As always, we relied on the generous support by our sponsors to make this issue happen: DuckDuckGo, Harvest, SuperHi, Hover, SiteGround, and Ueno. And of course, a big 'thank you' to all Patrons of this issue.

Changes in issue 21

Starting with this issue we’re introducing a few changes to materials and format:

You’ll notice that we’re (back to) using an uncoated paper called EnviroTop. This is in part due to our previous, coated paper not being available in the grammage we needed. But to be honest, we also kinda missed the lovely texture of uncoated paper. Just like the previous stock, EnviroTop is made from 100% recycled paper.

We reduced our sponsors from eight to just six. Finding sponsors has been time-consuming and at times difficult given that businesses these days prefer to spend their ad dollars on hyper-targeted, click-based online campaigns. Removing a quarter of our funding meant that we also had to reduce our production cost, and one way to do this is to reduce the overall page count of the magazine...

To achieve this we removed three regular features: the Gear section, the company profile, and the Workspace photo series. This allowed us to reduce the content from 158 pages to 128.

We understand that some of you will miss these features, but making Offscreen a little leaner hopefully means that we can sustain the publication more easily.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Thank you for your ongoing support! We hope you enjoy the new issue as much as we enjoyed making it.

– Kai

Those of you who have followed me from the beginning know that I had my fair share of ups and downs – the result of me coming to terms with the reality of shipping tangible products. Whenever I was close to calling it ‘the last issue’ I would receive a heart-warming email or an encouraging tweet or I would run into an enthusiastic reader at an event that changed my mind.

You kept me going over the years, making me proud and honoured to publish a magazine with an unbelievably supportive, loyal, and thoughtful readership. But not only by that measure has Offscreen exceeded my wildest expectations: the privilege to work with amazing contributors and sponsors, the opportunity to speak about Offscreen at many events around the globe, or simply being able to walk into a bookstore in a foreign country and seeing my own publication on display still makes me want to pinch myself.

Ok, this is starting to read like an obituary. It isn’t. At least not yet.

Having just released issue 20 I feel now is a good time to take a breather and give my mind some space to reassess. This means that there won’t be a new issue of Offscreen for at least six months, maybe more.

I’m hoping to spend a bit of time exploring other ideas (such as the recently launched Dense Discovery) and – if the right project presents itself – I wouldn’t be opposed to joining a small team to work on something unrelated to publishing. (I’m particularly interested in the ‘tech-for-good’/social impact field, so if you think I could be a valuable addition to your team, please get in touch!)

When there are news about Offscreen, you will hear from me via email and Twitter. It never hurts to also subscribe to Dense Discovery where I frequently share brief updates on my work.

Of course, the Offscreen website and shop remain open and orders are fulfilled as usual. In fact, your continuous support of Offscreen (by word of mouth, for instance) helps keep everything up and running.

Thank you all so much for your generous support! ✌️
– Kai

Hi Kai,

I live in Richmond, Virginia, USA which is about 1.5 hrs drive south of Washington D.C. There's a wide range of stereotypes about American's but I'm probably in line with many of the young professional male ones: thirty years old, upper-middle class white male, married to my college sweet heart, with a dog and a beautiful one-year-old little girl, in a house close enough to the city center to walk around but big enough for a yard and a couple of cars. I started my own consulting firm for digital business automation this year. In many respects, I live an unremarkable and privileged American lifestyle. However, I do my best to engage with my community and strive for positive change in the world in various ways. Medical trips serving the poor in Honduras, helping Afghan refugees settle locally, simply raising a child with love and care. Nothing game-changing but I try not to just sit on my privilege like Scrooge Mcduck. Recently, Offscreen has been an integral part of my life journey...

A community where I frequently have honest open conversations is my (Christian) church. That community consists of about one half young people – mostly liberal leaning – and one half old people – mostly conservative. It's this crazy microcosm of what's going on in America in a community of about a hundred people. We're brought together by our shared faith in God, but sometimes (like how much of the rest of the world views Christians and/or Americans) we look at 'the other side' and think "WTF is wrong with them?!?!". In spite of all this, our community has begun to acknowledge that the world is changing rapidly and society is becoming more divisive and one way for us to figure it all out is to talk respectfully and frequently with people we don't agree with. Often, people in this particular community bring secular topics to the table to discuss. In that spirit, I've been sharing Offscreen with folks and the ensuing conversations with people have been deeply moving.

Some highlights of conversations involving Offscreen:

The Jocelyn K. Glei interview might have changed dozens of people's lives in just my own community. Mind you, almost all of the folks in this group of Americans have zero familiarity with the whole world you live in as you daily reflect on technology's impact on society. So when you drop into the lap of the average technology-addicted and attention-enslaved American this incredibly insightful discussion on technology and how it impacts us, it's like this veil is lifted. I shared my copy with a usually exhausted mom who works at a bank and when she gave it back to me the next week she said she cried because it all cut to the core of so many problems she's been trying to sort out.

My pastor has an amazing gift to connect with our diverse perspectives each Sunday. While some people picture preaching as some judgement-day holier-than-though speech, his are pretty much like weekly TED talks with Christian themes woven throughout. You might find it interesting that he's indirectly drawn from Offscreen about a half dozen times this summer alone to highlight various points about slowing down. A few times, he mentions the "Day in the Life" stories highlighting how slowing down helps us open our eyes to the right way to care for ourselves and treat others with kindness.

Personally, I think the big take away has been that you are collecting content which people are thirsty for as they try to navigate such a rapidly changing world. I've yet to share my copy with someone and it not result in this crazy deep reflective conversation with them afterwards. Even folks who are much further right politically than your interviewees (or even the overall voice of the magazine) are able to have the core messages resonate.

I'm sharing this with you because I think it's important for you to know what your doing is advancing humanity. Even if it's just in this tiny stereotypical pocket of America, the work you are doing forces meaningful conversations and healthy reflections at a grassroots level. It is breaking outside of the bubble of your peer and professional network and is actually penetrating into the society that feeds the beast needing to be tamed.

Thank you,
Matthew

Issue 20 will start shipping in the next 48 hours. To be part of the first big batch leaving our warehouse, make sure you order your copy today.

As a subscriber you will automatically receive the new issue, but it’s worth checking your account occasionally anyway to make sure that your shipping details are up-to-date. The access link to your account can be found in the confirmation email you received after your initial order. Can’t find the email? Request a new link on my.offscreenmag.com.

In issue 20 we’ve had the privilege to interview:

• Richard Pope – A designer and digital strategist who was part of the initial team behind GOV.UK and who more recently has put his expertise on building trust and accountability in the digital to good use for the private and non-profit sectors.
• Amber Case – The author and researcher is the creator of the Calm Tech principles which attempt to protect our attention and recapture our sense of purpose and identity.
• Aza Raskin – The artist, design thinker, and co-founder of The Center for Humane Technology offers thoughts on how we can take on our future, reframe our problems, and look for solutions beyond the limits of the possible.
• Tricia Wang – The tech ethnographer and entrepreneur wants companies to look beyond their obsession with Big Data and invest in qualitative research (she calls it Thick Data) to truly understand the human aspects of their customers.

View the details of issue 20 here.

This issue would not have been possible without the support of our generous sponsors: Bakken & Bæck, Harvest, Help Scout, Hover, SiteGround, Made by Many, Simplecast, and Ueno. And of course, a big 'thank you' to all Patrons of this issue.

A special shout-out to Kieran O'Hare who conducted the interviews and helped with editing the issue. (Hire him if you need editing help!)

Don't forget to share your feedback and photos via Twitter and Instagram once you’ve received your copy in the mail. Any questions, just contact us. Enjoy your Offscreen time!

As a subscriber you will automatically receive the new issue, but it’s worth checking your account occasionally anyway to make sure that your shipping details are up-to-date. The access link to your account can be found in the confirmation email you received after your initial order. Can’t find the email? Request a new link on my.offscreenmag.com.

In issue 19 we’ve interviewed these inspiring folks:

• Jocelyn K. Glei – An author, podcaster, and newsletter-publisher on a quest to find out what it really means to be productive (and creative) in the age of distraction.
• Angus Hervey – The co-founder of Future Crunch advocates for an 'intelligent optimism' to fight the current doom and gloom of the news and the dystopian predictions of a tech-driven future.
• Ashleigh Axios – As former creative director and digital strategist at the Obama White House, Ashleigh now speaks out about design's ability for social change and urges designers to step up to the plate.
• Bryce Roberts – A venture capitalist like no other: with Indie.vc Bryce takes a fairer and more humble approach to investing in startups, many of which are founded by people of underrepresented groups.

View the details of issue 19 here.

This issue would not have been possible without the support of our generous sponsors: Adobe Typekit, Harvest, Hover, SiteGround, SuperHi, Twist, Ueno, and WooCommerce. And of course, a big 'thank you' to all Patrons of this issue.

A special shout-out to Amirah Jiwa and Kieran O'Hare who conducted some of the interviews and helped with editing the issue.

Don't forget to share your feedback and photos via Twitter and Instagram once you’ve received your copy in the mail. Any questions, just contact us. Enjoy your Offscreen time!

Last Sunday night, my daughter was moaning and rocking back and forth in her chair, wrestling with a question staring back at her from the computer screen. ‘What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced in your life?’, the college application pointedly inquired. As her Dad, I had some ideas. But her? She was stumped.

Looking at that question, I was torn between being terrified that I’d sheltered her from character-defining trials and grateful that I’d been able to provide her with a fairly carefree childhood. We ultimately uncovered something real and meaningful for her to write about, but in a world of possible obstacles and adversity it was clear that she has been living a very privileged life. That acknowledgement has provoked some real reflection for me too.

For years I’ve told myself a story. It starts with ‘no one ever handing me anything’ and ends with me in the position I am today. I didn’t come from a notable family, I never asked my parents for anything after I got married at the age of twenty-two. The opportunities that I’ve experienced and taken advantage of to bring me to today were a result of hustle, or something like that. When I graduated from college I started a company. As a young married family with one kid, and another on the way, we scraped by on $1,000 a month while we tried to get this new business off the ground. Taking that risk and coming out better on the other side laid the groundwork for all the other professional risks I’ve taken since. And look at where I am now.

I’ve revisited that narrative a lot over recent years and months, and the more I do so the more I realise that there are holes in that story that deserve acknowledgement.

I was raised in an upper middle class family. I never wanted for food or much of anything. My family owned a boat. The only jobs I worked as a kid were given to me by family or friends of family. And they paid me much better than my friends working summer jobs in fast food or at the Motel 6. I worked full time through undergrad and was able – with my parents’ help with tuition – to graduate with a degree from a well-regarded university with no student debt. When I married, we got a couple of old hand-me-down cars from our parents. And when I left a cushy job to go start a new company right out of school, my income was reduced to just $1,000 a month, so my parents offered to cover my rent for that first year. I could not have taken those risks or reaped the subsequent rewards had it not been for my family’s financial support.

So, the story that I’ve been telling myself all these years has big gaping holes that need filling. It has safety nets that require recognition, and privilege that deserves acknowledgement.

For those of us who are firmly convinced that anyone can do anything by working hard and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, we need to recognise that most of us had additional hands helping us do the pulling, while many others had to fight hands that actively pushed them back down. We had resources avail- able to us that may not be available to those upon whom we heap our pearls of wisdom. We may, in fact, just happen to have been born into more favourable circumstances than those who we hope can learn from the path we’ve trodden.

This imbalance deserves to be countered. But before we start with the grandstanding, it’s a worthwhile experience to embark on some soul-searching. In acknowledging the privilege many of us have had, we can fill the holes in our own stories and move forward with a more honest, insightful, and impactful understanding than the conventional wisdom that anyone anywhere can achieve anything by just 'following their dreams'.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

As the people who create technology, we love to think of ourselves as the architects of a better tomorrow, an exciting future full of positive possibilities. We often believe that the fix for major problems is a technological one: where humans fail, let the machines figure it out. Technology is, by definition, progress. Or so we thought.

In the wake of global upheaval against the status quo, the tech community is coming to terms with having over-promised and under-delivered. Almost weekly, headlines about security breaches remind us that we’re now in the post-privacy age, where private data is just another commodity. Meanwhile, a cultural shift is bringing deeply entrenched gender and racial inequalities into the open. And in Silicon Valley, unicorn defectors publicly apologise for having created addictive UI patterns and shady algorithms that exacerbate social division.

And just like that, the tech world finds itself on a soul-searching mission. The realisation that the ethical decisions made by its creators are baked into all technology has come as a surprise. It turns out that lifeless tools – such as a simple recommendation engine – are not as neutral or amoral as we thought. It’s become clear now that programmers, designers, and data scientists are faced with some of the most pressing ethical dilemmas of our time. This forces us to ask a vital question: are they sufficiently equipped to make decisions on behalf of millions of people?

I would dare to say that we are on the cusp of a new era in technology. For the first time, we’re seeing the broad ethical ramifications of the tools we build, sparking a discussion about what author Fabio Chiusi calls ‘the human ghost in the machines.’ From academics to journalists, and investors to politicians, we’re finally starting to engage in the difficult conversations that could lead us to exciting and much- needed alternatives to the orthodoxies of the last few decades.

In a more enlightened era of tech, we will move beyond a superficial understanding of ’well designed’, which today seems overly concerned with aesthetics. Instead, good design will focus on creating user experiences that are inclusive and empathetic, on writing code that is open and energy-efficient, and on running a business model that doesn’t rely on infinite growth to survive.

Perhaps out of necessity, ‘doing the right thing’ for people, planet, and profit will soon have a much broader, mainstream appeal. Let’s not forget that we – the industry at the forefront of change – carry a tremendous responsibility to lead the way. As the conversations and essays in this issue demonstrate, it is time that we all look inward and ask ourselves whether our work contributes to a tomorrow that will indeed be better than today.

As a subscriber you will automatically receive every new issue, but it’s worth checking your account occasionally anyway to make sure that your shipping details are up-to-date. The access link to your account can be found in the confirmation email you received from us after your initial order. Can’t find the email? Request a new link on my.offscreenmag.com.

Issue 18 is loosely themed around ethics in technology and includes insightful interviews with...

• Craig Mod – A curious writer, designer, developer, and photographer straddling the line between innovation and tradition, digital and analogue.
• Jessica Jackley – The co-founder of the popular microfinance platform Kiva talks about non-profit success and how she managed to reinvent herself after leaving the organisation several years ago.
• Aral Balkan – He describes himself as a Cyborg Rights Activist and believes Silicon Valley’s success is built on billion dollar lies.
• Erika Hall – The design researcher and co-founder of Mule Design wants designers to pay more attention to the ethical implications of their work.

See all the details here.

This issue would not have been possible without the support of our generous sponsors: Adobe Typekit, Balsamiq, Harvest, Hover, MailChimp, SiteGround, Swarm, and Ueno. And of course, a big 'thank you' to all Patrons of this issue.

Don't forget to share your feedback and photos via Twitter and Instagram once you’ve received your copy in the mail. Any questions, just contact us. Enjoy and have a great holiday! 🎅

My call for education providers two weeks ago resulted in around 40 applications. After filtering out ineligible or too difficult to reach applicants*, you can now find our final selection of 31 organisations below. In total, they will receive 400 copies.

I now need to find a way to cover the shipping cost of around $5 per copy. To achieve this you or your company can become a sponsor. You can sponsor 20, 50 or 100 copies through the link below.

What do you receive in return for sponsoring copies?

• A permanent mention and link on this page
• A brief mention in the Dispatch
• A shoutout/mention on Offscreen's Twitter account
• The great feeling of supporting the next generation of techies 🙂

This campaign has finished. Thanks to our sponsors (further below) for their support.

Where are the copies going?

Depending on the location and shipping cost, each of the below organisations will receive between 10 and 20 copies of mixed issues of Offscreen:

Academy of Our Lady of Peace
aCAT Penang
Accademia Belle Arti Catania
ACMI X
Barnard College
California University of PA
Center Centre
CodeNow
CodeYourFuture
CWRU ACM
École Brassart Nantes
Emzingo U
Fresno State University
Fundamentals Academy
i.c.stars
Jacht — University of Nebraska
Longford college of further ed
Manchester Met University
MICA (Maryland Institute Colle
Parsons School of Design
Service Design Network
Shillington Education
Thayer Academy
The Grace Hopper Program
The New Digital School
University college Howest
University of Colorado Boulder
University of the Arts London
UOC.edu
Yoobee School of Design

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

*We also received requests from colleges in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Peru. Unfortunately, some locations are just too difficult and expensive to reach. I apologise for having to exclude these from our list for now.

Update: Thanks to our sponsors

Thanks so much to our generous EDU sponsors who have collectively covered shipping costs for 210 copies of Offscreen. We will pick up the tab for 90 more copies to round it up to 300. Some of them have already been received, the rest is going out shortly. Thanks to all involved for spreading the word and for chipping in! 🙌

10 Copies – SPOKE.
10 Copies – With Jack
10 Copies – Alex Jacque
10 Copies - Users Insights
10 Copies – INCAYA
10 Copies – Zach Grosser
10 Copies – Subsail
20 Copies – Anonymous
20 Copies – Designing Intelligence
20 Copies – Emerson Stone
30 Copies – Anonymous
50 Copies – Lucid

Reading icon by IYIKON from the Noun Project

With every issue I set aside a certain amount of 'free copies' to give away for such causes but sending them around the world is expensive. On average it costs me around $6.50 per copy to cover postage, fulfillment, and packaging.

To reach more folks who can't afford Offscreen I'd like to run a little experiment: Companies can sponsor free copies for $5 a piece. All sponsors will be published (and linked to) on this blog, receive a social media shoutout, and get a mention in a future issue of the Dispatch.

Before I reach out to sponsors though, I want to call on educational providers to put their hand up. If you work at a school, college, library or if you run tech classes for underprivileged people, I want to send you a bunch of free copies!

You are eligible if you..

• are an educational provider (academic or community-driven)
• have a website (to verify you're legit)
• have an official shipping address (I can't send copies to your home)

→ If that's you, apply here. (Form is now closed)

In this first step I'm only collecting addresses of education providers. In the next step (if there is enough demand) I'll be calling on sponsors to chip in with getting those copies delivered. I'm hoping to give out up to 500 free copies in total.

If you like this idea, please help spread the word and share it with friends who teach or run classes. Thanks!

And so in August my partner and I got on a plane to Europe. We caught up with family and friends in Germany, hiked through the South Tyrol region in Italy, swam in crystal clear lakes in France, and of course indulged in the region's abundant fresh food. (I occasionally posted photos on Offscreen's Instagram account.)

Before taking off, I scheduled several issues of my weekly newsletter (although the Dispatch did take a two-week break in the middle of our holiday too). I tried to stay offline for much of the holidays, but couldn't avoid checking my emails every now and then and making sure Offscreen orders were being fulfilled as usual.

I'm back in Melbourne now and excited to get started with issue 18. In fact, I've already confirmed three out of four interviewees. It's going to be a cracker of an issue! (Make sure you're subscribed.)

Before I left I told some of you to get in touch again when I'm back from my holidays because I didn't have time to respond properly at the time. If that's you, please follow up on your email. My inbox is depressingly empty.

Yeah, not really. 😉

“Is there anything you like to ask us?” A typical question you hear at the end of most job interviews.

“I am a bit worried,” I said, “about the whole idea of relentlessly driving down supplier costs just so that people on the internet can buy marginally cheaper consumer goods.”

Silence.

I’d like to think that my question rocked him to his core, made him reconsider his life up to this point, caused him to abandon principles he never knew he held. In reality, he was probably making a this-guy-is-an-idiot face to his coworkers on the other end of the line.

“Well, if you feel that way, our organisation might not be a good fit for you.” He hung up and it was over.

I don’t know what I was thinking. If I felt that way, why did I talk to them in the first place? Because it’s always worth talking. Because they were interested. Because it’s nice to feel wanted.

As an independent web guy I often wondered what it would be like to be hired by a giant corporation. I would enjoy the security that comes with money and a big company job. I know from experience that years of worrying about being able to pay the bills take their toll. But I would also be wondering what I could have built instead, had I gone my own way.

If I took that role I’d disappear for a year or two, and out the other end would come a better login screen, a cleaner list view, an improved signup form – and a big paycheck. Those are nice to have but at what cost? The usual pitch that a big company makes is that they have the resources for profound impact on a large scale. Often though, that impact is spread out over millions of users, and it’s in the service of giving corporate investors better capital returns.

‘It doesn’t scale’ is a criticism leveled at many new ideas. It’s true, some things don’t scale to millions of users. No venture capitalist throws their money at an idea that makes just a decent living for a small team. You need explosive growth to reach a worldwide market. But how many things which are good when small get better by becoming bigger? That local restaurant you love can’t scale to millions of users. Do you really want your favourite indie band to aspire to stadium-level fame? People get cheaper books, and an independent bookseller closes its doors to make way for a giant warehouse full of underpaid people working ten-hour shifts. You order your groceries online, but you’ll never bump into your neighbours at the local shop. Is this progress?

I’m aware of the disconnect between decrying large enterprise and, say, owning an iPhone. Some things, good things, are unbuildable without a critical mass – thousands of builders and millions of users. Acknowledging that, though, isn’t it also true that most things get worse as they get bigger? Humans are good at family, middling at community, dysfunctional as nations, and self-destructive as a planet. What doesn’t scale is our ability to relate to each other as human beings instead of target markets, as eyeballs to monetise.

I love technology and the internet and the wonders that it brings. I, too, build it for a living. But I don’t need another social network or more ways to share photos or further technological assistance for catching up with friends. What if we stopped building new things for a while, and tried to make what we have better?

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to go huge, to build something for millions, to double in size every few months, to scramble for market share – and then to try and find a way to pay for it all by putting ads on it. Maybe some day it’ll happen.

If I’m honest with myself, I probably would have taken that job had they offered it to me. I would have spent a couple of years generating shareholder value. I would have gained some management experience, a familiarity with Powerpoint, and some inexpensive consumer goods. But instead, I’m now working with a small team of people on human-scale projects for clients I respect.

I’m glad I asked that question.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

We have always been here.

Lurking in the shadows of your forums, passing silent judgment on your conversations, even joining in if we felt compelled to do so. You didn’t even realise it was us you were talking to, us you were so embroiled in heated debate with. We became good at disguising ourselves, donning ambiguous avatars and cryptic display names, basking in the freedom offered by anonymity. We congregated as our true selves in corners of the internet that you didn’t even know existed. Long before Pinterest and Tumblr became the designated spaces that you – you, with your anxious need to categorise and contain — would relegate us to. We were there.

You didn’t really think you were the only ones who could spend hours in the solace of a dark room, illuminated only by the comforting glow of a screen, did you? Softly clacking away at a keyboard, leery of waking up a family who just couldn’t comprehend why you needed to be online at four in the morning.

For a young girl growing up online, the internet was a source of sexual awakening. There was the early solicitation for age, sex, and location, and the late-night instant messaging marathons with internet boyfriends. Whether I was perusing the female-dominated, libertine world of fan fiction, or curiously poking my head into a more visceral, male-oriented landscape, I always kept my pointer carefully positioned over an exonerating browser tab, ready to pull the trigger if I heard footsteps approaching my room.

The web does not discriminate in its seduction. Its siren call is a whisper of white noise with the resounding wail of a dial tone. It echoed in my ears when I was at school, at the mall, with friends, always beckoning, and insatiable in its demands for my time and attention.

Yes, we were there too! Furiously scrolling and clicking in an attempt to escape the banalities of adolescent life. But few noticed. We were erased. Just as we were erased from the pages of history, like our contributions to society and our participation in the wars that toppled dynasties and drew new lines in the sand.

Now you purport to ‘make room’ for us on an internet you’ve claimed as your territory, as if it hasn’t been just as much ours all along. The rise of social media holds us accountable to our true identities, and anonymity is no longer a guarantee. The threat of exploitation is all too common, and voicing one’s opinion in a public sphere always bears a certain amount of risk. We now have to fight to feel welcome in the very spaces we’ve always occupied. It’s retrograde.

Even those few sites where femininity is allowed to visibly flourish, the spaces that dare to cater to women’s interests are dismissed as frivolous and unsubstantial. Should those strongholds fall to their founders’ desperate need for male validation, then perhaps we will become digital nomads once more. In the past our attention was fleeting and we were loath to tie ourselves down, to nest. New plat- forms popped up like frontiers itching to be explored, and we happily planted our flag.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that Bill Gates had access to the early computers during his childhood and college years. Gladwell looks back on those early interactions with technology as foreshadowing for Gates’ later success. Twelve-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had ZuckNet, a messaging program built with Atari BASIC. It was arcade games for Elon Musk.

Where do I hear about the woman who found her calling after building custom Livejournal layouts, who learned HTML so she could spruce up her Neopets shop? Or about the designer who can trace her success back to posting desktop wallpaper art on DeviantArt and GaiaOnline?

We need to start talking about them. We need to understand and celebrate the origin stories of women in technology just as much as those of men, and make those stories part of our industry’s cultural lore. Not only for the sake of looking forward and inspiring the next generation of creators, but to be able to look back and be reminded that this is our domain too. We are experts, CEOs, and role models. You can’t make room for us, because we’ve always been here.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

For the launch of issue 17 I sent out an email to the ~10,500 people on my 'Offscreen Updates' list. This list is separate from my weekly Dispatch list and I usually only email subscribers of that list once or twice in between issues to inform them about the status of the next issue. If you have ordered anything from the Offscreen website in the past, you've been added to that list automatically. As such, this list consists of current and past customers – some are just following along passively, some buy issues occasionally, some are active subscribers of the magazine.

Four months in between issues is a long time to remember what you last ordered, so I use my launch newsletter to inform everyone about their individual order or subscription status. Here's how I make that email as relevant and clear as possible...

Disclosure: I'm using MailChimp, a current Offscreen sponsor, for my newsletters. It's possible to achieve similar outcomes with all major email marketing providers. This post was not commissioned or paid for by MailChimp.

Adding merge tags to the subscriber list

My custom order management system is connected to MailChimp via their API. This allows me to sync the following data about each customer to my MailChimp list:

Besides the obvious ones, like email and name, I also sync the number of the issues they bought (ISSUES), the type of subscription they have (SUB) and an authorisation code (AUTH). The auth-code is a string of numbers and letters unique to each customer. I use this auth-code to enable existing customers to log into their Offscreen account, but I can also use this code to send them to the Offscreen checkout page with their shipping details pre-filled.

List segmentation

I use MailChimp's list segmentation feature in conjunction with merge tags to split the list on two major groups:

Group A: those who have already ordered issue 17.
Group B: those who have not (yet) ordered issue 17.

I then create two slightly different email campaigns for each group.

Existing customers and active subscribers to the magazine (Group A)

All customers who have already ordered and paid for issue 17 (e.g. active subscribers) receive an email that shows the following note:

Here's where the auth-code comes in handy because I can include a link to the customer's account – no login required.

→ Live preview of this email

Past customers and passive newsletter subscribers (Group B)

For those who have not (yet) bought the latest issue, I display a call to action to purchase the issue and/or subscribe. I split this group into two more sub-groups: 1) those who have previously ordered something on Offscreen and have an existing auth-code, and 2) those who haven't bought anything before and are just following Offscreen as a newsletter subscriber.

All customers since our relaunch have an existing account (auth-code) and so I can add their auth-code to the checkout URL which pre-populates the order form with all their shipping details. This speeds up the checkout process – they just have to add their credit card or PayPal account credentials.

Those newsletter subscribers who haven't bought anything recently get a standard set of links without any pre-filling magic.

→ Live preview of this email

And that's pretty much all. I think getting a clear status update about your previous order/subscription goes a long way in regards to a great customer experience. If you know a little bit about email marketing and merge tags then the above won't seem overly fancy to you. It just requires an email list that is in sync with your customer database. If you never heard of merge tags before, here's a quick intro by MailChimp. I can highly recommend using them to make your newsletters more relevant and useful to your subscribers. Happy emailing!

If you have purchased anything from us before, please check your inbox. The email shows whether a previous purchase of yours includes this issue. Obviously, as a subscriber you will automatically receive every new issue, but it's worth checking your account occasionally anyway to make sure that your shipping details are up-to-date. Can't find the email? You can always check your order history/status on my.offscreenmag.com.

Issue 17 includes insightful, intimate interviews with...

• Tom Loosemore – Founding member of the UK’s Government Digital Service, the government organisation behind the groundbreaking GOV.UK.
• Heather B. Armstrong – Known to most under her pseudonym 'Dooce', she's one of the web's most successful bloggers.
• Jason Santa Maria – Design and typography aficionado and co-founder of A Book Apart, he's currently creative director for Slate.
• Ashwini Asokan – Co-founder of Mad Street Den and outspoken proponent for creating an ethical and legal framework around Artificial Intelligence.

You can find all the details on our issue details page.

This issue would not have been possible without the support of our generous sponsors: Abstract, Adobe Typekit, Adobe Creative Residency, Craft, Harvest, Hover, MailChimp, and SiteGround. And of course, a big 'thank you' to all Patrons of this issue.

Don't forget to share your feedback and photos via Twitter and Instagram once you've received your copy in the mail. Any questions, just contact us. Enjoy your read!

I’m a programmer, and therefore live in a world of worst-case scenarios. Networks fail, hard drives crash, and those troublesome human beings persist in disgorging all sorts of nonsense into every interface my software has. Computers are incredibly complex and delicate systems, and they fail in dramatic and unexpected ways, without warning, every day.

No, no, I’m fine. My eye twitches like that all the time.

In an environment as insanely chaotic as our modern technological infrastructure – made up of the most advanced science we have, and often held together with chewing gum and good intentions – the only rational response is a deep and abiding paranoia. Experience has taught me to see my software as a writhing mass of Achilles’ heels, a horrific Shoggoth, every line of code a potential disaster. And so I wrap each in a thick, protective layer of negative assumptions, so that when things do go wrong – and they will – the program can (best case) recover quickly or (worst case) not actually kill anyone.

I wish I was exaggerating. Twenty years ago, a few weeks into my first professional programming job, I read a story about the software in a certain type of X-ray machine. An overflow bug had been found, and the upshot was that the machine had been accidentally mega-dosing every 256th person it scanned, effectively giving them cancer. Paranoia doesn’t seem response enough.

By the way, don’t mention this at parties. People tend to look concerned and then sidle away. And never follow up with the story about the rocket that exploded because of a misplaced semicolon.

But programmers – engineers of all stripes – can’t afford to look away. They need a relentlessly negative outlook, to come up with the most horrific thing imaginable, add contingencies to prevent it, and then invent something even worse. It’s what keeps our mechanised world ticking along, what keeps most catastrophic failures safely theoretical and leaves computers merely frustrating instead of murderous. While most have heard of Murphy’s Law – “Anything that can go wrong, will.” – only the nerds know Finagle’s corollary: “...at the worst possible moment.”

Hug a coder, folks. They could use it. Because what the software industry calls ‘best practice’, psychologists call ‘catastrophic thinking’, and it’s awfully hard to spend ten hours a day worrying about disaster and not have the aptitude you develop for it follow you home, like sentient toxic sludge from a grade-B monster movie. It can infect your relationships, your personality, your real life.

For me, it took years to even see that it was happening. Unanswered phone calls became car accidents. Marital tiffs became grounds for divorce. Heavy traffic became late arrivals became missed opportunities became career stagnation became destitution. Anxiety at the omnipresent but-what-ifs grew until the entire world was shadowed by the spectre of inevitable but unrealised doom. The true pleasures of the real world – serendipity, trust, joy, love – became suspect, not to be believed, traps waiting to be sprung.

But the realisation that I was unconsciously extrapolating to the worst-case scenario in my personal life has helped me enormously. Anxiety defeats the rational mind by preventing a sensible examination of itself; it panics you into action at the expense of introspection and self-assessment. But assessment – the quiet, sensible consideration of risks, outcomes, costs, benefits – is vital to a well-lived life. Reward comes from risk, and a life without risk is a life spent under the bed, cowering.

It’s well-worn common sense that programmers need a break from the keyboard every once in a while. They should be standing and stretching and refocusing their eyes. They should get regular exercise and eat right. They should probably not have the local pizza place on speed-dial.

But programmers should also take a break from programming, from the mindset it inspires and the rationale it requires. Stepping away from the machine is both a physical and mental act. Seeing the world afresh, with clear and unswayed eyes, is as important and rejuvenative as a long walk or a good night’s sleep. Just as programming requires the world to be viewed as endlessly dangerous, perpetually teetering on chaos, actually living in it often calls for the exact opposite.

Because the world is a beautiful place, your friends and family love you, and the warm sun in the sky isn’t going to go nova anytime soon. Probably.

Enjoyed this essay? Support indie publishing and buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

Not too long ago, while sitting in my office, I took off my glasses, put my head in my hands, and cried. It was the culmination of the toughest year of my working life, and more specifically, of my fifteen years of running a company. As I squinted into my dark, brackish palms, I had visions of laughing with my co-workers over a drink after sales pitches, celebrating project launches, and laying carpet squares, prepping our beautiful new office. It all came rushing back in a Vaseline-lensed retrospective.

If you invest a lot of time in something you’re passionate about, it becomes a part of you. For me, that passion happens to be running a company. And after a while, you have no longer a say in the matter. Whether you’re cutting grass, driving, or sleeping, you’re thinking about just one thing. It’s an involuntary response, like breathing. Or recoiling when you see Guy Fieri.

Back then I knew I had to start my own company, because I was so often disappointed by other people I worked for. They didn’t take time to get to know you. They were short-tempered. They didn’t participate in the business anymore. And while I sensed they once inspired people, I saw little evidence of it myself. They appeared beaten down.

So I decided to create the company I longed to work for. In the beginning, it was just a small group, and it felt like family. We had fun, and things felt effortless. I sold the work, managed projects, and designed websites. We were swamped with opportunities, so much so that we had the luxury of selecting the clients we wanted. There was almost no overhead, and the projects paid well. The industry was still blossoming, and while we weren’t a big fish, we were one of only a few in our pond.

At one point, the opportunist in me realised that hiring more people would enable us to take on more work. Soon, we were ten, then fifteen. People would ask me, “How many people do you want to grow to?” and I’d respond, “No more than twenty, that’s for sure.” In 2011, we had a headcount of twenty-four. A merger and an additional business partner later, we’ve added ten people on top of that. Before I knew what hit me, we had multiple layers of management, closed door strategy meetings, and multiple project teams. We relied on messaging systems to communicate instead of speaking to one another face-to-face. It led to unconstructive backchannel communications, conflicting roles and responsibilities, and people not taking vested interests in one another – myself included. A young employee once came up to me and said, “I had no idea you were once a web designer. I just saw it on your LinkedIn profile.” Of course he didn’t. It was maybe the third conversation we’d had, and he’d been with the company for almost a year.

While all this was happening, the web design field was changing dramatically. Things were getting crowded. We found ourselves competing against our own alumni. Sales cycles started to take forever, clients pulled budgets, and contracts became more restrictive. You can see where this is headed. Lots of employees, not a lot of work. The math makes your next decision for you.

My teary-eyed moment came shortly before I finally accepted the fact that everything I loved about those early days was gone. And several of my long-time colleagues have since echoed the same. The camaraderie, the ability to anticipate each others’ every move, even the trust – it all felt like a chore to encourage and maintain.

I have two young boys. When I see them every day, they look the same, and they don’t act very differently than the day before. But when I go away for a week and come back, they look so grown up. They say things I’ve never heard them say. Somehow, running a business feels the same way. My biggest challenge has been focusing on what’s right in front of me. To adapt with it, but to also appreciate it.

Today, our company is smaller. I’ve experienced what growth for growth’s sake is, and for me, it’s an unfulfilled prophecy. More people to enable more work didn’t make things better. And I was starting to show some of the negative traits of bosses I’d had in the past, the very people I tried to get away from.

The lesson I’ve learned is that you shouldn’t be afraid to stick with what feels right. The passion you bring to the table is directly dependent upon your level of happiness. If it’s all a chore, you have to figure out why. You may have even contributed to it. Own up to it. Then save yourself.

Enjoyed this essay? Buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

I recently got a chance to visit the famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Most people know it as a Gothic church covered in gargoyles, the home of Quasimodo, or – for the architecture buffs out there – one of the first buildings in the world to use the flying buttress. While all of these tidbits of information are fascinating, what stuck with me was the history of its construction: it was started in 1163, and completed in 1345. It took almost 200 years to build, and it’s still standing 700 years later. Between five and nine builders are credited with the construction; most of them died before its completion.

What an odd thing, to commit your life to something you know you’ll never see finished. No addiction to the rush of shipping to keep you going, only solidarity with those working alongside you and the vision of something greater than yourself.

In the ’30s, the Empire State Building took just over a year to build. The Willis Tower in Chicago took three. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, took a ‘seemingly endless’ six years. In our own industry, digital projects are usually measured in weeks or months. Today’s web workers will hold between twelve and fifteen jobs in their lifetime. That averages out to around four years of commitment to each job. And this is all made even more startling when we consider how long our work lasts. Basically, it doesn’t. Apps are outdated almost immediately with the release of new hardware and operating systems. The web is flying by. Our work is fleeting.

Ray Kurzweil wrote about the Law of Accelerating Returns back in 2001, suggesting that the rate of technological evolution grows exponentially. This means we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century. It will be more like 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. His work explains why we can build amazing structures faster today than ever before. What it doesn’t explain is how this impacts us as makers: how the immediacy with which we can create changes us.

‘Good things come to those who wait.’ Everything in our industry pushes against this aphorism. From indispensible continuous integration tools to the latest web development frameworks, it’s all presented under the guise of making us more productive and better contributors. None of this is done with malintent, of course, but we’ve lost the long view. And with each push to production comes that shipping high. It’s self-feeding – a roundabout with no exit where we test how fast we can go and still make the turn.

Part of me wishes there were a balance to the formula, that the amount of time it takes to create something would directly impact its longevity. Of course, this is not true. And even if it were, it would be nearly impossible to measure. Miles Davis and his band recorded their album Kind of Blue in a matter of days, and the end result is considered the greatest jazz recording of all time. This was only possible because of the decades of experience each player had gained before they ever set foot in the studio. In a sense, they had been preparing for those sessions their entire lives.

Which makes me wonder, what are we preparing for?

If the things we produce are merely a symptom of who we’re becoming, maybe we should ask ourselves who that is. How do we implore the next generation of makers to take their time, to hone their craft, to see their current accomplishments as foundational to their life’s work? But also, how do we make them recognise that most things worth doing cannot be done alone? Like those who spent their lives building Notre Dame, we need to understand our role in the grand vision. Every product we release is a brick in a new kind of cathedral – one that connects us all, from its foundation to its spire. And it’s this architecture that holds us together, taking its strength from our diversity.

For you and me – for all of us – there is much left to do. Are you willing to commit, knowing that you’ll never see it finished?

Enjoyed this essay? Buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

After five years of loyal service, I'm retiring my current Macbook Pro and replacing it with a new model. (For those interested in specs: it's the 15-inch 2.8GHz 2017 model with standard specs.) As I went through the process of buying and now setting up a new machine and talking to people about it on Twitter/Instagram, I made a few observations I wanted to share:

• Five years is a long time for a computer. To be fair, I have had one battery and a couple of screen replacements (free through Apple Care) but given that this was my main and only machine for the better half of the last decade running for around eight hours per day on average, it's aged amazingly well. In fact, it's still going strong now. I've decided to get a new one because its battery needs replacing again and, more importantly, the CPU/GPU is struggling during heavy lifting in Indesign/Lightroom. The laptop's casing is certainly showing its age too – it's lost a couple of its rubber feet a while back. But after five years of daily operation and many thousands of kilometres of travel, I'm very impressed with the shape it's in. Apple devices aren't cheap, but their build quality is hard to beat.

• There was a time when hardware specs got me really excited. I remember the thrill of ordering PC parts online and then putting together my very own dream machine. Twenty years later, I really don't care all that much about the inside. Hardware specs don't seem all that important anymore. It's a tool, and the less time I spend thinking about the inside, the more I can focus on getting work done. That's why I don't feel particularly strongly about the Touch Bar, the lack of ports, and the many other things that got people riled up about this release. Some of the updates will cause inconvenience for a while, but I'll adapt.

• Some people on Twitter suggested I should look beyond Apple and check out Microsoft or even Linux alternatives. The stuff coming out of Microsoft lately looks really promising, but a move from one platform to another is way too disruptive for me. The time it takes to (re)learn Windows, find similar apps, and move things over is just not worth it for me. As I said above, computers are tools. I don't obsess about tools – I just want them to work reliably so that I can go on with my life/work. The Mac does this for me, so I don't see any major benefits in moving to another platform.

• Those who follow me know that I don't believe in jumping on every trend or purchasing every shiny new gadget (despite publishing a weekly newsletter containing a lot of those). Our industry produces millions of tons of toxic e-waste every year. I think we shouldn't upgrade our devices just because Apple tells us to. I made it a principle to not buy new devices until they break or their age negatively impacts my productivity in a major way. The same goes for my phone.

• I occasionally do consulting for fledgling magazine makers and one question that often comes up is what hardware setup I would suggest. The assumption is that in order to make a good print product, you need expensive, 'specced-out' Mac Pros and special screens. But the only other hardware I've been using to produce 17 issues of Offscreen is a pretty simple, non-retina 21-inch DELL screen (I think it was less than $500 when I bought it) that I attach to my laptop when I work from home. I also bought a colour-calibration device (Spyder Express from Datacolor) to ensure colours on screen aren't way off. And that's it. It's a pretty basic setup that has worked well enough for me. Now that I have the new Macbook Pro I will most likely update my screen as well to get a bit more screen real estate and make use of 4K and USB-C connectivity. I'm looking at the LG 27UD88 but haven't decided for sure yet, because... see above.

• Environmental issues aside, upgrading the machinery I rely on every five or so years is a worthwhile investment. Sure, Apple products aren't cheap, but it's a tiny expenditure considering the value I'm able to produce with it. Spending $5000 every five years breaks down to around $83 per month or $2.75 per day. I spend more on coffee. How crazy is that?

2013 was a rough year. I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I walked away from the thriving business I’d helped to build. And I closed the door on my marriage. Today, professional contacts still invite me to Bay Area events and are surprised to learn that I haven’t lived there in almost three years. New colleagues express shock when I name myself as the co-founder of a well-known online media property. And casual acquaintances meet with disbelief the revelation not only that I’m divorced, but that I was ever married in the first place.

Before the rise of social media, I would not have expected anyone but my closest friends to know the intimate details of my life. However, as we increasingly broadcast our daily minutiae to an ever-growing network of loosely connected followers, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that our hairdresser can describe what we ate for breakfast before we even sit down in her chair. Take into further account the fact that since 2008 I’ve acquired a small degree of internet recognition through my blog, and it seems odd indeed that these pivotal points of my personal history remain shrouded.

Yet a look back at my Instagram feed from that tumultuous time reveals nothing of my divorce, my career upheaval, or the emotional havoc that came with both. The image gallery reads more like a modern homemaker’s almanac – roses, latte art, thrift store sprees – than the visual diary of a young woman mourning the passing of life as she knew it. There’s no mention of the midnight junk food binges or the crying jags on the bathroom floor, the bounced checks or the rejected credit applications. Given the shiny veneer I lacquered over my struggles, it’s no wonder that few beyond my intimate circle know I was a hot mess for the better part of two years.

It’s possible to scroll back to those photos and lump them with an issue that has garnered much attention lately: the concerns over FOMO (‘fear of missing out’) and its accompanying pressure to project a flawless online image that defies reality. And indeed, I’m the first to admit that plenty of those 'latte-grams' stemmed from the desire to hide my mess with a filtered facade. However, with hindsight I’ve determined that this desire arose less from a place of outward comparison than from a deep sense of self-preservation. More than I wanted likes and comments, I craved the healing peace of privacy.

Plainly put, I wasn’t ready to tell my story. Nor was it exclusively mine to tell. The recently altered relationships were too tenuous, the just-cut ties too raw. So I retreated behind the sheltering wall of social media. I drew pleasure from snapping sunny photos and giving them pithy captions uncoloured by my inner shadows. Meanwhile, I dwelt in my loveless, jobless present, reflecting on my role in the past hurt and drama, and on my vision for a kinder, calmer future. My online restraint represented an expression of the care and respect that I’d previously denied my marriage, my business partners, and myself; and my determination to maintain an upbeat social media presence inspired a continual quest for reasons to smile. I emerged from this contemplative time anchored as I hadn’t been before in my values, my responsibilities, and my intention to leave a positive legacy on the long memory of the internet.

In our current cultural obsession with buzzwords like ‘authenticity’ and ‘transparency', we forget that there’s a time and a place for airing our grief – and that the internet isn’t always it. While public vulnerability can indeed dilute the isolating effects of FOMO by grounding us in common experience, an equally solid foundation awaits us when we remove our hearts from our sleeves and hold them quietly, tenderly, to our chests. My Instagram feed from those difficult years stands not in defiance of reality but rather in support of a powerful truth: that even through a veil of pain and confusion, we can choose to seek and share a moment of beauty. And that when we’re wandering lost in the dark, even roses and latte art can be a radiant light at the end of the tunnel.

Enjoyed this essay? Buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

In a picturesque valley, nestled in the southern alps of Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture, lies a traditional Japanese hot spring hotel, an onsen. It’s not big. There are fewer than 40 rooms. Unlike other typical onsens, which operate during certain hours, the baths at this onsen are open 24 hours a day to serve its patrons. The water is of the highest quality – pure, alkaline, neither artificially heated nor treated. The meals served aim to 'balance taste, texture, appearance, and the season'. Fresh, seasonal ingredients are used, foraged and caught in the nearby mountains and rivers.

The staff are hardworking, courteous, and committed to exemplary service. They embody omotenashi: the spirit of selfless service and humble hospitality. With an understanding that each of those they serve has different needs, there is a desire to put their patrons first, personalise their experience, and exceed expectations. The staff are dedicated not to reaching the top of the corporate ladder, but instead to protecting the onsen, to help it thrive and preserve it for years to come.

They have done so for many, many years. Over 1,300 years in fact. Established in 705 A.D., Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is the oldest company in the world. It opened during the Middle Ages, before the Islamic Conquest of Spain, a full millennium before the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. When the onsen opened, the country of my birth, New Zealand, had yet to be discovered by our Maori ancestors. And in all that time, this onsen has been operated by the same family – currently in its 52nd generation of continuous management. Some members of staff have held the same post for generations, passing it from parent to child, child to grandchild, grandchild to great-grandchild.

The onsen has stayed small. They know what they do, and they do what they know. Their focus on service is relentless. They are a team united in its mission to protect, to nurture, to tend to, to keep alive – a delicate balance of continuation, innovation, and dedication that has endured for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Over 1,300 years after the onsen first opened its doors, I sit in my home office and skim through the morning news: congratulatory interviews and enthused reviews with 'startup gurus' celebrating exits and acquisitions – the ultimate end goals reached. And I wonder...

Did Fujiwara Mahito, founder of the onsen, have an exit strategy? I wonder if his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren or his great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren ever considered their exit strategies? I imagine they didn't. I imagine they focused not on an exit strategy, but on an exist strategy – a strategy based on the idea of sticking around.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how fulfilling it would be to have my children all working alongside me, to have them share in the love and passion of my business, to have them want to protect it, nurture it, nourish it, tend to it, craft it, feel grateful for it, and try to keep it going for a long time, for themselves and future generations.

I wonder what decisions we would make differently if we inherited the work we do? What if our 'exits' were bestowing upon someone we love the thing we have created and crafted over a lifetime? What if the focus wasn’t on selling up and moving on, but instead was on handing down and passing on? What if this 'longtrepreneurial' thinking had a bigger overflow effect, changing our sense of community, government, and the planet?

Digital strategist Shelley Bernstein once said that one of the greatest challenges currently facing us is how to interact meaningfully with the people we serve. Interact meaningfully with the people we serve. Not eyeballs. Not users. But people.

Success, surely, needn’t be measured only by the hockey stick or the exit sign. We can choose to remain small. We can choose to devote ourselves to something that serves and respects and delights people. We can choose to do our small things in small ways, which over a period of time can build upon themselves. In the spirit of omotenashi we can find meaning, pride, and fulfilment in what we do, continually and selflessly. Surely, that is success too.

Enjoyed this essay? Buy available issues of Offscreen for more thought-provoking reading material in beautiful print.

I'm an Unsplash fan too. In fact, I use photos from Unsplash for this very blog. So when Mikael Cho reached out to ask whether I'm interested in running a little campaign together, it was an easy decision.

Under the theme Life Off Screen we've started a new collection all about our favourite ways to log off. My first shot: I love browsing book and magazine stores, so I've chosen a photo of a recent visit of our Berlin stockist, Do You Read Me.

I'm now calling on the Offscreen community – you – to submit your photos of your favourite things or activities that you turn to once you turned off your device. What's your favourite way of spending time away from your screens?

How it works

• Use the link below to upload your photos. (You'll need to create an account if you don't have one already.)
• Add 'Life Off Screen' to the photo story (its caption)
• All photos must adhere to Unsplash's Submission Guidelines.
• Your photos will be reviewed, generally within 24 hours.
• Once approved your photos will be available to use for everyone for free without restrictions.

Submit your photos now

With a bit of luck your photo will also be selected as a top-ten pick and appear in Unsplash's newsletter (sent to around 400,000 recipients) and on Unsplash's homepage. As a top-ten pick you also get a load of free Unsplash swag.

I can't wait to see what you come up with. Happy snapping!

View survey results

Of those who answered the two open-ended feedback questions (one on Offscreen Magazine, the other on Offscreen Dispatch) the vast majority had nothing but praise. I'm always flattered by this (thanks again!) but of course it's the critical feedback that helps me improve and make changes. Though, the contradictory nature of the responses really surprised me. Here are some verbatim answers:

On the focus on tech

A few of the interviews lately have been less tech-industry focussed which is fine and understandable, but isn't my personal preference. Not a huge issue, though!
– vs –
Broaden the industries you cover in the magazine and also cover photography, art, illustration, typography, etc.

On the new binding method

Bring back the glued binding. This new one looks so very wrong.
– vs –
I like the redesign, especially the binding.

On the length of interviews

I love the longform articles. Such a treat to have some well curated, deep discussion. The tone of voice is ace too. More of these would be welcome.
– vs –
Interviews can be very long and it's not fun for readers with limited attention span. Perhaps more bite-sized articles and features would be good.

On featuring well-known people

Focus on industry leaders. Julie Zhou was a big name which attracted me to that last issue.
– vs –
Interview less known people, from non-english speaking countries. I was a bit disappointed to see Julie Zhuo on cover of the new mag. She's too 'mainstream'.

On diversity

Keep it up with the diverse voices please!
– vs –
More diversity! The magazine is still mostly white guys in the U.S. Let's get some gender/racial/ethnic/geographic diversity in there.

This is just a small selection. Reading through the hundreds of entries, it felt like almost every piece of feedback was immediately annulled by the next. To be honest, I'm not sure if I actually can take anything away from it. Perhaps that by landing in the middle I'm doing it right? I'm not sure.

Some other responses that caught my eye and that I wanted to briefly touch on here:

On Offscreen Dispatch

I actually preferred the old layout due to the use of imagery for each link. Helps provide context and captures attention.

Many of you mentioned that they preferred the old layout of my weekly newsletter (then called The Modern Desk) because it showed more images of the products. That's actually not true. I've always only showed images of the tangible products (and not the digital ones). It might be the layout overall that gives that impression.

Sometimes there are some really cool products but the 'reviews' don't seem like you actually used them.

That's correct. I don't review any of the products in the newsletter unless I clearly say so. There is no way I can find the time to buy and review 5–6 products every week. All of the items in the newsletter are purely suggestions – things I've stumbled upon and want to share because they caught my eye.

I canceled it because it makes me click to read. I like newsletters to contain all information without having to open my browser.

Hmm.

On sharing more of the behind the scene

Add more background knowledge about managing/producing/designing Offscreen.

Several of you said they wanted to know more about what's happening behind the scenes. This is something I actually really enjoy sharing. If you have been following me for a while you will know that I write and share a lot of what's happening behind the scenes right here on the blog. If you aren't aware of the depth of the blog yet, have a browse and then grab the RSS feed to always get the latest posts. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to blog as much as I'd like recently.

I'd prefer if you gave away the content for free and find another revenue model.

I also wish we could end capitalism but sadly we're not there, yet.

Dear Kai,

Thanks for the speedy delivery of the three issues of Offscreen. I’ve just finished issue 14, now going through 13 and I already feel thankful for what they have done for me. It immediately convinced me to subscribe.

I started out as a graphic designer with a ‘focus on web’ 18 years ago, and then worked at a design agency, before becoming an entrepreneur 10 years ago. I’ve grown up along with the web – learning new tools and new ways of thinking, and incorporating it all into what I offer my clients.

Along the way I’ve lost my interest in design-focused magazines. More recently, I have been on the lookout for something that was more in line with my point of view, something that would enrich my thinking as an entrepreneur. And Offscreen is the perfect fit. The human perspective, the background stories with all the ups and downs really motivate me to continue chasing my dream to create products that help and inspire others.

Thank you very much for that!

Sincerely,
Dirkjan

Offscreen’s original order management system (OMS) has served me very well over the years. It solved a fundamental problem every magazine maker faces: managing orders for single issues and for subscriptions (which are essentially orders for future issues) in one place, while keeping customer data up-to-date and optimising orders for shipping. It connected directly with PayPal’s IPN system, which has its flaws (like everything PayPal-related) but is extremely easy and fairly flexible to run.

When we created this system almost five years ago, there were a lot fewer out-of-the-box ecommerce tools available. Today, between Shopify, Squarespace, bigCartel, and a whole host of other shopping cart apps, it begs the question why I should develop my own customer and inventory management tool.

Why not go with Shopify?

While the above mentioned apps are extremely powerful (especially Shopify with its own app store), they don’t exactly suit indie magazine makers who often publish new issues infrequently and rely heavily on subscribers to manage their cashflow. Available subscription management plugins don’t cater for this type of product either. Most subscription SaaS products either focus on digital subscription management or sell monthly subscription boxes which are completely different beasts to printed publications that come out every few months. While customising these tools is possible, they are just not meant to be used that way.

I also don’t use any of the larger fulfilment services like Shipstation or Shipwire because Offscreen is shipped through a small logistics company in Berlin. Their low handling fees combined with German Post’s low postage makes shipping Offscreen around the world possible. Going through a small service provider like that also means I don’t have any fancy APIs to work with – instead I export a weekly order sheet in the form of a CSV file and make it available to my shipper in Berlin.

When it comes to handling payments, almost none of the existing apps offer recurring, but infrequent charges. Like many other indie magazines, Offscreen doesn’t adhere to a very strict publishing cycle. I aim for a new issue every four months, but it sometimes varies by a few weeks. Many of the available SaaS products offer recurring charges such as every week, month, quarter or year, but I still haven’t come across a tool that allows me to charge customers whenever I'm ready to ship a new issue. Essentially, I’d like to store my customers’ payment information securely and then trigger a charge by the time I release a new issue.

All of this means that creating a custom plugin for Shopify would be almost as complicated and expensive as creating my own order/subscription management system. And so I chose to go with the latter because it gives me a lot more flexibility.

The ideal order and subscription management tool

So what would the ideal buying experience for readers and the ideal order management system for a publisher look like? I've been pondering that question for the last few months, if not years. Here are some of the features I’d love to use:

• Make magazine subscriptions more like digital SaaS subscriptions
  Most indie magazine subscriptions are simple pre-orders for the next n issues, paid a year in advance. They usually don’t auto-renew which means readers have to be reminded to come back to the site to buy another one-year subscription. Rather than making a big commitment upfront, what if we let readers subscribe on a per-issue basis? Once subscribed, Offscreen charges readers a few weeks before the new issue is released. They can cancel or change tiers any time.

• Offer different tiers of support
  So many of my readers want to support the magazine beyond just buying a copy. What if, rather than just buying a standard subscription, they could choose from a few different tiers according to the level of support they want to give? I can imagine at least three different tiers – subscriber, supporter, and patron. The higher tiers include a little gift to show my appreciation for their support. Subscribers can change tiers in between issues.

• Integrate the patron model into subscriptions
  Offscreen patrons pay a fee to have their name included as supporters in the back of each issue. I think all small indie publications should consider having such a patronage model for their most loyal readers. Their extra contribution goes a long way in making it a sustainable publishing business. Ideally that patron model would be more deeply integrated in the checkout process so that more people can become a patron without me manually handling every single request.

• Provide a simple account interface to manage orders/subscriptions
  I think a lot of us don’t like buying subscriptions to physical products because there is often no sense of control. You subscribe to a magazine online, pay the yearly fee, and then hope that you don’t move houses in the next twelve months. How do I change my shipping address in between issues? Do I need to renew manually? What if my credit card expires? I want Offscreen readers to feel like they are in control of their subscription through a simple account interface – ideally without having to create a login/password.

• Offer discounts to students and libraries
  I feel strongly about supporting the next generation of techies and making Offscreen available through more public libraries. Offering EDU discounts isn’t as straightforward as it seems because it requires some sort of eligibility check during the checkout process. We’re exploring using this openly available database to check customers’ email addresses and apply an EDU discount of around 25%. (Note: we didn’t manage to release this feature with our launch, but it’s still on our to-do list.)

• Streamline the management of all of the above
  The only reason why I’m able to run Offscreen by myself is that I streamline the admin side of things as much as possible. The ideal system is perfectly tuned to what I need to get done every day, week, month, and quarter. Creating a completely customised system allows me to avoid unnecessary steps and optimises the process between receiving an order and sending out issues.

Some of the above features are ‘experimental’ to say the least. Other publishers I spoke to said I should continue offering standard yearly subscriptions (and this new system still allows me to do that if I change my mind), but I’m eager to see whether the age-old model of magazine subscriptions can be improved through a per-issue model that behaves more like other digital subscriptions we already have.

Using Bootstrap, I quickly created all the necessary templates for the back-end so that my developer Dan Rowden can get started with development. I also spent a lot of time on a very detailed document (23 pages in Google Docs and counting) to outline all the different features, edge cases, etc. It’s been an interesting experience working through every detail of such a big project. There is so much stuff happening behind the scenes that is necessary for things to run smoothly but that nobody will ever see or even know exists.

All previous issues of Offscreen use a pretty standard binding method called ‘perfect binding’. Tightly wrapped by the cover material, a thin layer of glue holds the content pages in place. ‘Perfect binding’ is not the cheapest method but it’s proven reliable and fairly straight-forward during production which is why it has become a quasi-standard for most publications.

Because the glued spine is quite rigid and usually doesn’t bend open (although you can break it if you force it) some information is lost in the centre of the spread. Depending on other factors, like the paper type, the page count, and the publication’s dimensions, it can be difficult to keep the publication open. This video by Works That Work illustrates this really well.

As you would expect, Germans have a wonderfully descriptive word for this: Klammerwirkung (the peg effect). If you own older issues of Offscreen – in particular issues 5 and 6 – you would have experienced it yourself. At the time, I changed the paper to a heavier stock which increased the Klammerwirkung and gave your hands/fingers a real workout while reading.

There are a few ways around this problem. The early issue of Works That Work in the video above uses a simple saddle-stitch binding (staples) which works well up to a certain number of pages. Then there is a fairly new binding method called Otabind which Works That Work used in later issues as the page count increased. This technique tackles some of the issues above by detaching the cover from the spine. However, depending on the total number of pages and the cover material, it can make the spine of the cover a bit wiggly and flimsy.

I’ve looked at a whole range of publications and a binding technique that stood out was the so-called Schweizer Broschur (Swiss brochure). With this technique the content pages are only attached to one side of the cover. If combined with a more expensive stitch-binding technique – a series of threads literally stitching the pages together – the Schweizer Broschur can deliver one of the best reading experiences out there. It’s also great from an editorial design perspective: because it lies completely flat I can work with the full area of each spread without the centre being swallowed up.

I can certainly understand why the exposed spine looks ‘unfinished’ to some, but it’s one of those classic ‘form follows function’ cases. The experience it provides makes up for the slightly unrefined look. Once you open the magazine and explore its contents I think you’ll notice how nice it is to be able to do so without requiring any effort at all. Eating your lunch while reading Offscreen has never been easier. 😉

Going through the editorial design inspiration that I’ve been collecting for a couple of years now, you can see that I like mainly type-driven spreads, using only a few simple elements combined with one or two (often subdued) colours. This is where the redesign of Offscreen is headed. The goal is to further reduce and simplify, to create a placid reading experience accompanied by unpolished, real-life photography. I want it to feel as calm as reading a book and as personal and authentic as going through someone’s photo album.

How can a typeface assist in that goal?

Most typefaces contain a few distinct letters that give it away quite quickly. For example, the unique shape if the lowercase ‘a’ in Calibre, the curve in Circular’s lowercase ‘t’ or that prominent crossbar of Walsheim’s capital ‘G’.

Perhaps that’s why, when I came across Acumin, it didn’t trigger any particular reaction at first. In a way, Acumin is spectacularly unspectacular. It’s a pretty ‘straight-faced’ sans-serif type with few characteristics that stand out. It doesn’t really make much of an effort to grab your attention or sell itself. [Writing this I’m realising that I’m kind of describing myself/Offscreen.]

I love going through the websites of type foundries to explore the stupendous amount of work that goes into designing typefaces. When I buy new things I’m usually rooting for the underdog, so I was eager to support smaller foundries. Acumin was commissioned by Adobe, another reason why I didn’t really pay much attention to it. Not that I dislike Adobe in any way, but as a tiny brand I know that every paying customer can make a big difference. And so after a lot of research, these were the typefaces I set out to test:

• Post Grotesk by Incubator
• Atlas by Commercial Type
• Graphik by Commercial Type
• Lab Grotesque by Stockholm Design Lab
• Neutral by Typotheque
• Founders Grotesk by Klim
• Maison Neue by Milieu Grotesque
• Suisse by Swiss
• Agipo by RP
• RM Pro by The Designers Foundry
• Zurich by bitstream
• Theinhardt by Optimo
• Aktiv Grotesk bu Dalton Maag
• Unica by Linotype
• Neue Haas Grotesk by Linotype
• Acumin by Adobe

On my initial shortlist was Suisse International, Aktiv Grotesk, Atlas, and Post Grotesk. Some testing showed that Suisse and Aktiv Grotesk just ran a little too wide in body sizes. This meant that I either had to cut down on content, reduce the font size or add more pages – neither of which was an easy thing to do. Both of those typefaces can feel a bit too modern and cold. In contrast, Atlas and Post Grotesk are beautifully human and amiable, yet I simply didn’t enjoy them as text fonts. What makes them so friendly and a bit quirky gets in the way when reading long passages of texts, in my opinion.

Once I ruled out the ‘too cool’ and ‘too playful’ types, I was left with something in the middle, something quite neutral. I was looking for a less ‘trendy’ and overused version of Helvetica. This eventually led me to Neutral (duh!) and back to Acumin. Neutral is amazing, but Acumin’s much larger family was very appealing.

After devouring Acumin's wonderful microsite, I did a bit more digging and came across a post by a familiar face. Jeffrey Zeldman has high praise for Acumin. He calls it “a Helvetica for readers”. And I couldn’t agree more with his observations:

Reading about the design challenges Slimbach set himself (and met) helps you appreciate this new type system, whose virtues are initially all too easy to overlook, because Acumin so successfully avoids bringing a personality to the table. Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water. (...)

Book designers have long had access to great serif fonts dripping with character that were ideal for setting long passages of text. Now they have a well-made sans serif that’s as sturdy yet self-effacing as a waiter at a great restaurant."

After I ran several rounds of test prints, it impressed more and more. Offscreen is a very small, book-ish magazine, so the typeface has to perform in relatively small, compact spaces. Acumin scales beautifully, no matter the font size. Since I’m an Adobe Typekit user it was easy to test Acumin’s webfonts extensively too, and again, it performed amazingly well on screen.

The microsite claims that Acumin was “developed with the highest standards for aesthetic value, technical quality, and typographic functionality”. That may sound like some cliché marketing speak but I have to admit that there is a certain level of quality in fonts made by big foundries like Adobe or Monotype. Several other fonts I tested had kerning issues at certain sizes or the performance on screen felt more like an afterthought (which is often the case when custom fonts become retail fonts).

What’s also nice about Acumin is that it hasn’t become a the go-to typeface for every new magazine or startup yet. I tend to come across the same ten typefaces in so many magazines and websites these days, but Acumin hardly ever makes an appearance.

So, there you have it. As I’m writing this I’m pretty set on Acumin. As with everything though, I might still change my mind (the advantage of not having to report back to anyone other than you lovely people), but given how much time I’ve spent testing this typeface in various scenarios I can’t see myself doing that all over again with another typeface in the foreseeable future. Having said that, I fall in and out of love with typefaces fairly quickly. 🙃

Since there are a few type designers amongst the readers of this newsletter I should say that I certainly don’t consider myself a type expert. I love discovering the technical details of how a typeface came to be, but in the end I arrive at my decisions to use a particular typeface mostly by ‘what feels good’, and my gut agrees with Acumin.

New look

Both the website and the magazine have undergone a complete visual overhaul. The new design comes with a lighter footprint, thanks to simplified typography (just one type family), more white space, a brighter colour scheme, and quirky, hand-drawn illustrations by Agnes Lee that add a personal touch.

New magazine specs

We made the new issue a little smaller so it feels even more like a book. Instead of the standard Perfect Binding that makes the magazine hard to keep open, Offscreen now has an open, lay-flat stitch binding that offers an improved reading experience. We’ve also broken an (unwritten) rule of indie magazine publishing and moved to a matte-coated but still 100% recycled paper for a sharper print result.

New subscription model

The biggest and most complex update is our new subscription model. Subscribing to Offscreen now means you pay for the next issue upfront and for every following issue we’ll simply charge your credit card a few weeks prior to release. It's a set and forget system. You can choose between several tiers depending on the level of support you feel comfortable with. Of course you can cancel your subscription any time through your new Offscreen account (see below). Creating the platform that powers recurring, irregular, multi-tier subscriptions was a bigger challenge than I thought and I will definitely do a more in-depth write-up here in the future. (Thanks to Dan for providing the developer chops to make this happen!)

New Offscreen accounts

To make managing your orders and your subscriptions as easy as possible we built a password-free account interface. After placing an order you’ll receive a link via email that gives you instant access to manage everything Offscreen related: view the status of all existing orders, print invoices, change shipping/billing addresses, cancel or change your subscription, etc.

New weekly newsletter

For more than two years I’ve been publishing a weekly newsletter called The Modern Desk. As part of this rebrand I’ve decided to merge the newsletter with Offscreen. The Offscreen Dispatch is the more frequent, digital counterpart to Offscreen Magazine. For a brief weekly digest of interesting apps, accessories, and articles sign up here.

New website backend

While the old website was mostly a bunch of static PHP files, the new site is powered by Kirby which has been a delight to set up and use. Shout-out to Kirby maker Bastian Allgeier who’s helped with implementing the site with our backend.

There are many other important updates that aren’t directly visible from the outside. And there are some that haven’t yet made it into this first version of the new Offscreen (such as educational discounts). As mentioned above, I’ll try to write up more detailed posts about some of these changes once things have settled down a bit.

With all these changes to the website, don't forget to check out (and order) the new issue! We have a fantastic mix of interviewees in this issue discussing a wide range of topics – from inspiring kids with a new generation of DIY tech toys to how we can prepare for a future marked by exponential change.

This revamp (of website and magazine) has been a huge undertaking. I have to admit that there were numerous moments when I contemplated not seeing it through to the end. Finally revealing everything to the public comes with a big sense of relief but also some trepidation as to whether this big investment of time and money will pay off.

Please enjoy having a look around. If you find bugs we missed (which I'm sure some of you will), please don’t hesitate to let us know so we can continue to improve Offscreen’s online experience.

I’m eager to see what you all think of the new issue and the refreshed format. As always, any supportive tweets, blog posts, Instagrams or real-life word-of-mouth is hugely appreciated! If you have any questions, please email away. It may take me a few days to reply, though. Enjoy!

A big thank you to the following people who helped make this issue and the new website happen: all contributors, sponsors and patrons of issue 16, Dan Rowden, Bastian Allgeier, Agnes Lee, Ivana McConnell, Kieran O’Hare, Michelle F., all beta testers, all backers of my fundraiser, my printer and shipper, and everyone else who supported me in spirit and by sending positive vibes via email, tweet, or postcard.

As Douglas Rushkoff says, we need a new operating system for startups. The current one will keep producing the same extractive and monopolistic empires we’ve gotten so far. No, what we need is a new crop of companies that are institutionally comfortable with leaving money on the table. Leaving growth on the table. Leaving some conveniences and some progress on the board, in order to lead the world into a better direction.

Important, thought-provoking words on unsustainable growth in tech by David Heinemeier Hansson.

I’ve come to the publishing world by way of digital/web design. Until launching the inaugural issue of Offscreen I had no prior experience in designing or publishing printed media. Even after producing fifteen issues of Offscreen, I still consider myself a noob in this field – there is still so much to learn! This post is a collection of lessons I’ve learned about the business side of making Offscreen.

Before you dive into this very long post, it’s worth noting that Offscreen is largely a one-man show. Therefore, my process probably looks different to that of most of my publishing colleagues. I’m sure people with a long career in traditional print publishing that are part of a bigger team have a very different approach.

Every publication is unique. I believe Offscreen is in the very special position of being a print publication for digital folks. While many magazines rely on traditional distribution channels (i.e. retail) for most of their sales, I can directly approach my readers and sell a magazine to them where they already are: online. In addition, Offscreen is a magazine that consists largely of first-person stories, opinion pieces, and interviews that I collect by collaborating with my contributors directly online. As such, I rarely commission writers or journalists. These are all factors that impact the bottom line – how I make money, where I spend it.

All this is to say that what works for me, might not work for you. Obviously, there is no golden bullet when it comes to creating a sustainable print publication. Everyone has their own approach. This is mine.

Content

Just like on the web, content is king. You don’t have a magazine if you have nothing to say. Leaving the definition of content aside, the food for thought served to your readers is what defines your magazine. Not the paper, not the typeface, not the cover.

Good content, be it written, photographic or illustrated, obviously comes at a price. If you publish an outdoor adventure magazine, you might spend a lot on photo licenses. If your mag is a collection of short stories, you might be paying a lot of different writers for their contributions. Whatever it is, you will have to decide early on how much content goes into each issue and how much money you’re able to spend on that content, not just for the first issue, but on a regular basis.

A lot of new publishers make the mistake of trying to fit too much content into their inaugural issue. Keep in mind that you will have to find similar amounts of content for each consecutive issue. Is it realistic to generate the same amount of content within each publishing cycle?

Think about how you locate your contributors/your content. There is nothing wrong with re-publishing existing content, if you can get permission and think that it is still fresh content for your specific audience. Republishing content can be a great, affordable way to resurface quality material and introduce it to another medium and audience (think online/offline). You can also add value by, for instance, commissioning a set of new illustrations for an existing story.

Deciding whether your issues are topical (meaning that each issue focuses on a particular theme) and determining whether your content is timeless or time-sensitive are factors that will make finding contributors more or less complicated in the long term.

The question of how much to pay contributors for their work depends on your individual circumstances. If you’re not making any profit with your magazine (the so-called ‘passion project’) it might be easier to convince contributors to help out for free. If you recycle content or don’t ask for exclusive usage-rights, the fee might be a lot lower or non-existent. Some writers, photographers or illustrators might be happy to start with a very low fee that increases as your publication gains popularity and a wider audience.

As for Offscreen, I generally don’t pay someone for letting me interview them. A lot of entrepreneurs and creative types talk about their own companies, projects, and opinions in Offscreen, and I usually don’t pay for those stories (and I’ve never been asked for a payment). I usually offer to pay a small fee for new material, be it longer essays, photos or illustrations, but, to be honest, my budget is always very modest.

The hard truth is that most indie publications rely on a lot of favours by a lot of generous people. Virtually every publisher I talk to tells me that they wish they were in a position that allows them to pay everyone fully and fairly. The reality is that — bar a few exceptions — small-scale indie publishing does not make a lot of money, and that is reflected in the fees paid to everyone involved in the making of an issue. While most of us try to offer something, it hardly ever is the full rate that contributors would charge larger clients. Due to the abundance of content online, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing one’s work in print, and this up-valuing of the medium makes some contributors look past the financial return and work with the meagre budgets of the indie publishing world. If you’re uncomfortable with asking people for favours, indie print publishing is probably not your cup of tea.

Production

There are so many stressors in making magazines the last thing you want is to lose sleep over the production once the files are out of your hand. That’s why finding a reliable, trustworthy printer is crucial. Having said that, no production will ever go 100% perfect. There are always minor issues and delays, at least that’s been my experience so far. More on picking a printer below, but let’s first look at the different elements of a quote and how they impact the cost of printing.

Type of printing

If you print anything less than, say, 500 copies, offset printing might be too expensive for you (or printers simply won’t be interested). In that case you may want to look at digital/on-demand printing. Digital printing is an entirely different beast which I’m not very familiar with.

Amount of colours

In most cases an offset print job is using four colours (CMYK), sometimes five and very rarely six (so-called spot colours). Obviously, the more colours the more expensive, although there generally aren’t any big cost savings in printing with fewer than four colours, unless of course it’s just black.

Amount of copies

The higher the print run the lower the per-item cost. A lot of indies start with 1000–2000 copies. I started with 3000 for my first issue, but it did take me more than a year to sell them all. If your magazine is fairly timeless, having a large back issue catalogue is a great way to increase your cash flow further down the line. Almost every second order I get includes back issues, so you definitely don’t want to sell out within the first week. Only after having produced a few issues will you have enough sales data to figure out what number is about right (and hopefully it’s increasing too). But even then, some issues will always sell better than others.

Format

There are no rules as to what shape or format your magazine should have. Your publication can be as small as a postcard or as large as a newspaper. There are some important considerations when choosing the ideal size. First and foremost, you should go with what you personally like and what you think your readers will appreciate. Publishing a travel journal that people read on the road in a newspaper-sized format might not be the best idea, but then again, maybe it is!?

When discussing the paper stock with your printer (see below), they’ll be able to tell you what sheet sizes are available for the stock you’re interested in. Some paper types only come in ‘standard’ sizes, some can be ordered in irregular sizes. Up to issue 15, Offscreen used a custom sheet size, which meant that my printer had to order it in four to six weeks in advance and purchase a bulk amount, enough for at least two issues. The sheet size is important because it will determine how many pages/spreads of your magazine the printer can fit on one sheet. There is always a chance that changing your format by a few millimetres means more pages can be printed on one sheet, reducing the amount of paper necessary and thereby reducing the total cost.

The final size and weight of the finished magazine can have a huge impact on shipping costs. This is important to keep in mind and is often overlooked at this stage. More on that further below.

Page count

Closely related to the format/size of the magazine, you’ll have to determine how many pages you need to present your content. As a general rule – depending on the binding/cutting method used – it’s most economical and practical to calculate in eight- or sixteen-page steps. Therefore, producing a magazine with 96 (6 x 16) pages is more economical than producing one with 92 or 100 pages.

Binding

Most of today’s magazines use a glue-based binding technique called ‘perfect binding’. In terms of cost it sits somewhere in the middle between staple binding at the lower end and stitch binding on the higher one. Your printer can offer different options, but the default will most likely be ‘perfect bound’.

Paper choice

I love exploring paper types. It’s a huge topic to cover in its own right and I’ve had my fair share of good and bad experiences with the paper choices I’ve made in the past. Your printer will have access to many different stock types, ranging from cheap, standard xerox quality to really fine, luxuriously tactile paper. You’ll be surprised how many different types there are.

It’s helpful to just browse through some of your favourite magazines and pay attention to the paper they use. If the colophon doesn’t make a note of it, email the publisher and ask if they can share the name of the paper stock and its manufacturer. Note that the availability of certain types of paper is limited depending on your location. It’s also quite common that the names of a specific paper changes if you request it through a different wholesaler. Your printer can help. Don’t be shy to ask for samples.

Personally, as someone who is always concerned about the environmental impact of printed media, I spent a few days researching the benefits of using 100% recycled paper. There are pros and cons, but I eventually found a manufacturer who has a really unique and transparent approach to their recycling methods that makes me feel good about buying their products. I’ve been using their paper (called Envirotop in Germany) for eight issues and only changed to another great recycled paper with the release of issue 16.

Special finishes/add ons

You can go crazy with special finishes like embossing, varnishes or die cutting, or adding things like a dust jacket to the magazine. Easiest to ask your printer for what options are available. It’s tempting to go overboard with special finishes (if you can afford them). I personally always preferred a rather conservative application of them because they can quickly turn your magazine into a novelty item.

Location of your printer

In today’s interconnected world we don’t have to print where we design the magazine. In fact, I edit and design the magazine in Melbourne, Australia, and print it half way around the world in Berlin, Germany. There are several reasons for this: cost, quality, logistics.

Australia is a very expensive country. As much as I like to support local businesses, it’s just not feasible to print Offscreen here. Based on a few quotes I received from Aussie printers, the final cost was between 15–50% more expensive than their German counterparts. Also, Germany has a long history of printing and making printers. They are known for being very reliable. The competition is high, so the quality is good and the prices are decent. Added benefit: I speak German.

However, the most important reason for choosing Berlin as my place of production was a logistical one. I knew that most of my copies would be sent straight to readers around the world. That meant that I had to find a place that offers affordable international shipping. Australia is not one of those places. More about that further below.

One other aspect to keep in mind if you print outside of your country: currency fluctuations. If you pay your printer in a different currency than your own, the production cost will be going up and down over time. This can work for and against you, obviously.

Distribution

When it comes to getting your magazine to your readers, there are mainly two ways of doing that: you self-distribute your magazine, meaning you do all the shipping, or you use a distribution company that gets your magazine stocked in retail outlets. Most indies use a mix of both methods.

Self-Distribution

Self-Distribution basically means that you are responsible for getting the magazine to your readers. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to convert your bedroom to a warehouse, although that is often the inevitable side effect. Since I print Offscreen in Germany (and live in Australia) my stock is managed by a third-party fulfilment company based in Berlin. They warehouse my entire back catalogue and send out orders once a week. More on that below.

Before we talk about logistics, the bigger question here is: how do you reach your customers? How do you get them to buy your magazine? If not through retail outlets, then online is your best option. The great thing about selling directly to your reader is that you can keep close to 100% of the profit.

When it comes to taking and managing online orders, there are lots of options. You can go with a standard website package, like Squarespace, Shopify, Big Cartel, Wordpress and the likes. All of them offer fairly affordable and straightforward shopping cart solutions. While selling single magazines can be easily done through these apps, when it comes to magazine subscriptions it gets a bit trickier. Most indies still rely on a spreadsheet to keep track of who ordered what and when. There are some available tools that could help you with subscription management, but I haven’t tried them.

For Offscreen, I created a custom order management system that runs in the background of my website. It allows me to easily manage all orders, including subscriptions and pre-orders, and it gives me a simple interface to export weekly orders ready to be processed by my shipper in Berlin. Developing that system with the help of a developer wasn’t easy nor cheap, but it makes my life so much easier now, it’s worth considering the investment in a custom solution that fits your requirements.

Shipping copies to readers

Ask anyone who sells physical products and they will tell you that one of the biggest challenges is getting the product from A to B. Shipping is hard.

When it comes to shipping, there are two main things to consider: postage and packaging.

Postage depends on the size and the weight (and the speed of shipment, but let’s assume we’re going with the default). Unless your magazine is a hefty 2.5kg monster, it will most likely still be categorised as a ‘letter’ by your postal service. It’s super important to know the pricing tiers of your local postal service. In Germany, the upper tiers for letters are: up to 250g, 500g, 1kg, 1.5kg, 2kg. This means you can send a magazine of up to 2kg and it’s still technically considered a letter! Why is that important? Because sending a letter is much cheaper than sending a parcel. It’s also crucially important to keep these postage tiers in mind when determining your magazine’s format.

If your product ends up weighing 510g you will have to pay the 1Kg postage tier. That means shipping will be twice as much compared to a magazine that is perhaps 1cm smaller in size and only ways 480g. Don’t forget to add the weight of the packaging though! If your $10 magazine costs $15 in shipping to get it to your readers’ doorstep, people will think twice about ordering it online. As you can see, the dimensions and the page count of your magazine can make or break the entire project.

Obviously the type of packaging you choose matters too. The goal is to find an affordable packaging solution that is light in weight, offers good protection, and ideally doesn’t cost the earth either. Shipping envelopes are often sold in bulk quantities and you’ll find that buying them in packs of 100 or more provides steep discounts! If you go with a fulfilment company, like I do, they will usually provide your ideal packaging solution.

Besides the cost of printing, shipping will be your biggest expense. So it’s important to think carefully about where you produce and ship your magazine from. Being based in Berlin makes Offscreen a viable business, because printing and shipping costs are relatively low. I couldn’t do it from Australia. To show you what I mean: sending one copy of Offscreen from Melbourne to Berlin using the Australian postal service would cost around US$13.00. Going the same distance, but the other way around using German Post costs US$4.20 (both amounts are pure postage costs). I have no bloody idea how this discrepancy can be, but that’s the sad reality of global logistics.

Supplying stock to shops

Besides sending individual copies to your readers, you can also approach specific shops that you think should stock your magazine. Many of them won’t reply, some of them will require you to use a distributor (see below), but some will be happy to take you on on a trial basis and deal with you directly.

The usual deal is a 60/40 cut (you keep 60% of the cover price, they keep 40%). You are usually expected to cover shipping costs. This means you will be sending boxes of your magazine around the country/world and you’ll quickly realise how expensive that is!

After some shipments that went missing or were badly damaged using standard postal services, I now send all of my boxes with FedEx. This is more expensive, but it comes with good tracking and they usually arrive safely after just a few days. Courier services like UPS, FedEx, DHL and the likes offer steep volume discounts that you won’t have access to if you only send the occasional parcel. It’s worth considering using a fulfilment company to get access to their discounted rates if you ship a lot of boxes.

Using distributors

Bigger publishers usually work with middlemen (called distributors) to get their magazines in as many retail outlets as possible. Publishers enter into a contractual agreement with the distributor that define the terms of that relationship. A standard agreement often includes a 40/40/20 cut of the price of the magazine, meaning of every copy sold the publisher and retailer keeps 40% (each) and the distributor takes a 20% cut. These contracts are often exclusive, meaning that you can’t use another distributor in that same region. Once the publisher hands over the copies to the distributor, the distributor does the rest: distribution to his network of shops, invoicing the retailers, promoting the magazine, taking back unsold returns, etc. It’s not unusual to work with several distributors to cover different regions in the world. I have a distributor for the UK and a different one for the US, for instance.

In theory, distributors are great. They work on a commission basis, so you don’t have any upfront costs (there are exceptions). They can get your magazine into a lot of shops that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. However, you don’t need to be a genius at maths to realise that you are also ‘missing’ out on up to 60% of the price you charge for your magazine. Depending on your business model that might work just fine. However, most indie titles rely on the (fairly high) cover price to be sustainable, and so working with distributors might not always be your best option – unless, of course, the distributor can really drive up sales significantly.

Based on my own experience, most distributors that I worked with are struggling to understand the dynamics of indie publishing. And I don’t really blame them! Their business model is based on a much larger volume of high-frequency mainstream titles, most of which are slowly disappearing. In an industry where margins are very low (and getting smaller) you can’t really expect great customer service. As an indie publisher with a print-run of just a few thousand copies, you’re not generating enough revenue to be all that important to distributors. The result is that you’re often dealing with long, overly complicated contracts, outdated reporting methods, slow communication, and delayed pay-outs. Since distributors always want to push sales (good!) they’re usually quite generous with the amount of copies they order from publishers. With a sell-through rate (actual amount of copies sold in the shops) that is often in the 50% region, you can expect to see half of the copies you send to distributors being destroyed as unsold. If you’re only printing 3000 copies, that’s a lot of your babies being pulped.

As an indie publisher it’s easy to be frustrated with the current state of magazine distribution. We’re too small to be able to make demands and too important to them to simply ignore us. I empathise with the difficult position they are in, though. It’s a volatile market with tiny margins. No doubt, shipping so many different items around the world is no easy job either. The reality is that sales through my own website generate a lot more revenue than what comes in through my distributors. Having said that, it’s difficult to know how many people first discover Offscreen through their local shops. Besides, it’s just lovely to see people in various corners of the world stumbling across my magazine in shops I haven’t even heard of. And that’s one of the main reasons for me to continue to work with distributors. The web remains my best sales tool, but that feeling of walking into a shop and discovering and falling in love with a beautiful magazine that speaks directly to you is part of what makes tangible products so great.

Marketing

How to find new customers the biggest challenge of every business. I won’t go into traditional marketing techniques here, mostly because I’m not familiar with them and also because there are literally thousands of books, websites, podcasts, etc. that cover this topic extensively. I do want to make a few points though:

Indie publications have always been respectable authorities in their niche. The clearer you define your audience and your niche, the easier it will be to stand out from the crowd and find a supportive, loyal community that is looking for a voice. By establishing who your reader is (and is not), you can tailor your voice/language accordingly.

Another exercise you should do before spending any money on promoting your magazine is to make a list of what you want your brand to stand for. Create purpose page that you can refer to for all big decision. All of your sales efforts (from design to marketing copy) should be in line with those values.

Website

Coming from the web design world, I strongly believe that print and digital can not just co-exist, but help each other thrive. In order to get there, we need to be mindful of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium.

The goal of any brand is to reach as many of their customers directly, without any middlemen or gatekeepers. That’s why the web is the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal. A well-designed, responsive, user-friendly website is therefore imperative. If you don’t feel confident in your abilities to design or create a decent online experience, invest in getting help – not just in building a site, but in how to create and nurture an online community.

I mentioned several website builder tools in the section above. They offer simple ways of creating a website and selling a product. Once your site is up and operational, your main focus will be to get the attention of the people in your niche, and you can achieve that through various techniques…

Online Content/Content Marketing

Regularly creating fresh content for your website will attract new visitors, some of which you can hopefully convert to paying readers of your magazine. Many magazines choose to digitally (pre/re)release some of the content published in the magazine. Others create exclusive online content and sometimes refer/cross-promote to their magazine for extended coverage of the story.

I’ve chosen not to publish additional content digitally, and instead created this blog that has become a sort of personal diary of my life as an indie publisher. I publish insights, experiences, and thought pieces on making a small indie magazine. I also publish a weekly newsletter that helps me stay in touch with readers in between issues.

All of the above (and indeed this very post) are different types of content marketing that can generate traffic and hopefully translate into magazine sales down the line. But beyond that, again, it’s a great way to establish yourself/your brand as an authority in a certain field. Frequent blogging, being open about what’s happening behind the scenes, and actively seeking a dialogue with your readers online helps to stay in touch with them in between issues.

Social Media

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a love-hate relationship with social media. Much has been said about its effectiveness (or lack thereof). Here are my two cents:

While it’s worth being on all the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram being the main three in Western countries), I think it’s important to focus on one or two that you think will work best for your audience. In Offscreen’s case that’s Twitter. I also enjoy Instagram a lot, but it’s difficult to promote external content and elicit action on the behalf of your followers. Personally, I’ve lost all faith in Facebook as a tool for brands. It has no meaningful impact unless you pay to get in front of your followers, which, in my opinion, destroys the idea of creating a genuine dialogue with your fans.

I follow many brands online myself, but unless I have the feeling that there is a well-meaning human being on the other end, I instantly unfollow them. The last thing I need is more thoughtless, corporate marketing messages raining down on me. With that in mind I communicate with my own customers accordingly: respecting their time/attention goes a long way. You therefore won’t find me rehashing the same queued-up marketing message several times.

While social media can have a huge impact on your sales with close to no costs involved, I think we overrate the significance of large follower/like numbers. I’d take 1000 loyal fans over 100,000 unenthusiastic followers any day.

Surprisingly, a much older medium than social media is a lot more effective at generating sales for me…

Email Marketing

With social media stealing the spotlight, email has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the last few years. But no matter how boring or old-fashioned it seems, email is still the most powerful marketing tool for most online businesses. Engagement rates are usually much higher. And receiving a personalised email just feels a lot more intimate than skimming through a never-ending stream of social media soundbites.

Collecting your customers’ email addresses should therefore be on top of your list. Sign up for a tool like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor and start gathering your customers’ details even before your full website is up.

When it comes to sending out newsletters, similar rules to the use of social media apply: respect the time of your customers. Don’t feel pressured to send out emails on a regular basis. Only send out an update when you actually have something to say.

I usually send out an email between two issues to update my readers on what I’ve been up to, and then another one when the newest issue has been released. I use MailChimp’s API to link my customer records to my subscriber list. This way I can customise my emails and show each customer whether they are currently still subscribed. I also include a link to their order history page, where they can update their shipping address if they have moved in between issues.

In my own experience, email trumps any other form of marketing. I send out a newsletter to my readers and within minutes orders are flying in. It’s worth investing time and money in building a reliable email template that looks good (on all devices!) and converts well.

Sending out review copies

Initially I was very hesitant to send out free copies for review purposes, but as my back issue catalogue was increasing it felt less ‘painful’ to part with unpaid copies. I still don’t make enough efforts to approach blogs, magazines, and media companies to review Offscreen, but when they request a copy these days I happily comply. Any sort of media coverage is usually welcome (and it’s always been positive so far).

I also offer small amounts of free copies to organisers of web/tech/design conferences, usually 15–30 copies (some of them chip in with shipping costs) that they can use any way they like — as part of a give-away during ticket sales or as prizes during the event. This is a simple and cost-effective way to get the word out and surprise a few event-goers with a nice gift to take home.
My home office in Melbourne.

Making Money

Cover price

Pricing any product is tricky. There are lots of resources online that discuss various pricing strategies. It’s worth doing a bit of research, but in the end, your cover price needs to make what you do sustainable while not shutting out your core readers. Most indie titles are priced somewhere between $10 and $30, and I think most magazine aficionados are willing to spend around that much for a product they appreciate.

The perception of quality and ‘bang for bucks’ obviously plays into readers’ willingness to open their wallets. Offscreen is a small-format magazine and so spending $20 on Offscreen seems expensive compared to larger format titles with a heavier stock. Of course, the size doesn’t say anything about the quality of the content, but it’s worth considering how the perception of quality impacts the price people are willing to pay.

When selling your magazine on your own website, it’s pretty common to add shipping costs at the end of the checkout process. Keep in mind that this will deter some people from buying the magazine directly from you. It still fascinates me to what length some people are willing to go in order to avoid $5 in shipping charges. If your shipping cost structure is relatively flat, you might want to consider incorporating the shipping costs into the RRP (Recommended Retail Price), which is what I have done with Offscreen. Rather than offering a RRP of $18 and adding $5 in shipping cost on my own website, I priced Offscreen at $20 across the board and included shipping to anywhere in the world into the RRP. This way the magazine costs (technically) the same anywhere in the world, whether you buy it from me or from the shop around the corner.

Subscription price

Pricing subscriptions is another challenge. Especially in the US, magazine readers are used to ridiculously steep discounts for subscribing to a magazine (“Get a free lawn mower with your Times subscription!”). Obviously that’s not feasible for indie mags. Since issue 16 I introduced a new subscription model that automatically charges subscribers per released issue, rather than asking for a big lump sum upfront, which is still the standard method.

Advertising/Sponsoring

Open any magazine found on a typical newsstand and you’re likely having to flick through 20 pages of advertising before the ‘real content’ begins. For readers, the ad pages are usually considered a necessary evil. For publishers, however, those are the pages that make or break their entire business.

A classic magazine offers a range of different ad formats, placements and sizes that determine the price for the advertiser. Those prices are usually hidden away in some ambiguous media kit with bloated circulation numbers and made-up market research figures. Just like in the digital advertising space, large companies employ ad agencies to manage their ‘media buying’ (that word!). Those ad agencies negotiate the actual rates with the publisher because everyone knows that the rates advertised in media kits are inflated and unrealistic.

That’s my own perception of the state of advertising in printed media. As you can tell, I’m not a fan.

Indie publishers tend to have strong ideals which don’t always mix with advertising dollars. That’s the general assumption. However, I’m not categorically against advertising. I believe readers generally don’t mind advertising if it doesn’t devalue the reading experience. And I believe that not all advertising has to be evil. It’s a matter of picking advertisers that largely align with your own values.

The challenge is to find a way to bring your advertisers’ message across in a subtle, yet effective way while respecting the time and attention of your readers. Offscreen is trying to solve this by replacing ads with sponsors. The goal is to find organisations that understand the value of community building and that allow the freedom to weigh in on the artwork and messaging that goes into the ad pages.

When I tried to find sponsors for issue one I reached out to companies that, above all else, I personally liked and respected and thought were accessible (and small) enough to reply to my emails. Having nothing to show for, I explained my ambitious plan for a new magazine and asked for a very low ‘trial’ sponsorship fee (I believe it was $400). That fee obviously grew with every issue as the magazine became more popular and the circulation number increased.

When I now approach companies (and all of them are non-traditional, digital product companies) about sponsoring an issue I’m upfront about the fact that advertising in print works very differently to advertising in digital. Sponsoring an issue of Offscreen gives companies a chance to capture the attention of a very thoughtful, creative group of web workers through a medium that’s removed from the fast-paced, low-attention-span screen environment. Because of this, over the last 14 issues, Offscreen has become a trusted brand in its own right, and my sponsors are paying to be associated with that brand and what it stands for (see ‘values’ above).

There are pros and cons to the sponsorship model. I understand that this approach doesn’t work in all industries and with all advertisers. Fashion publishing, for instance, runs on wildly different rules and, weirdly, many people buy fashion magazines because and not despite of the ads. Unless you have good connections, I think in most industries only ad agencies will give you access to certain larger, more affluent advertisers.

Decide early on how crucial the money that’s coming in through advertising is to your overall business strategy. If your goal is to sell the magazine cheaply (or even give it out for free), obviously a lot more time and effort would then go into finding valuable advertising partners. If your strategy is to only pay for the printing costs through a couple of ads in the magazine, this should give you more time to focus on other efforts to make a profit. If you go ad-free, you’ll rely entirely on the cover price and related efforts (see below) to make it all sustainable.

My own strategy has been (and still is) to cover not just the printing but the entire production of the magazine through my sponsors. This includes fees for writers, photographers, and illustrators, the cost of proofreading and editing, the software I use, and everything else that goes into the making of one issue. This way, when the printer delivers the magazine, it’s completely paid for and I know that with every issue I sell I make a profit, and for every issue I give out for free I won’t lose money. It’s a very simple approach that has worked well for me this far. As you can tell, it’s important to figure out the true cost of each issue when establishing your sponsorship/ad fees.

Other income sources

At a recent conference I attended it was said that indie publishers shouldn’t consider themselves as just makers of a magazine. They should consider themselves media companies, meaning that sustainability can be found in a ‘multi media’ approach where one channel supports the other and vice versa.

Many publishers generate money through an agency business (creative client services) and use some of the profits to build and grow the magazine they make on the side. Or, a magazine could hold regular events that could entice advertisers to spend more money on an advertising partnership. We see a lot of magazines extend their product range, like Kinfolk going into clothing or Cereal offering travel guides and other items. If you manage to build a lively online community, there might be ways to monetise your digital audience too.

Many of us get excited about the prospect of producing our own magazine. We immediately jump at the challenge from a creative perspective and often worry about the monetary side of things later. I hope this post helps you in understanding all the different aspects that go into creating a sustainable magazine that survives beyond issue 1 or 2.

For more info on how to get started with magazine publishing, please check out to this blog post which covers the most important resources for magazine newbies. Feel free to send in feedback, corrections and additions if you have any.

I also recommend you check out Heftwerk, a Berlin-based network of services that aims to make indie print publishing a lot easier (I’m co-founder).

Lastly, I’d be a horrible salesman if I didn’t mention that you can show your appreciation for the many hours of work that went into writing this article by buying a copy of Offscreen and sharing this link.

Dear Kai,

I would like to say ‘thank you’ for the amazing work you have been producing throughout the Offscreen journey. About a year ago, out of frustration, I had decided to give up my PhD programme, but browsing again many of the fascinating human stories in past Offscreen issues was one of the factors that convinced me not to quit and keep going. (The main factor was the that my parents offered to move across Europe for a few months to live closer to my wife, myself and our little daughter and help us take care of the little one so I would focus on my research and writing – showing yet again that basic human support is vital for much of what we do in life).

My dissertation is about stories and struggles of common web users and hackers who try to take back control of internet technologies from big web companies and governments, and who lovingly (and with heartbreaking dedication, given the disparity of powers at play) hack on stuff that adds humanity back into technology. Although this is largely based on my own ethnographic fieldwork, I have drawn incredible inspiration from many of the stories found in my collection of Offscreen magazines – one of the most cherished sections of our bookshelves at home.

I’m now very close to submitting my dissertation – just one month left for final polishing and endless, clenching doubts about how it will be judged by my examiners. But whatever happens, even in the gloomiest scenario of a fail, I’m delighted and proud of what I accomplished this past year, having seen a whole book come to life page by page, day after day from what wasn’t much more than a bunch of random notes and disconnected thoughts just over one year ago. And throughout this journey I felt so much love for the stories of dedication I came across through my own interviews, through the stories in Offscreen, and the many blog posts and inspirational talks by hackers and web folks who increasingly speak out about what makes this work so important for a democratic and open internet.

Your blog posts about the behind-the-scenes of Offscreen and sharing your own fears and doubts have also been important both for my research (some of your thoughts on gender imbalance are cited in my dissertation!) and for my efforts to grow a tiny web agency I started with a dear friend of mine.

Thanks, Kai!

Best,
Andrea

Magically these appreciation bombs drop into my inbox whenever I need to hear something positive. There is nothing more I love about my job. Thank you, Andrea!

In today’s brave new world where our privacy has become a commodity and tweets can topple governments, it only takes a quick look at the news to realise that geeks rule the world — and I don’t mean that in a melodramatic or self-aggrandising way. The people behind bits and pixels find themselves in a unique place of power.

With the ability to influence millions if not billions of people, we’re facing some difficult questions about the impact and relevance of our work, the role of money, and how both correlate. In the era of Big Data, we are in the challenging position of bringing governments, corporations, and the public onto the same page, so all can work towards a common goal rather than against each other. All the while, we slowly come to terms with the good and bad of a lifestyle that is measurable, marketable, and hackable.

Listening to mainstream media or the average dinner table conversation, it’s easy to get sucked into a trend of scepticism about the web. You don’t have to be of any conservative affiliation to feel wary of ‘the next big thing’. For many of my friends, much of the web has turned into a place that’s made up of fluffy articles and stalking banner ads with the sole purpose of filling investor pockets before our data is gobbled up by freshly IPO’ed tech giants.

Has the web failed us? Have we failed the web?

What’s missing in these bleak assumptions is the realisation that the underlying values of the web permeate through all aspects of modern life. Beyond the sensationalised headlines of overnight billionaires and self-righteous hackers, you’ll still find a community that cares deeply about helping one another.

How else can we explain the altruistic principles of open-source software which in one way or another lie at the basis of almost every interface? It’s an ethos that lives as much in forum threads and shared repositories, as it does in the many conferences, hackathons and co-working spaces around the globe. It’s the ripple effects of our ‘sharing is caring’ culture that cause upheaval in established industries. No startup could exist without them.

Even though as an editor/publisher I’m now coming to terms with the slow-moving wheels of the publishing and print industries, I still feel as much part of the web as ever before. That’s because the real web is not return-on-investment or shareholder value, nor is it follower numbers or the latest shiny gadget.

The web is a mindset — a way of doing things. It’s collaboration and openness. It’s inclusiveness and non-hierarchy. It’s figuring stuff out, being creative and breaking some rules along the way. It’s constant reimagening of the status quo with no need for permission to get involved.

The web has forever changed the way we think about each other. That’s the web I’m part of. And it’s the web Offscreen wants you to see.

Kai Brach

Raindrop
I'm using Raindrop to save stuff I come across online during the week and want to feature in the magazine or Dense Discovery.

Harvest
The invoicing software I use it to invoice stockists, sponsors, and occasional consulting clients.

Google Drive
Google Docs has been indispensable for me since starting Offscreen. I create around 30 separate documents (one for each contributor) with every issue. Its collaboration and editing features make working with others on content simultaneously a breeze. My goal is to move away from goal, but weening myself off G Drive has been difficult.

Gmail
I made the switch to using Gmail in my browser (Chrome) many years ago and still find it the most productive way to use email! (I have a paid account with Google, so no ads, more storage, custom domain name, etc.) As mentioned above, the ultimate goal is to also move my email account away from Google.

Receipt Bank
My book-keeping app. I can either forward email receipts or upload photos of paper receipts (through my iPhone) and it does all the categorising, finding total amounts, tax, etc automatically. All I need to do is to export a spreadsheet at the end of the quarter and send it to my accountant.

Dropshare
I use this little tool every day. It lives in my menu bar and I can drag’n drop anything onto its icon to either create a short-URL, upload a file or take a screenshot, and then make it available online. It’s been a super handy companion.

1Password
I have no idea how I’d survive the login mayhem without my trusty 1Password app. It stores all my secret words, and therefore it’s probably the most important piece of software on this machine.

Pocket
Oh yes, online content overwhelms me too. There is just too much I want to read, watch, listen to… I don’t get to read all the things I add to my Pocket app, but especially on long flights, I really enjoy catching up on interesting reads I’ve stored here.

MailChimp
Campaign Monitor was my go-to tool for email marketing, until I changed over to MailChimp. I like both of them equally and both have been big supporters of Offscreen. I decided to go with MailChimp because their creative branding/marketing suits Offscreen a bit better. For my weekly newsletter Dense Discovery I use the much more affordable Mailblast.

Adobe Suite
With Typekit, Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom and even occasionally Bridge, I do use a lot of Adobe products for the design of the magazine. It’s easy to criticise them for making software that crashes often, but when I’m in the depth of a project, I realise again and again that these tools are immensely powerful and have matured a lot over the last decade or so.

Dropbox
Puts my files online.

Podio
Podio is an extremely versatile project management software. You can essentially build your own app setup and connect lots of different interfaces. It seemed overwhelming at first, but turned out to be exactly what I was looking for in order to build a searchable/filterable database of potential contributors for future issues.

TunnelBear
I work from a lot of cafes, so a good VPN is important. I love TunnelBear because it’s so simple to use.

Arq
I back up my data to a hard drive with Time Machine and then use Arq to push an additional backup to my Dropbox account.

Atom + CodeKit + Github + MAMP + Transmit
My tools for working on the Offscreen website.

Jumpcut
Simple copy-and-paste tool that allows me to have a plain-text clipboard history.

aText
My go-to text replacement tool. I use this to create shortcuts for everything like shipping addresses, emojis, often-used URLs, standard replies, etc.

Fantastical
A little calendar menu app for quick access of my calendar. I use it for lack of decent alternatives. There are a few design issues that still confuse me after years of using it.

RightFont
Recently bought this font manager to manage my growing font library. It's a little slow sometimes, but very reliable. Would buy again!

Clocks
Another mini app that lives in my menu bar and allows me to check and calculate global times/timezones. Handy when working with contributors from all sorts of places.

Screeny
I don’t record a lot of screencasts, but when I do, Drew Wilson’s little app never lets me down!

While I think Gary and his attitude do not deserve more of my (or anyone’s) attention, it made me think about how ‘political’ a thing like Offscreen can or should become. (It’s depressing enough to think that humility and compassion is now a partisan issue.)

In my talks and here on the blog, I’ve long been promoting a more personal approach to our work. I believe that we can make better products and create stronger relationships with the people who buy/use these products if we build some of our ideology right into what we make. Thanks in part to the internet, we have the unique opportunity to put ‘corporate professionalism’ behind us and instead put our moral beliefs front and center.

I’m reminded of this excellent piece by Elizabeth Farrelly in which she describes how professionalism has become this destructive myth forcing us to leave our conscience at home.

Professionalism, which most of us were brought up to admire, implies compartmentalisation. It used to mean something good and noble; leaving petty emotions at home, taking your higher self to work, thinking beyond mere profit, doing good, committing to altruism. Now, it means almost the opposite.

Where ‘professional’ once meant 'bound to higher truths’, it now denotes payment. Professional dancers, politicians, footballers are those who do it for money. What this indicates is professionalism’s slide down the moral razor. Now what we leave at home is not petty emotion but conscience. (…)

Out there, in just-nuke-it profit land, those glimmerings of deeper knowledge – human wellbeing, nature’s dignity and how these twist together into spiritual value – are easily derided. Out there only the measurable matters.

For the next issue (spoiler alert!) I’ve been interviewing Yancey Strickler, the co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter. It’s a company I hugely admire not just for their immense success, but for how they managed to stay true to their early beliefs. Yancey talks about how idealism drives them:

We think that idealism is incredibly important. We tend to view idealism as being naïve, but maybe that’s exactly why it’s so important. What we sought to do with our mission and philosophy is lock in that idealism from the very beginning to ensure that it’s always a part of who we are. I think there is a certain magic in that.

Every big company once started as a small one, and while it’s not the case for all, many of them lost their soul or their meaning somewhere along the way. How often do we see people reminisce about their younger selves asking, “Remember when we cared about these things?”

Obviously, Kickstarter operate on a much different scale than Offscreen. But no matter how big or small, we all frequently face crossroads where we get to choose between following our conscience or succumbing to the lure of ‘professionalism’.

With Offscreen, I feel extremely lucky and privileged to be given a voice, to be able to provoke people’s thoughts on a particular subject in the hope that it instils just a little bit more empathy and humanity in them. And in the same vein, I hope that small acts of kindness towards people in need remind us of what it means to be human in a fairly dehumanising industry.

If you disagree and would rather not support me in doing so, email me and I will cancel and refund any order on your subscription that hasn’t shipped yet.

To Gary: I’m saddened that you have such strong feelings against people who are fleeing war. Let’s hope you never end up in a situation in which your life depends on the compassion of others. But just in case, I made another donation to the Australian Red Cross’ refugee efforts in your name.

Update: You guys never stop to amaze me. Since I made this public, many of you made further donations in the name of Gary. If only he knew...

Hi Kai,
hope you had a great weekend and an awesome day so far! I wanted to drop you a message to say one thing. Thank you!

Lately I have been struggling a lot with anxiety and depression. The everyday life in running a company is not always easy and the temptation of giving up is, sometimes, really strong. The last couple of weeks have been awful. Even just waking up, coming out of bed and drag myself to the office. This is not what I wanted from life. This is not what the people I look up to do.

During these pretty bad weeks a thing kept me afloat. Reading Offscreen.

Your magazine has been one of my favourite readings since I discovered it a couple of years ago. This week it was my safety net. A window to a world to look up to and get inspired from. Your articles and interviews boosted my morale and gave me the motivation to pick up the pieces and start taking care of myself again.

The stories of success you tell are always realistic, they show the struggle to get there, they show that a mindset oriented to excellence pays off. This was super important for me. Calmed down my anxiety and gave me the strength to get back to my fights.

I just wanted to thank you. To tell you that you are making a difference in my life. A positive one. A massively positive one.

I am gonna buy the issue 13 today (I am catching up, sorry). Can’t wait for it.

I can imagine it’s hard work to run the magazine, but please do keep it up! You have something amazing in your hands. You are showing a good example to a lot of readers like me. Hopefully, some of us will be talented enough to make a difference in this world and it will be because of you.

Sorry for the super long mail. I never write this kind of fan boy emails, but this time it was important to me.

If you’ll ever need a hand with something, with the magazine or other projects, feel free to get in touch. I’ll always owe you a big one.

Have a great rest of the day,
Simone

This. This is why I do what I do. All the best to you, Simone! And thanks for sharing this heartfelt message with me/us.

As it is Offscreen’s tradition with every issue published, I’ve just made another small donation to the Australian Conservation Foundation, one of Australia’s most important organisations for environmental protection work. I'll continue to support their work through regular contributions and my yearly membership fee.

Most magazine makers I talk to hesitate to add a personal touch to their own publication. “The magazine isn’t about me. It’s about [topic].” I felt the same way. It took me a few issues of Offscreen to be OK with printing a photo of my own mug next to my editor’s note. It took me longer to turn the About page of Offscreen’s website from a sterile descriptive paragraph into a personal pitch for my magazine, telling readers who I am and why I decided to start Offscreen. I originally intended my blog to be a place for complementary content to the magazine, but it was the first behind-the-scene post that got a lot of shares and encouraged me to write more about my own process. All the signals and feedback I received couldn’t be clearer: my readers wanted to know more about the backstory – the why and how of the magazine.

With an increasingly automated and software-driven lifestyle, giving a publication a human touch seemed like a welcome change. From heavily photoshopped magazine covers to scripted, hyperbolic TV shows – if today’s media feels out of touch with reality, it’s because it is. It’s virtually impossible to tell what’s authentic and what’s not. Add to that the fact that in our local communities, the old mom-and-pop shops are disappearing, replaced by faceless mega-chains that turn individuals into marketing personas. Everything around us tells us that being human means being ‘unprofessional’.

And so every time I’m asked what advice I have for fledgling indie publishers, I essentially rehash Trent’s blog post: give your readers a face they can relate to and a person they can talk to. Give them a reason to support not just a brand or a label, but the hard-working individual(s) behind it. Be proud of not being a corporation, but a creative indie project trying to build something sustainable. Instead of polished PR messages, give them the whole story – the good, the bad, and the ugly. And, importantly, give them credit for enabling you to do what you do. In short, make it personal.

Photo by Club Barber Shop

About a month prior to that I had confirmed an encouraging list of three women and three men, all of whom had assured me that they were interested and would be able to make time for an interview. All of my candidates seemed excited to be on the cover of a print magazine. But, of course, it didn’t take long for my hopes of finally getting a more balanced line-up to crumble.

When people drop out, they usually don’t email me with a clear “Sorry, I can’t do it!”. I understand that everyone is really busy. So part of my process is that I frequently I follow up via email and Twitter over several weeks, treading the fine line between reminding them of deadlines and being too pushy. Typically I get “I’m on it!” or “I will start this weekend!” responses until eventually they either send me a brief note (“Too busy after all, sorry!”) or they simply stop replying.

That’s the reality of doing long-form interviews over the internet. The line-up I had worked so hard on fell through once again. (In fact, there was a moment when it was unclear whether Ariel Waldman would be able to finish the interview, which would have meant that we’d be left with 100% dudes on the cover.) With more than half of my line-up not responding, I was already running late and getting really anxious about it all. You may remember my blog post about being stuck in The Swamp. Well, that was it.

Of course, after 11 issues I somewhat anticipated these problems so I already had a list of folks I contacted to ‘fill in’. But telling busy people that you want to do a 5000-word interview and an extensive photoshoot with them on short notice often results in nothing but a friendly 'maybe we can make it work for the next issue’. And so I frantically went through my contacts and my contacts’ contacts to find worthy replacements…

Putting together an issue of Offscreen means that I’m trying to simultaneously steer about 50 contributors and photographers towards a common deadline. During that intense six-week process of gathering, producing and editing content I have to make constant changes to the original list of contributors. And so when I finally emerged from that stressful and nerve-racking process in early August, I sadly realised that after all the dropouts and changes I had to make, diversity took another backseat. (In all fairness, while the cover is pretty 'white and male’, across the entire issue the ratio looks better: out of 30 contributors 17 are men and 13 are women).

–

The above is a long-winded way of saying ‘sorry I let you down’. I received a few tweets and emails since launching issue No12 that rightly pointed out the lack of diversity on the cover of Offscreen. No12 is not the only issue in which white guys took over the line-up. It happens more often than I like to admit. There are some issues where I managed to do better, like issue No9 and No10, but overall there is still much room for improvement.

I’ve talked about this problem in previous blog posts, but I wanted to summarise my thoughts here once again and hopefully get some more feedback and ideas from you, my readers.

“It’s almost always just white, successful dudes? What about women and ethnic diversity?”

I hope my little explainer on the process above showed that I really am trying hard. I don’t take this topic lightly. Every single issue I struggle filling even one interview slot with a woman. For some issues I had between two and four women lined up and ready to go, but – you guessed it – they all dropped out or stopped replying. Of course, being busy and dropping out is not unique to female contributors, but the scarcity of women in our industry makes finding a replacement on short notice that much more difficult.

Many of you have written to me with a list of names – folks that don’t fit the typical caucasian stereotype. I follow up an every suggestion. Many of those suggestions read like this: “You should check out XYZ, she’s doing some amazing design work for [company]!” or “XYZ just got funding for this cool app last week. You should interview her!” or “Have you seen this talk by XYZ? She’s the CTO at [company] and has lots of experience in scalability.”

Unfortunately, I’m not just after amazing designers or talented coders or well-funded entrepreneurs. There is a huge amount of talent out there, and everyone is doing crazy cool stuff. But what I’m after is a person with a very interesting and inspiring life story. People that have done a lot of different things and have insights and opinions that are uniquely inspiring – and, most importantly, they need to be able to express these opinions in an elegant and thoughtful way. Plus, their work needs to be related to the web and technology because that’s what Offscreen is all about. Once they fulfil all of these criteria, there is another big hurdle: they need to be accessible enough to actually do an interview with me and a shoot with a photographer, and reserve enough time to make it a great piece. The thing about interesting people is that they are often very busy.

When it comes to women in particular, I also get a lot of emails suggesting the same names over and over again. There are a few dozen women that have been interviewed numerous times on various blogs, in podcasts, and in business magazines. Unintentionally, they’ve become the idealised prototypes of 'successful women in tech’. Without taking anything away from their success, I just don’t want to reprint the same interview over and over again just for the sake of a better ratio. It seems to me that most of the media landscape is struggling with finding a fairer ratio, and so you see a lot of familiar faces pop up again and again.

Add to the above my own personal preference of the type of people/stories I want to feature in Offscreen. As an avid reader you will know that I value independent makers and projects that have the potential for positive impact on our lives. Sure, I occasionally feature projects that are just fun to hear about (like that beer-brewing robot or 3D-printed jewellery), but overall I like ideas that challenge the status quo in a meaningful way. I simply can’t get excited about projects in the fashion or beauty space, for instance. With the risk of falling in the prejudice trap, based on my own research and the many suggestions I get, there are a lot of female entrepreneurs (especially in the US) that try to innovate in these areas. Frankly, it’s just not what the magazine is about. Note that I’m not saying that all women work in fashion and beauty. I am saying there are a lot of tech success stories about women in those fields.

Lastly, I want to add that apart from emails reminding me of more women, I also get a lot of requests from people in non-English speaking countries that add to the complexity. “Why don’t you feature more people from France?”, “Hey, there are awesome apps being developed in Lithuania! Why are all these people in your magazine from the US and UK?!”, “You know, Asia has the internet too!” There are various reasons why featuring more non-native-English speakers is difficult. Most of them have to do with language barriers and fitting translations into the already tight schedule and budget. Also, finding a reliable photographer in places like Nairobi or Mumbai is harder than you think.

I also briefly want to address a specific question I received recently: “Why don’t you put more photos of women on your cover?” Choosing a cover photo is pretty tricky – especially if you don’t have a budget to specifically commission cover shoots. Once I have received all photos of our interviewees, there are usually 2-3 shots in total that can actually work on a cover. (I’m not going into details what works and what doesn’t, but it essentially comes down to having a great quality shot with the right angle, light, backdrop and facial expression. It’s not unusual for larger magazines to spend a whole day just shooting a cover photo, something I can’t afford and my interviewees can’t make time for.) Since I’ve so far always only had one female interviewee in the line-up, the chances of getting a great photo of her are slim. I worked with Helena Price for the shoot of Ariel Waldman in issue 12, and as Helena can attest I specifically pointed out that I’d love to feature Ariel on the cover. But as it often is the case, Ariel is a busy person and time was limited, so we only got a small selection of photos, none of which I thought would have made for a great cover. In the end, it purely comes down to 'getting lucky’ with the photoshoot. So obviously, if I manage to tackle the overall diversity problem, my covers should become more diverse too.

I just came back from XOXO in Portland and I was very impressed with the diversity there – amongst attendees and speakers. I said before that organising conferences and making a magazine share similar challenges when it comes to a diverse line-up. But there are also differences.

Doing an extensive interview about someone’s life story is different to giving an inspiring talk on making great comics or creating a lively Youtube audience. Many of my friends are public speakers and while I very much admire their work and their expertise in a particular field, I wouldn’t necessarily consider them for a long interview. Again, there is a difference between being talented and having an inspiring story to tell that spans personal and professional topics.

(XOXO definitely featured some people that fit the bill. I tried to introduced myself to many of them while I was there and will follow up with them soon. Fingers crossed!)

With issue No12, my budget finally allowed me to get some help with finding and organising contributors. My editorial assistant Ivana has already been very helpful and a big reminder to continue to work on improving diversity. However, I think after just one issue she’s also come to realise that it’s harder than it seems from the outside.

Finally, I want to be clear that I fully understand that the onus is on me to improve diversity. ‘Receiving bad suggestions’ is not an excuse. However, Offscreen is still pretty much a tiny one-man operation. In order to make this publication a sustainable full-time job for me, I need to at least release three issues per year. With the current process, this gives me around six weeks to gather content and conduct interviews. As I’ve hopefully shown, my heart is in the right place (really, I get it!), I just often struggle to make good on the promise. And to be honest, I have no idea whether I will succeed with issue No13. But you can be sure that I’ll continue to try my best…

If you do want to help (thank you!), here’s how: instead of a whole list of people, please think about just one amazing person who you think fits the following criteria:

• she/he has an interesting career and life with lots of unique insights and a great story to tell that would inspire our readers
• the web/technology is a crucial part of what she/he does
• she/he is accessible via email and is most likely able to make time for an extensive interview and photoshoot

If you know someone you think would inspire our readers through a long, intimate interview, please send over their name and any links that help me find out more about them (interviews, videos, podcasts, etc).

Feel free to also send any suggestions or feedback you have on the topic. Thanks for your support of Offscreen, despite its imperfections. :)

UPDATE: Since writing this post I’ve received a lot of emails. It seems easier to do a ‘reply-all’ through a brief update here...

I was told that some companies are only willing to sponsor events if x per cent of their speaker line-up is female. Apparently there are recruiting agencies that have specialised in placing women at companies where the workforce is at least x per cent female. To me (yes, as a guy) having these sorts of forced quotas in place seems kind of counter-productive. Nobody wants to feel that they were invited as a speaker or hired in a new job purely because of their gender or the colour of their skin. In both cases, the onus is on the event organiser and the employer to create an inclusive, welcoming environment.

Up until this post, I have never kept exact count of how many men vs. women or caucasian vs. people of colour I have in an issue. Of course, I always wanted to have a more balanced and more diverse pool of contributors, but to me it was never about hitting an exact target.

My biggest concern about Offscreen has always been that it (unintentionally) becomes a mouthpiece of Silicon Valley’s digital elite. No doubt, some of the most talented and forward-thinking people can be found in the larger San Francisco area, but it’s also a massive echo chamber that in many ways has lost touch to how the rest of the world functions. I truly admire some of the ideas and creativity coming out of Silicon Valley and, as my readers will know, I happily include many of them in Offscreen. However, I have always put a lot of effort into also covering stories that have nothing to do with what’s currently trending on TechCrunch.

The startup that 3D-prints orthotic braces for kids, an India-based organisation that helps the poor with setting up their first savings account through their mobile, or a non-profit that hopes to reform tech education across the UK putting an emphasis on kids with a migration background – these are stories of and about diversity. They are stories by people with many different backgrounds affecting all ethnicities and genders in many countries around the globe. I’d like to think that presenting these stories does more to promote diversity than simply adding two more women to my interview line-up in order to make Offscreen look more diverse. Can a powerful story about the lack of funding in education – told by a white guy – contribute more to this discussion than an interview with an award-winning female designer? If the goal of the diversity debate is to empower minority groups, I believe the message is often more important than the messenger.

With all that said, I totally understand that women and people of minority groups face many challenges in having their voices heard that others just don’t. And that’s why I think it’s important to make an extra effort to reach out to women and people in those minority groups and to provide a safe and inclusive environment for them to share their stories (which is one of my core values. I did and I will continue to do exactly that, as I’ve described above. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t yield more results, but it’s not because of a lack of trying. If it was just about a better ratio and if I didn’t mind pretending that all is well in the tech world, I would have had a very balanced line-up from issue no1.

magCulture
Probably the most popular and most established blog about everything magazine related. I admire Jeremy Leslie’s persistence and devotion to the subject matter. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram too.

Stack Magazines
Stack is a service that sends you a random indie magazine every month. The guy behind it, Steve Watson, is also extremely knowledgable about magazines and runs a very lively blog and Twitter account with lots of mag reviews and insightful interviews.

Magpile
An online community all about magazines. Create a digital database of your own physical mag collection, follow other mag lovers, buy or sell issues and generally discover great publications (maybe by their covers?. I love what Dan is doing with Magpile! Make sure to also check out his podcast MagHeroes for interviews with publishers and his new tool for managing subscriptions, Subsail.

Magazine Wall
A Tumblr with thousands of magazine covers.

The Publishing Playbook
Hüman After All is a London-based creative agency with a lot of publishing experience (having created titles like Little White Lies and more recently Weapons of Reason. They’ve launched numerous publications in the past and have compiled their experience in this open and free Google document that is collaboratively edited by lots of other folks in the publishing community. Definitely check this out if you’re thinking of starting a magazine!

Monocle’s The Stack
The Stack is a weekly podcast dedicated to the world of magazines, often hosted by Tyler Brûlé himself.

Lynda Video Tutorials
If you’re a total noob like I was and don’t even know how to use Indesign or how colour management works (who the hell knows!?), you can use an online video tutorial service like Lynda to learn the necessary basics.

Editorial Design Inspiration
I collect the occasional editorial design inspiration in this collection. Other great resources for editorial design are Designspiration and Behance. Though, the best inspiration comes from buying the actual magazines.

Heftwerk
Heftwerk is a network of Berlin-based services for magazine makers (printer and shipper, mostly) that I helped create. I use these services to print and ship my own magazine and because they’ve now done this with several indie titles the process is getting a lot smoother. Get in touch with them to get a quote, and if you don’t mind, please tell them that you heard of them through me.

Indie Publishing Club
This is a simple Facebook group I created to help indie publishers connect and share ideas/challenges. It’s a member-only thing, and for the sake of keeping the discussion on topic, I only give access to existing publishers of print titles. So once you’ve got a first issue, make sure to join us!

Last, but not least, a reminder to keep browsing. I've written down most of my successes and failures on this blog. They might save you some mistakes. Also highly recommended, my Medium post Indie Magonomics.

IndieCon has only happened twice, but it’s quickly become one of my favourite events of the year. Malte, Urs, Arne and all the friendly volunteers behind it have created something very special. They realised that there is no existing platform for this new wave of indie magazine makers to connect. IndieCon provides this platform in a smart, unpretentious way, while cheekily telling the larger media world to take note. It manages to briefly put the spotlight on the hidden creativity that can be found in small publishing projects. Thank you for putting on a great event, guys!

For me, it was the added Indie Mag Day on Sunday that made the event extra special. Set in an old, run-down warehouse, publishers and stockists presented hundreds of magazines – from small local zines to larger international titles. And what would have been an amazing event for being able to meet likeminded publishers alone, the massive turnout of curious readers, buyers and collectors made it all the more successful for everyone involved. There was an extremely positive vibe in the air: finally, a place for magazine aficionados to geek out!

Just like last year, I had many wonderful conversations throughout the weekend. I met a lot of smart, creative people and learned a few things about magazine making along the way. There were two points of discussion that came up several times – on and off stage – that I want to briefly comment on here:

The first has to do with substance. Some people – mostly journalists and publishers working for the more established/traditional media outlets – are still lamenting over independent magazines having no substance. They call them ‘pretty objects’ with nothing to say. Designers shouldn’t be in charge of making a magazine, they say. It seems that in their eyes every publication has to invoke some deep and meaningful socio-critical debate. It’s this view that was the main message of last year’s keynote by Oliver Gehrs, too.

Ok, look. While I personally think some indie mags do in fact make that statement on society, most indie mags do not claim to be journalistic masterpieces, nor do they want to critically analyse [insert big issue of our time]. Many of us really just want to explore a topic we feel ‘passionate’ about. We hope to be able to gather enough people around us that feel the same way and then connect through shared interests. Some people do that through an online forum, a Snapchat channel or a conference – we do it through a magazine.

Why are so many journalists and other literary folk convinced that their medium of choice deserves ‘more substance’? Most of us seem to be OK with magazines on fishing, golf, boating or gadgets being sold on newsstands (with no apparent reason to exist other than to serve their specific interest group). Yet, as soon as a small team of designers or travellers or food enthusiasts experiment with the printed format as an outlet for their interests and ideas, some call it overdesigned fluff.

The print industry, especially the more commercial side of it, is in the midst of a massive upheaval. I can understand that it feels threatened by us. But if I was a professional journalist, I’d be much more worried about the digital world depreciating my job than a bunch of indie magazine makers. So, can we move on from this debate, please?

The second thing I heard people voice their concerns about is the idea of commercial success and how money inevitably impacts editorial decisions.

Yes, there is obviously a moral debate about where advertising can and can’t go. It’s a debate that’s been going on forever. However, too often I hear publishers say that they ‘hope to figure out’ the commercial side of it all later, after they produced a couple of issues. While I can understand the self-sacrificing enthusiasm of my publisher comrades (been there!), one of the many challenges of making a magazine is to make a business case for it. If you don’t plan on making it financially viable somehow, there is little reason for making a magazine in the first place.

That’s why I’m slightly critical towards using Kickstarter as a way to fund new magazines. Because more important than the initial funding is a business plan or a commercial strategy (whatever you want to call it) that outlines how the mag is going to survive long enough to build a loyal, ongoing readership.

Let’s not forget that magazines and print publishing in general have always had a commercial element. It’s one of the many loose ends we need to figure out in publishing. The great thing is that, as indies, we don’t need to adhere to traditional business models. We can experiment, try out new ideas and explore new opportunities in order to, yes, make money from all the hard work we put in. So, don’t be shy to ask for money. Stop feeling dirty when talking about money. And most of all, don’t put off thinking about money until it’s too late.

By the way, by no means do I claim to have figured it all out! Making Offscreen viable is still a challenge, but from issue No1 I had a clear idea, a goal, of how I wanted to finance the magazine with the result that my current sponsorship model and a fairly high cover price seem to work – work well enough to make more issues and not starve to death doing so.

Clive Thompson must have seen it as a challenge. He committed to reading – purely on his mobile phone – one of the longest and hardest books out there: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which in its paperback form has no less than 1296 pages. He summarised his experience in this lengthy and insightful article that contains some really interesting observations around physical vs. digital books.

On distractions

I certainly wrestled with social distractions. Your phone is, as I’ve often joked, not really so much a “phone” as a “portal through which five or six gigantic multinational firms fight for your attention so they can sell you advertising.” For services like Facebook and Twitter, distraction is central to the business model.

To focus on Tolstoy, I had to be much more “mindful.” I had to start paying attention to my attention, to notice my own urges to peek at Twitter or email, so that I could decide to actively ignore them, instead of responding with a Pavolovian lunge for the app.

On the design/usability of real books

Bookmakers have spent hundreds of years patiently tweaking their design for maximum usability and loveliness. In the early years following the Gutenberg explosion, books were, by modern standards, surprisingly weird and unusable. They often had no paragraph breaks, no page numbers, no indexes — none of the features we typically use to navigate and orient ourselves in a book. It took a long time to arrive at their elegant modern design.(...)

Today’s digital books do not give you the nearly-sensual, visual sense of “where” something is in a book. We remember bits of a book not just by the words, but how they looked on the page — where they were located, how our hands lay next to them.

On the seriousness of real books

Some new research into the nature of reading suggests an intriguing reason we remember more from print books than digital ones: It’s because we expect print to be intellectually engaging. We approach it with an orientation that “this is serious business,” in a way that we don’t when we read on a screen.

To be fair, he’s also highlighting some interesting benefits of reading the book in digital, so his review is not just an anthem for the good old paper format. To find out what he prefers, you should read the article.

Because our ideas tend to be conceptually challenging and often completely new to us, we spend a lot of time in that ‘middle part’ of development, which I like to call The Swamp. It’s when we’re trying out a lot of different ideas, with lots of temporary art and half-baked code and even halfer-baked design. And because of that, the game feels, looks, and plays like total garbage for probably the longest chunk of development. When we’re in The Swamp, visible progress slows down and it feels very much like you’re suddenly crawling through sludge, each step forward requiring great effort to dislodge from the dense goo of bugs, broken ideas, technical hurdles, and self-doubt.

We spend a lot of time in The Swamp, and I still haven’t discovered a way to circumvent it. During this part of the development process I usually feel awful and I doubt my work. Everything is a total, hideous mess and the end of the project is impossible to see. The only way to proceed is to just go to work every day and move the project forward bit by bit, until one day, you suddenly look back and realise that you left The Swamp behind you. After fixing a million little things, at one point you inevitably look at your work and it suddenly doesn’t make you cringe or have an anxiety attack. That’s usually when we start pushing towards the finish line.

This is an excerpt from my interview with Kris Piotrowski in issue 11. Kris runs an indie game studio, something I have a lot of admiration and respect for. And I also have a lot of empathy for being stuck in The Swamp.

In fact, I’m working on the content of the new issue and I feel like I’m neck-deep in The Swamp at the moment. I can’t seem to be moving forward, no matter how hard I’m trying. It’s really frustrating and just like Kris, it’s one of the few things I really hate about this job.

It’s been a tough week. Here’s to a better, less swampish one. Enjoy your weekend folks!

When contemplating the future, we place far too much emphasis on flavour-of-the-month inventions and the latest killer apps, while underestimating the role of traditional technology. In the 1960s, space travel was all the rage, so we imagine ourselves on school trips to Mars. In the 1970s, plastic was in, so we mulled over how we would furnish our see-through houses. [The author] Nassim Taleb (…) coined a word for this: neomania, the mania for all things shiny and new.

In the past, I sympathised with a so-called ‘early adopters’, the breed of people who cannot survive without the latest iPhone. I thought they were ahead of their time. Now I regard them as irrational and suffering from a kind of sickness: neomania. To them, it is of minor importance if an invention provides tangible benefits; novelty matters more.

So, don’t go out on a limb when forecasting the future. Stanley Kubrick’s cult movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, illustrates why you shouldn’t. Made in 1968, the movie predicted that, at the turn of the millennium, the US would have 1000 strong colony on the moon and that PanAm would operate the commuter flights there and back. With this fanciful forecast in mind, I suggest this rule of thumb: whatever has survived for X years will last another X years. Taleb wagers that the 'bullshit filter of history’ will sort the gimmicks from the game changers. And that’s one bet I’m willing to back.

Lots to think about in this short excerpt from The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Kieran O‘Hare my proofreader and sub-editor since issue No11 and has been hugely helpful in improving the overall quality of Offscreen’s writing. I asked him some questions about working on Offscreen and his many talents, one of which is publishing a magazine himself.

Kai: Who are you and what do you do when you’re not working on Offscreen?

Kieran: My name is Kieran O’Hare. I currently live in the northeastern U.S. in Portland, Maine. I have fallen (pleasantly!) into the role of copy-editor and sub-editor of Offscreen. When I’m not buried in an endless Google Doc with you, I lead a sort of double existence as a musician and an independent magazine publisher.

On the musical side, I work around the world in music performance, as well as musical design and artistic direction for the stage. I play Irish traditional music on an instrument called the uilleann pipes, which is the uniquely Irish form of bagpipes, and I serve on the Board of Directors of an organization in Dublin called Na Píobairí Uilleann, which works for the preservation and spread of the uilleann pipes. I’m typing this from an airport in Baltimore, as I’m making my way home from recording a second album in Chicago with my trio, Open the Door for Three.

While being a professional piper might be enough of a kamikaze mission in itself, I recently co-founded a brand new quarterly print magazine about Irish culture and people at home and around the world, called Éirways. I and my partner, designer Kevin O’Brien, just launched our first issue, and it’s going very well so far. It’s been an exciting and very fulfilling process. I’m already buried working on Issue #2, which we plan to launch around October 1.

What apps and tools could you not live without?

I’m fairly basic when it comes to technology, but I’ll try anything to see if it simplifies things for me. My basic arsenal on the road is my 11” MacBook Air, an iPad (with the White Noise app to make hotels bearable), and an iPhone. Pages, Skype, Facetime, and Gmail are constantly open and often in use. Squarespace – surprise, surprise – is the home for Éirways magazine. Thanks to you, Google Docs is always there too. Oh, and pens. I like pens. Lots of them. And paper: the good stuff.

Print is dead. Comment?

Print is alive, well, growing in new and surprising ways, and thriving. Print fills a void that the digital world can’t, and often, it can fill a void that the digital world causes.

I’ll excerpt my editor’s letter from Issue #1 of my magazine, Éirways:

Éirways is a print-only magazine about Ireland, its culture, and its people at home and around the world. As editor, my goal is to create a magazine that broadens perspectives about Ireland and forges new connections between those who live in Ireland, those who leave Ireland, and those who love Ireland.

We have chosen to do this through print, a medium which some have already declared to be moribund. But we have been inspired by a new wave of independent magazine publishers around the world who work hard to prove that the breath of print can do more than fog a mirror. Print can be the vehicle by which we retake for ourselves the quiet contemplation and pure enjoyment of learning about the world around us.

We are bombarded and overwhelmed with electronic ‘content’. It is fleeting, fast-moving, and ultimately transient. How calming and pleasant it is to handle a beautiful magazine: media that we choose to welcome into our lives. We can handle it, touch it, feel it, smell it. When the latest website has receded into the digital din, a magazine is always right there where you last put it down…”

What’s your favourite thing on the internet this week?

I honestly haven’t been that plugged in this week. I returned to the States from Dublin one week ago, was home for two days, went to Chicago, played a concert at The Art Institute of Chicago, hung out with my brother Sean and his wife, went into the studio and mixed an album for three days, and now I’m going home. I have a novel to read on the plane, and I have to say the relative lack of internet has been, dare I say, blissful?

If you could pick any person to have a long dinner conversation with, who would it be?

Any one of the amazing photographers, artists, writers, or profile subjects I’ve had the honour of working with for Éirways magazine. It’s been an absolute privilege to be able to forge new connections with people that I wouldn’t have met had it not been for my foray into the world of print magazine-making.

Please complete: Working with me is ___!?

Germanic. Hard. Easy. An honour: you are one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, and are truly an inspirational figure in the world of independent magazine publishing. I was a fan of Offscreen long before I made contact with you, and it’s an absolute pleasure to work with you now!

Well said. ;) Thanks Kieran! You’ve done a wonderful job with issue 11! Can’t wait to dive into the next bottomless Google Doc with you.

Photo by Earl Richardson

Meet Ivana McConnell, who’s written an essay for issue 10 and recently took on the role of editorial assistant for Offscreen (next to her main job) to help me with the upcoming issue.

Kai: Who are you and what do you do when you’re not working on Offscreen?

Ivana: My name is Ivana McConnell and right now I’m based out of Vancouver, after stints in Toronto, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. I’m an apologetic Canadian with a weakness for typography, and as of lately I’m Offscreen Magazine’s editorial assistant.

My day job is that of interaction designer; when I’m not doing that or working on Offscreen, I’m probably either rock climbing or doing some sort of exercise. It helps me stay even-keeled, and listening to a podcast or some music while cycling helps me turn my brain off for a little while; something I find incredibly hard to do. I’m also trying to make time to learn how to draw letters, properly. It’s my ambition to one day design a typeface. Other than that, I’m usually enjoying a good conversation over a pint or a coffee (depending on the time of day) with my wife, or being dragged around the neighbourhood by our hyperactive jack russell terrier.

What apps and tools could you not live without?

Aside from the usual (Gmail, Skype, etc.), I’m not much of a tools person; I try a lot of them but nothing seems to stick. What does, I adore: Overcast for podcast discovery and listening, Clear and Captio to get tasks done, Byword to write, and the Longform app for great reads. Also, my wife and I recently had to spend six months apart due to work and a big move, and Evernote and Avocado turned out to be lifesavers.

Print is dead. Comment?

Lies. I think reports of the medium’s death are exaggerated and, in fact, it’s managed to reincarnate and reinvent itself into something that both complements and contrasts the digital, always-on world we live in. It can, like Offscreen, become an excuse to unplug from that digital world or, in some cases, allow us to connect to it in a different way. They encourage us to engage with the world a little bit differently; to create or read them is an act of commitment much different to reading or writing a blog post. There’s an honesty about it all — we know that a printed book or magazine isn’t collecting data on us while we’re reading it — and reading is a focused act that, in today’s world, requires just a little bit more devotion than it used to. We can’t share it with a click, we have to talk about it.

Technology changes but the printed word doesn’t; it’s a snapshot of time in a tangible, human way that web content can’t be. It’s permanent, and I think people are looking more and more for that humanity and that authenticity these days. So print isn’t dead, in my opinion, it’s alive and kicking our digital doors down.

What’s your favourite thing on the internet this week?

This 38,000 word interactive article which aims to answer the lofty question, ‘What is code?’ Sit down with a coffee, an open mind, and get ready to take notes (and a few breaks). It’s a cracker.

If you could pick any person to have a long dinner conversation with, who would it be?

I think my answer to this question would probably change every time you asked it, but today it would be Tommy Caldwell. I’ve been a rock climber for many years, and followed his Dawn Wall project since he first started checking it out and seeing if it was possible. He’s such a tenacious, humble human being with some epic stories to share, not to mention some invaluable climbing advice, which I could always use more of!

Please complete with honesty: Working with Kai is ___!?

Reassuring, but not in that cliche, ‘everything-is-going-to-be-all-right’ way, but reassuring in the way that only genuine honesty can be. I’m never in the dark about a suggestion I’ve made or an idea I’ve had, and that forthright clarity is so valuable to me. It’s also unfortunately fleeting sometimes, given the time difference of Vancouver-to-Melbourne, but it’s been brilliant!

Thank you so much for the offer, I actually buy my copies at an independent magazine kiosk in Santa Monica, Ca since I’m a bit impatient when it comes to shipping haha. I wanted to say thank you for making such an amazing magazine. As someone who lives in the growing “Silicon Beach” part of southern California and works for a few tech companies, this magazine has given me so much confidence in pursuing more opportunities in tech.

I love how personal your magazine feels. I read a lot of independent magazines from Hello Mr. to Human Being, The Happy Reader, The Great Discontent, Saturdays, Monster Children, Cereal, and the recently published Avaunt. What I like most about yours and other publications with similar dimensions is that it’s the perfect size to take around but also to leave out on the coffee table. I know you take careful time in choosing the paper and I have to say that hard work doesn’t go unnoticed, I would buy the magazine for the paper quality and smell alone. Those smaller details that may go unnoticed if sitting on a shelf amongst other widely spread commercial magazines are exactly the reasons why I seek yours out and only buy directly from you or from an independent seller where I know the money keeps you both in business. I really appreciate the colors you choose, the fonts you use, the advertisements sections, and my favorite: the side notes.

Thank you so much for putting this out and continuing to share the behind the scenes processes that go into the creation of the magazine. All the emails you share, blog posts you write, and just every interaction to keep the magazine human makes me as a reader truly feel as if I’m supporting a friend by buying, reading and admiring their work.

A very satisfied reader and supporter,
Jeremy

Thanks for making my day, Jeremy!

But having earned a little more money that quarter compared to the previous one was not what made me feel comfortable. It was the following thought process and the answer I arrived at.

For most entrepreneurs, the idea of having to do better this month than last is constantly on their mind. If you spend much of your working day online like I do, you’re frequently reminded of how much everyone focuses on getting bigger and more profitable. Growth hackers. Content marketing. IPOs. Everyone is chasing the hockey stick. And everyone is anxious about being left behind.

I get a lot of “How is the magazine going?”-type of questions when I meet readers in real life. I always wish I had some astounding numbers to report. How the magazine subscribers have quadrupled in the last quarter. How the new issue sold out over night. How I’m struggling to hire enough people in order to keep up with demand. It’s what we’ve come to expect from internet success stories. But that’s not the truth in Offscreen’s case.

The truth is that Offscreen has seen very slow growth. I started with 3000 copies and it took me 11 issues to justify a 5000 print-run. The truth is that some issues do better than others depending on a range of factors, none of which seem very predictable. The truth is that the magazine still doesn’t make enough money to hire more than a few temporary freelancers. (More on that in coming blog posts).

I love going back to an essay in issue No7 titled “Human Scale”, written by fellow Australian and Icelab co-founder Michael Honey. He writes:

‘It doesn’t scale’ is a criticism levelled at many new ideas. (…) But how many things which are good when small get better by becoming bigger? (…) Humans are good at family, middling at community, dysfunctional as nations, and self-destructive as a planet. What doesn’t scale is our ability to relate to each other as human beings instead of target markets — as eyeballs to monetise.

And then there is this recent interview with Jeff Sheldon of Ugmonk fame in which he talks about being proud of staying small:

We’re not growing a hockey-stick growth, but we’re growing enough. We’re building that fan base and are in it for the long haul, so I’m able to keep it really small and handle every part of the business or almost every part of the business, which does limit me on the creative side sometimes. I can’t release a hundred products every year. I can’t speak at dozens of conferences. I have to limit everything I do. (…) But I’m okay with all those things right now. I choose to keep it small, to keep it lean, to keep this business profitable where it is. (…) I’m much more focused on building that tribe of core followers that cares about what I do, than having ten thousand, one hundred thousand, or one million people that kind of like the cool shirt today, and then they totally forget about it tomorrow.

So here I am, working long days (and sometimes sleepless nights) to make a thing with a growth trajectory slightly more optimistic than the mom-and-pop shop down the road. And I’m finally ok with it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind growing, but I do mind growing for growth’s sake, which is what seems to happen a lot with tech companies these days.

There is a saying that you only need 1000 true fans to make a living from your work. Going through my reader database I can recognise almost all of my ‘true fans’ because we are in touch regularly via email, Twitter, Instagram or in real life when we finally meet at conferences. There is something quite beautiful in knowing your core readers personally and establishing an honest feedback loop that helps improve the magazine with every issue.

So the ‘answer’ I arrived at is the following question: as long as I can make a decent living, create work I’m (mostly) proud of, and get so much heartfelt feedback from people I respect, why add the pressures and headaches that come from chasing mainstream success?

Bootstrapping shares a similar emotional rollercoaster to freelancing. On an up day, I might have a few dozen signups and, all-of-a-sudden, I feel unstoppable. I start thinking about hiring people and taking on less client work. I look months into the future and make projections on where Cushion will be based on that one good day.
Then, I won’t see a single new signup for an entire week and that impenetrable confidence begins to waver. I start doubting that I’ll ever be able to hire the help I so desperately need. I look to take on new clients because I’m now projecting the future based on this week alone, thinking I’ll be homeless in no time. I feel like no one cares anymore because nobody mentioned Cushion that week.

I can totally sympathise with him (as most entrepreneurs and sole business owners can). At Offscreen, there are days when I get ten orders for back issues and a couple of starter packs within hours, and then there are days when no one orders anything. It’s difficult to remind yourself that people still appreciate your product even when there is no chatter about it online or you make no sales.

In our issue 11 Pip Jamieson, founder of The Dots UK, shares a beautiful nugget of wisdom that I’ve added to my list of things to do when the issue is finally done. She writes:

In the past I’ve been completely guilty of jumping from project to project without reflecting on the amazing things we’ve achieved. That’s when we started our Glory Wall (sorry for the name, it just stuck) where every month the team pins up something they’ve achieved on a wall in our office. It can be anything from a lovely message from a community member to a press clipping or a quote. It’s a wonderful, visual motivation tool and a daily reminder of how far we’ve come.

Go forth and build your own Glory Wall. I know I will.

These days, where everyone has an opinion and way too many tools to express it, we love to focus on easily sharable quips of advice that seem to summarise the mood of the moment.

“Love what you do.” “Find your passion.”

I’ve made use of them myself for the little gimmicks I add to Offscreen, and in theory there is nothing wrong with a motivational poster on your wall. But there are particular messages I come across again and again, and each time they feel shallower and duller. The words ‘love’, ‘passion’, and ‘work’ (in any possible combination) follow me everywhere I go online.

Like Rachel Nabors explains in Offscreen issue No10 (also online here), these statements oversimplify the complexity of reality. We’re setting ourselves up for disappointment, especially when we preach it to the young, the up-and-coming generation of creatives.

It suggests that you are no longer allowed to just have a job. You must show passion in everything you do. You must love your profession, otherwise it’s not worth pursuing. If you don’t feel it, you have failed.

Our chantable slogans also create an illusion that we will reach a particular point where happiness sets in and everything else magically falls into place.

In reality, even if you do finally get paid for making knitted tea cup sleeves, chances are that you’re not going to be passionately pursuing that career for the next 25 years. And then what? You are back to square one.

I enjoy making Offscreen. I really do. But let’s be honest, it’s a love affair that will eventually come to an end. What happens next, I do not know. I might have to do some hard yakka I don’t particular enjoy so I can afford my overpriced coffee and take care of the bills. Heck, maybe I even have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. In that situation I think the last thing I need is a reminder that I’m doing it all wrong, because I don’t lie awake at night thinking about my work.

One of the beautiful things about printed publications is what Craig Mod calls ‘the edges of print’. We all know how great it feels to open a new book — the excitement of a fresh start. But also to be able to finish it, to close it and to move on to the next one. What happens in between those events is quite a linear experience. While magazines are also great for 'quick dips’ and reading in small chunks, most of us start from the front cover and work our way through to the final page. Compare this to consuming content online: how often do we start reading an article only to find ourselves watching a farting cat video because we clicked on a link half-way down the page? There aren’t any edges in digital.

This is one of the reasons why printed publications are still such an attractive tool for storytelling. Because content consumption usually flows in a linear direction, editors can create a unique journey that has a clear start and a clear finish.

When I first thought about Offscreen and how I wanted to present the content inside, the idea of arranging stories in an engaging way was exciting, but also quite daunting. The first step towards clarity and action was to define some basic boundaries, like the page count and the dimensions of the publication. Once I had some physical limits, I experimented with typography and grids within Indesign, trying to come up with a versatile set of ‘templates’ and a consistent visual direction. I won’t go into detail about this phase here, but let’s just say I bought a lot of font licenses (which I didn’t end up using) and printed out a ton of sample pages in the process.

All of the above sets the constraints for how much content I could fit into one issue. The next step was to come up with a way to organise my ideas to see how they flow in the context of a magazine. This is where the content plan (or flatplan) comes in. The content plan gives you a bird’s eye view of an issue. It allows you to pace the reading experience by placing and moving around story ideas with the goal of creating an enjoyable and captivating content flow.

There are various degrees of detail when it comes to content plans. It often starts out with something like this:

Source

…and then often turns into a more detailed version such as this:

Source

At a later stage, once content is coming in and the editorial designer begins with her work, the content plan takes a more realistic shape as printouts stuck to the wall or laid out on the floor:

Source

Seeing all the spreads next to each other enables editors to identify critical areas where, for example, stories or visuals are colliding. These printouts also give creatives an idea of how the layout of a particular spread work in the context of the bordering pages.

Being a kid of the digital age, I don’t really have an office with a big wall or a lot of floor space. I move from place to place quite a lot and take my office with me when I do. So I decided to take a more digital approach to the content plan: a simple spreadsheet. Although I do print out the magazine in its entirety on my trusty ol’ laserjet, mainly for proofreading.

This document stays open as a pinned tab in my browser throughout the three or more months it takes me to create a new issue. It’s a constant work in progress. As contributors confirm (or drop out), I add/edit names and deadlines accordingly. During the 3-4 week period when the majority of content is due I run through this document from top to bottom at least 2-3 times per week to check on the status of each contributor. This is by far the most stressful period in the making of an issue as I have to replace the inevitable drop-outs last minute and remind already very busy people that they are running late. If a piece is complete (written and visual parts have been submitted in their final version) I colour the cells in the 'Deadline’ column green. I repeat this step until the last piece of content has been submitted and I can move on to the next stages (proofreading, final editing, and eventually laying out the issue in Indesign).

The content plan is one of the most important tools in the making of a magazine. There are many magazine titles out there that do an amazing job at creating a unique reading experience and taking the reader on an adventure with every new issue. I won’t lie, Offscreen is not one of them. The core structure has intentionally not changed much since the inaugural issue launched. My lengthy interviews set the pace and make up the bulk of each issue. Changing smaller features in between break up the reading experience into digestible chunks. It’s a fairly strict pattern that I’ve come to rely on, not least because I’m a one-man show which necessitates a fair amount of routine to be able to make three issues per year possible.

Update: There is now a handy little online tool called pageplanr for easier flatplanning. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks great.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen

Joseph Campbell on having a ‘bliss station’, in The Power of Myth (via Austin Kleon). I quite like the sound and the idea of this. Not sure how well the bliss station fits into our tiny inner-city apartment though.

There is, however, another type of sustainability that doesn’t get much attention: the emotional sustainability of what we do. In a conversation about the long-term future of indie magazines with Steve from Stack, he said that the closure of indie magazine titles is rarely due to the readers losing interest; it’s the makers becoming exhausted.

With so many new magazine titles appearing on newsstands noawadays, it’s only natural that some won’t grow beyond issue two or three. While many publications emerge out of ‘passion projects’, after a while the economic realities catch up with the publishers. I have yet to meet a publisher that managed to generate a healthy profit from the first issue onwards. But even if the magazine sells well and eventually becomes economically sustainable, the financial rewards are often anything but generous. On top of that, we publishers tend to always want to improve upon the latest issue, so many of us decide to re-invest our money to make the best possible product with the next issue.

This inevitably leads to a point where you question the effort-reward ratio. You can be passionate about your work for a long time, but eventually you need to be able to measure your efforts in more than just Tweets and Likes. Making a magazine (like any other great product) is a demanding undertaking that doesn’t really get that much easier over time. The result is that magazines disappear, and publishers move on to more financially rewarding work with a lower stress factor. (Hello client services!)

I’m throwing these thoughts out there because I know a lot of us are in a similar situation. I’ve spoken to a lot of publishers lately — those starting out with huge enthusiasm, and those tired and exhausted who work on their final issue. I won’t lie, I’m continuously struggling to find an emotionally sustainable level too. One of the problems I’m facing is that I have to spread myself very thinly as a one-man operation. I’m still trying to find a workable solution for this. (Don’t worry, I currently have no plans to discontinue Offscreen.)

If you asked me today what I’d do differently when setting up a magazine, I’d say that I would think more critically about the effort-reward ratio from very early on. The initial excitement about launching a magazine (or any product for that matter) blinds us to accept unsustainable work practices. More important than keeping our readers/customers happy, is to keep ourselves happy. The former isn’t possible without the latter, at least in the long term.

Now let me go find a way to practice what I preach…

I hope you’re doing well! I just wanted to send you a picture of me reading my Offscreen issue 10 with my four-month old, who happens to sort of be named after you. My wife and I were trying to think of names one day and an issue of Offscreen was on the coffee table and I remembered meeting you at XOXO. I asked her what she thinks of “Kai”. We were trying to find a name that works easily in English, Chinese and Japanese and it fit the bill. The name made the short list, then the list and in October of last year little Kai was born :-)

I just thought I’d let you know. Thanks again for all of the hard work you do with Offscreen. It’s by far my favorite magazine to get in the mail :-)
Brian

I’ve said it before and I say it again: I have the bestest readership a publisher could wish for. Thank you, Brian!

Dear Kai,

I just wanted to write you a brief note of appreciation. I am in the process of launching a magazine, and I wanted to let you know how much of an influence and an inspiration you have been.

I have never functioned heretofore within the world of web design or app development or anything even vaguely computer-related. Yet, I read every issue of Offscreen from cover to cover, with great relish and enjoyment. The publication itself is what I have come over the last few years to seek, to demand, from the printed word: that is, a tranquil and beautiful diversion from work, from hassle, from being online all the time. Offscreen gives me what I have always sought from books. An escape, a stimulation, a diversion: ideas in physical form. A beautiful one, in this case.

Moreover, I am staggered, and astounded, by the generosity you have shown in putting in the time to keep your blog going. You cannot imagine what an impetus and source of guidance your experiences, your honesty, and your transparency have been. I have read the whole thing, from your first post, and you have saved me huge amounts of time and hassle as you have kept me thinking of things that wouldn’t have occurred to me until it was too late!

I am delighted to hear of every success you enjoy, and I hope it may continue long into the future.

So, simply, thanks a million!

Best regards,
Kieran

Whenever I’m having a hard time working on the next issue (which is often), I look through the Letters tag on my blog and read humbling emails such as this one to cheer me up. You guys are the best readership a magazine can wish for!

Of course, having sponsors is nothing unique. There are lots of other magazines that had sponsors before me and I certainly don’t claim to be the inventor here. However, it’s nice to see other titles following a similarly subtle approach and turning away from the standard (often intrusive) ad slots of traditional magazines because of Offscreen.

Many of the emails I receive ask me how I find my sponsors or how I convince them to participate in Offscreen. The truth is that they don’t really need much convincing. Finding sponsors has so far been fairly easy. (knocks on wood)

I believe the web community is quite unique in that way. Many web companies are used to the idea of sponsorships, because we have so many events that are funded through this support model. Also, frankly speaking, successfully operating web/tech companies usually have quite generous marketing budgets and don’t necessarily request traditional media data before they invest in a particular campaign (I think I’ve been asked for a advertising kit once, and couldn’t provide one). Also, it seems to me that companies in this industry are a lot more open to trying out new things and supporting the underdog where it fits.

No matter what your title is about, finding approachable companies that align with your own values is crucial. Don’t start with the Google of your industry. Start with a company you already have close contacts with, maybe even a local one. Set your initial fee very low. Sponsoring the first issue of Offscreen cost $400 and barely made a dent in the cost of everything, but it helped establish a relationship with those companies. I got a chance to prove that Offscreen is a product worth investing in, and as a result many of those companies are still sponsoring the magazine today!

Here’s an email that I recently sent out to a potential new sponsor showing how I see our sponsors and (hopefully) how they see themselves too. I suggest you don’t simply copy and paste this for your own project, but find your own voice for communicating your goals/values instead.

Let me give you some stats first: I currently print 4500 copies and they all sell out after a while — nothing is wasted. Our readers are some of the smartest and most influential creatives in the web/tech industry, from founders and CEOs to designers and developers running their own shop. Most readers are based in the US, UK and other English-speaking countries, followed by the rest of Europe. That’s all the marketing speak you get from me. ;)

As you may know, a sponsorship is not an ad. It can’t be tracked as such and shouldn’t be compared. With a sponsorship you make your brand part of what I’m doing with Offscreen. You directly link your company to my values and those of my readers.

The folks at Campaign Monitor, for instance, list Offscreen under their ‘giving back’ section. They see sponsorships as a way of making their company known for supporting unique projects that are part of our community.

You will definitely get more clicks by spending the same amount on Google or Facebook ads. Spending it on an Offscreen sponsorship will get you respect and recognition within our industry that is much more difficult to attain. Let’s face it, people like you and me that are part of the web industry hardly ever respond to ads. By supporting products core people in our industry love, your sponsorship tells them “We love it too, and are proud to be supporting it.”

To be honest, I’m not a good sales person, never have been. And as much as it looks like it, I’m not really trying to convince you of anything. In fact, I usually have a few people waiting to become sponsors, though I’m very picky. I personally would love to have ——— on board (maybe even long-term), because from what I hear, people trust and like your service for understanding how web-savvy people tick. That’s exactly what I hear from my readers about Offscreen too.

Finally, if you have a few minutes, Seth Godin sums it up nicely (as always).

In the same way that the automobile allowed the horse to become a creature of leisure rather than of labour, so too has digital publishing moved traditional publishing into the realm of luxury.

Love that analogy by Björn Rust. Part of the editor’s note in the lovely ScragEnd issue No1.

From reading about other experiments I knew that giving people the choice to pay (next to) nothing usually attracts a lot of opportunists that care more about scoring a bargain than paying for something they really appreciate. So I was expecting the average price paid to be well below the standard price for a copy. And so, in order to decrease my chances of losing a lot of money in this exercise, I decided to set a few limits. Here is what the experiment looked like:

The Setup

I designed a simple page with a three-step checkout process:

In the first step, visitors could pick one of the available back issues. I intentionally didn’t make future issues available for pre-sale because, well, selling things I haven’t even produced yet for potentially less than cost price is a pretty dumb thing to do.

The second step offered a slider to define your own price — from $5 at the minimum to $38 at the max. With $5 as a minimum I could at least minimise the impact of a worst case scenario and have some of my shipping cost covered. I chose $38 as a maximum amount simply because it would put the handle of the slider right in the center at $22 (the regular price), which was also the default setting when opening the page.

Just below the slider I offered a bit of insight into how the chosen price affects Offscreen as a business. Here are the tiers and their message:

• $5 – $7: Significant Loss
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate a significant loss, killing the magazine instantly.

• $8 – $10: Small Loss
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate enough money to cover shipping, but would still struggle to pay for other expenses.

• $11 – $13: Break-Even Point
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate enough money to break even on expenses, but the publisher would essentially work for free full-time.

• $14 – $20: Small Profit
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate a small profit, enough to operate as a side project producing 1-2 issues per year.

• $21 – $23: Sustainable Profit
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate a sustainable profit, allowing the publisher to create at least 3 issues per year full-time.

• $24 – $30: Profit for Growth
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate enough profit to hire a part-time editor to increase quality and content for at least 4 issues per year.

• $31 – $37: Profit for Expansion
  If all copies sold at this price, Offscreen would generate a enough profit to hire 1-2 people full-time to increase quality and frequency, and the brand could expand to events and other projects.

• $38: Offscreen Venture Capital Inc acquires News Corp for immediate sunset.

Step three had a simple PAY NOW button with this message next to it: “To make this experiment fair and available to as many people as possible, we kindly ask you to order one issue at your custom price only.”

I also decided to limit the availability of this offer to 18 hours (with a countdown displayed on the page), largely for two reasons: once again to limit my chances of losing a lot of money, but also to create a sense of urgency and scarcity, one of the oldest tricks in the marketeer’s book.

The Result

I launched the experiment on a Wednesday night at midnight local time (Melbourne, Australia) when most people in Europe and America are awake or waking up soon. After a fairly restless night worrying that the experiment would somehow take off on social media and I’d become a victim of my own success, the counter stopped at a total of 71 sales the next day.

Here are the sales according to price paid:

Take-Away

First off all, my assumptions about people taking the opportunity to grab a bargain were validated. 21 people paid the minimum price ($5), compared to just one person sliding it all the way up to $38. (If you are reading this: you are awesome!)

Several people either disregarded or didn’t see my request to order one issue only. 6 customers went through the process several times and ordered all available issues at the lowest price (only shown as one order in the graph). I followed up with them and informed them that I had to cancel all but one of their orders and to my surprise their response was polite and apologetic, and a few of them even asked me to cancel these orders, but keep the money as a donation.

Several people that ordered their copy at the minimum price emailed me to tell me that they would love to give more, but can’t for personal/economic reasons. They explained that this was a unique chance for them to ‘test’ Offscreen. Unsurprisingly, many of these orders came from countries where the economy is not doing so well (e.g. Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Ukraine, Italy). And there was the occasional student in that group too.

The average price paid ends up being $12.40, which is just above my break-even point as stated below the slider. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Most sales congregated around the ‘break-even tier’ and I like to believe that knowing where it ‘doesn’t hurt me’ influenced customers’ decision. Though paying the ‘break-even’ price doesn’t make Offscreen sustainable, for the customer it’s a seemingly fair balance between scoring a bargain and not leaving the maker out of pocket.

Other than that, I don’t think there is much else to take away from this experiment. Considering that I offered back issues only, my existing and most loyal readership didn’t participate and hence didn’t get a chance to express how much they value Offscreen. I’m not sure exactly how many of these orders come from new vs. returning readers, but a few random checks showed that many of the customers in the lower pricing tiers are buying Offscreen for the first time (which is great).

Is such an experiment worth the effort? I believe so. There are a lot of variables that could be changed to see how it affects people’s decision to pay a higher or lower price. How did my messages/tiers influence their decision? Should I have made a future issue available for purchase and thereby encourage existing readers to have a say? Should I have run it for longer than 18 hours in order to have a bigger sampling group? How could I change the UI/UX to encourage a higher price?

Rather than making decisions about ‘the ideal price point’ based on one such experiment, I think you’d have to run several campaigns like this for it to be a reliable and realistic source for your pricing strategy. And of course, there will always be opportunists and poor students. ;-)

The content-first approach to modern publishing may turn out to be a winner, even as the business challenges for journalism remain significant and unresolved… Soon, if it’s not true already, magazine brands will matter more as marks of quality or tone than they do as gatherers and arrangers of content in a unified experience… That is the standard to which magazines of the mobile era must aspire.

A great quote of a quote from a great article about the future of digital publishing.

However, one little issue I keep stumbling upon when communicating with my readers is the ‘me vs. us’ problem. In 9 out of 10 cases, writing copy from my own view works just fine, but there are occasions where it just sounds a little amateurish, in particular when talking about the magazine as a business and not just a ‘thing I do’.

For instance, on the Contact page, inviting readers and contributors (or even sponsors) to get in touch with me would make Offscreen sound like a little ‘zine’ I throw together during my lunch break. Telling my readers to contact us still appears more meaningful and simply more professional. And while I don’t usually care about standard business lingo, it does seem more mature in certain situations.

And sure, there are ways around using ‘me’ or ‘us’ altogether, but it often makes communication a lot less personal.

So I guess there are rare cases when writing about a one-person business from the perspective of a (fake) team makes sense, as much as I hate inconsistency. I’m sure I’m not the only one dealing with this little predicament. How do you handle this situation in your own one-person business? Any emails or tweets are welcome.

Making something new takes patience. But it also takes faith. Faith that everything will work out in the end. During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t. Times when you hate the thing today that you loved yesterday. Times when what you had in your head isn’t quite what you’re seeing in front of you. Yet. That’s when you need to have faith.

Love this short article by Jason Fried on making things.

What surprised her most was the fact that more people were actually reading the magazine than buying it (assumingly getting it handed down from friends or finding it in cafés and other places). Apparently, there was also a large group of supporters that bought the occassional issue and followed the project online, but never really committed to being a regular reader. And they, too, were sad seeing a project disappear that they appreciated, even if they just followed it from the sidelines most of the time.

The overwhelming response to her announcement of bringing the magazine to an end surely made the decision more difficult, but “nice words don’t really pay the bills”, she said frustrated. It reminded me of something Cameron Moll mentioned in his interview with Offscreen. He said: “There’s an opportunity for a Buy Bootstrap movement along the lines of Buy Local or Buy Organic.”

The ‘passive supporter problem’ (if it can/should be called that!?) is, of course, not only prevalent in the magazine scene, I think it can be applied to all ‘indie’ makers out there. I can easily think of a handful of app developers and bloggers with tons of supporters that really want to see the project grow and succeed, but that rarely take practical action (in most cases by signing up for a paid account, paying a small membership fee, etc.) to actively enable the creators to continue the work they appreciate.

Of course, there is a lot of great ‘indie’ stuff out there and you can’t throw your money at them all. So what to do?

In the last few years, I’ve made a conscious effort to find out more about my favourite products and services, by following them online, by signing up to their newsletter, and by meeting and talking to them in person when I get a chance. If I’m convinced that their values and efforts align with my own, I try to be an active supporter and pay my fair share. This doesn’t just apply to the digital world, of course, I try to apply the same principles to, say, charities or my local shops down the road.

I guess it all comes down to being an informed consumer. Take a moment and think about the tools, products, and services that really make a difference in your life, and then show them your appreciation through proactive support, which in most cases (but not always) means adding them to your list of things worth paying for.

What surprised her most was the fact that more people were actually reading the magazine than buying it (assumingly getting it handed down from friends or finding it in cafés and other places). Apparently, there was also a large group of supporters that bought the occassional issue and followed the project online, but never really committed to being a regular reader. And they, too, were sad seeing a project disappear that they appreciated, even if they just followed it from the sidelines most of the time.

The overwhelming response to her announcement of bringing the magazine to an end surely made the decision more difficult, but “nice words don’t really pay the bills”, she said frustrated. It reminded me of something Cameron Moll mentioned in his interview with Offscreen. He said: “There’s an opportunity for a Buy Bootstrap movement along the lines of Buy Local or Buy Organic.”

The ‘passive supporter problem’ (if it can/should be called that!?) is, of course, not only prevalent in the magazine scene, I think it can be applied to all ‘indie’ makers out there. I can easily think of a handful of app developers and bloggers with tons of supporters that really want to see the project grow and succeed, but that rarely take practical action (in most cases by signing up for a paid account, paying a small membership fee, etc.) to actively enable the creators to continue the work they appreciate.

Of course, there is a lot of great ‘indie’ stuff out there and you can’t throw your money at them all. So what to do?

In the last few years, I’ve made a conscious effort to find out more about my favourite products and services, by following them online, by signing up to their newsletter, and by meeting and talking to them in person when I get a chance. If I’m convinced that their values and efforts align with my own, I try to be an active supporter and pay my fair share. This doesn’t just apply to the digital world, of course, I try to apply the same principles to, say, charities or my local shops down the road.

I guess it all comes down to being an informed consumer. Take a moment and think about the tools, products, and services that really make a difference in your life, and then show them your appreciation through proactive support, which in most cases (but not always) means adding them to your list of things worth paying for.

What surprised her most was the fact that more people were actually reading the magazine than buying it (assumingly getting it handed down from friends or finding it in cafés and other places). Apparently, there was also a large group of supporters that bought the occassional issue and followed the project online, but never really committed to being a regular reader. And they, too, were sad seeing a project disappear that they appreciated, even if they just followed it from the sidelines most of the time.

The overwhelming response to her announcement of bringing the magazine to an end surely made the decision more difficult, but “nice words don’t really pay the bills”, she said frustrated. It reminded me of something Cameron Moll mentioned in his interview with Offscreen. He said: “There’s an opportunity for a Buy Bootstrap movement along the lines of Buy Local or Buy Organic.”

The ‘passive supporter problem’ (if it can/should be called that!?) is, of course, not only prevalent in the magazine scene, I think it can be applied to all ‘indie’ makers out there. I can easily think of a handful of app developers and bloggers with tons of supporters that really want to see the project grow and succeed, but that rarely take practical action (in most cases by signing up for a paid account, paying a small membership fee, etc.) to actively enable the creators to continue the work they appreciate.

Of course, there is a lot of great ‘indie’ stuff out there and you can’t throw your money at them all. So what to do?

In the last few years, I’ve made a conscious effort to find out more about my favourite products and services, by following them online, by signing up to their newsletter, and by meeting and talking to them in person when I get a chance. If I’m convinced that their values and efforts align with my own, I try to be an active supporter and pay my fair share. This doesn’t just apply to the digital world, of course, I try to apply the same principles to, say, charities or my local shops down the road.

I guess it all comes down to being an informed consumer. Take a moment and think about the tools, products, and services that really make a difference in your life, and then show them your appreciation through proactive support, which in most cases (but not always) means adding them to your list of things worth paying for.

I thought it would be fun to show you guys a bit of the process of laying out a new interview in InDesign, so I made this timelapse video, condensing roughly 70 minutes into 10.

7:15am — My iPhone gently wakes me. I’ve given up resisting the urge to check my emails in bed a long time ago. I quickly scan the 32 unanswered emails. Some good, some bad, one with the subject line 'Sorry dude’. I wait with opening that one till after I had my first coffee.

7:45am — Pants are on, teeth are brushed. Time to check the weather: looking good enough for the five-minute bike ride to Code Black, one of about five local cafés and unofficial Offscreen 'side offices'. I inhale a banana on the way to my bike.

8:00am — Armed with a Long Black I get started with emails: a couple of stockist enquiries, a few contributors asking for feedback, some submissions, some bills to be paid, and a reader from Slovenia asking about the whereabouts of his shipment. Oh yeah, and that apologetic email from an interviewee dropping out last minute.

9:30am — After getting most of the emailing done, I’m scouring the web and my database of potential contributors to find a worthy replacement for the newly opened interview slot. One of the more difficult parts of running a magazine: locating and then soliciting busy people to see whether they can help you out on short notice.

10:15am — I’m starting to slouch — a good sign to get up and move to a new spot. I’ll grab a bag of coffee beans, pay up and ride home.

10:30am — A reminder of Melbourne’s unpredictable weather: I arrive slightly soaked. Time to put the heater on (yes, we have winters in Australia too!) and get the kettle going for a brew in the Chemex. I love the ritual of making coffee.

10:45am — Back to work with coffee in hand. I love my standing desk. Perhaps the best work-related investment I ever made. Today I’m getting started with some photo retouching for the new issue, so I’ll get the Spyder Express out to calibrate my external monitor.

11:15am — Still getting used to working in Lightroom. Half of the time I’m not sure what I’m clicking at. Google is my friend.

12:45pm — Lunch time. I find some leftovers in the fridge. I turn on the news to be reminded of people’s inability to coexist in the world. I turn it off when Australia’s prime minister comes on to propose a business case for delisting Tasmanian World Heritage forest.

1:15pm — I open up the essays from three contributors in Google Drive to do some editing and provide a first round of feedback. This is good stuff!

2:30pm — More Gmail action: I email my proof-reader to sync our schedules. A look at my Content Plan for issue No9 suggests that six contributors are already running late. I follow up with them via email to set new deadlines. Let’s hope they get back to me!

3:15pm — Browsing behance, flickr and 500px to locate a photographer in Florida. My tiny budget filters down my options to about one.

4:30pm — I log into Offscreen’s order management system and quickly go through last week’s orders to make sure all the shipping address details seem correct. After exporting current orders, I’ll email my shipper in Berlin so they can get those orders out as soon as they start their day in Europe.

4:45pm — With another trip to Germany on the horizon, I’ll search for accommodation in Berlin on Airbnb.

5:15pm — I go for a quick run (usually around 8km) before the rain is coming back. It’s my favourite (and only?) way to clear the head and get some proper thinking done.

6:15pm — After a shower I’m checking in on Twitter, Facebook, and the like to see what everyone else has been up to. I jump on Tumblr and press the 'Publish’ button on a post I’ve been holding off on for a few days. I love sharing some of the behind-the-scenes stuff with my readers and getting feedback from it. It’s humbling to know people actually care about my ramblings from time to time.

6:30pm — My girlfriend is back from work. We have a quick 'catch up’ before heading out to get groceries for tonight’s dinner. That’s when I appreciate living in the city — our local fruit and veg shop is just 50 meters up the road.

7:30pm — While dinner is cooking, I jump on Skype to confirm the production schedule of issue No9 with my printer in Berlin. They always love getting a call with last minute changes from the other side of the world. ;)

8:15pm — Dinner time, often accompanied by an episode of a TV show. It’s Fargo at the moment, and it's good.

9:30pm — Time for cleaning up the kitchen, my part in the daily dinner ritual.

10:30pm — I have a quick Facetime chat with my mum in Germany, explaining for the 24th time how to add a new contact to her iPad’s contact list.

11:00pm — One last email check to see if my printer has confirmed the paper delivery for the next issue. He hasn’t, so I guess it’s time to log off for today and worry about it tomorrow.

11:15pm — I try to conquer at least three or four long-form articles in my Pocket reading list before getting some shut-eye.

Buy all the issues

It’s as easy as that. Every sold copy counts and helps make the magazine a viable business and full-time job for me.

Share it with friends and colleagues

Tell your social media friends about Offscreen and be prepared for the default question: “Print-only, really?” Once you receive your copy, show or lend it to a friend or colleague.

Make your boss get an office subscription

It’s the perfect magazine for the office: put it in your cafeteria or in the reception area where clients are waiting. It’s also a great gift or additional perk for new employees.

Write a review

If you have a blog, consider writing a short review with a few photos about your experience with Offscreen.

Suggest it to your favourite companies/blogs

This could potentially have a huge impact: if you have a direct contact at a popular blog, publication, magazine or other media outlet, get in touch with them to tell them how much you like Offscreen and why it should get more exposure.

Suggest it to your favourite local book/design shop

If you frequent a well-stocked book or design shop in your city, take your copy with you and show it to them. I’m always interested in extending my stockist list.

Take it to local events

Events are great for meeting like-minded folks. You’ll be loved even more for introducing them to a beautiful magazine they have never heard of. ;) If you are organising an event, email me to get some free give-away copies.

Become a patron of an issue

Make an extra contribution by becoming a patron subscriber.

Request promotional copies

If you are in a unique position to promote the magazine (at a conference, during a business trip, a meeting with the editor of the New York Times, etc.) Please get in touch to request a few promotional copies.

Introduce the magazine to potential interviewees

Although the list of potential contributors is constantly growing, I’m still interested in finding inspiring candidates for our interviews (especially of underrepresented groups). If you are in contact with such a person, please introduce them to the magazine first and see whether they’d be interested in being published.

One of the problems with the prevalence of solutions is it overvalues invention and undervalues behavior. We look for a gizmo, when changing how we act can have the desired effect. It seems like we’ve been hoodwinked into a trap of technological dependency. But, technology is only as good or bad as what we use it to do, and I don’t think anyone who works in tech gets into the field with malice as their intent. In fact, usually the opposite, which is why I like this business. Hell, I’m one of the the folks in technology, so none of this criticism excludes me—I only suggest we stop looking at technology as the primary way to fix problems, and stop turning a blind eye to its negative consequences and to the new problems it produces.

Frank Chimero

Hi Kai

I’ve been meaning to write to you to thank you for the positive impact your sweet magazine has made on my life. When I read your most recent blog post today, it seemed like the right time to send you a note.

I’m a magazine fiend myself, a Kiwi living in Berlin. A couple of weeks ago I picked up Offscreen for the first time in a cafe, and found I had to wrestle my boyfriend (a web developer) to keep a hold of it. Finally, I had found magazine that he actually wants to read – thank YOU for single-handedly solving a serious problem in our relationship. Now each week when I drag him into Do You Read Me? I will no longer have to endure his sulky looks, because he will be happily reading as well! Kai Brach: relationship counsellor.

So that’s the first thank you. The second one is for your blog, which I think is brilliant. I am in the process of eking out an idea for my own magazine and being able to follow along your journey and discoveries has been invaluable to me. Where else could I find musings on working alone, the actual numbers instead of the usual “we don’t make a lot” (because what is ‘a lot’?!), a brief history of typefaces, how to choose a printer. Please, please don’t stop.

The last thank you is for making a mistake and keeping on going. So many people are too scared to even start a project like this for fear of making a mistake. And yet you just made one and received an outpouring of love for your project, because it is so much bigger than one silly mistake.

Please keep on keeping on.

Best wishes,
V.

The launch of issue 7 on Tuesday last week was followed by a bit of an emotional meltdown the next day when my own box of magazines finally arrived in Melbourne. I always open that box with a fair amount of apprehension, aware that I will probably find something that is not ‘right’, that doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to. Proofing print products is difficult, especially when done under time pressure and from half way around the world.

Within seconds of opening the box I spotted (to me) a very obvious problem with the cover that sent a shock wave through my body. I won’t tell you what it is – I want you to enjoy the magazine without any preconceived ideas. You can either see it or you will never notice (great!). So far none of you have voiced any complaints. I’m not sure whether that’s the case because you guys view the magazine with unbiased eyes or you’re simply too kind to let me know.

Unless you are in publishing or produce physical products, you’ll probably find it difficult to empathise with how I felt at that moment. After spending hundreds of hours working on something so personal and close to my heart, discovering a very blatant problem in the final product can instantly shatter your self-confidence.

I went through the whole spectrum of emotions: anger, despair, disappointment. I could have easily burnt the whole box of magazines right then and there without even opening a single copy. The biggest source of anxiety and distress came from a fear of disappointing you, my readers. I imagined being judged, being criticised for selling a second-rate product, for not living up to the high expectations of the eagle-eyed designers that make up most of my readership.

The day before I was on cloud nine. The launch went really well and I was feeling great about myself from getting so much recognition for months of hard work. And it all went to sh*t when I opened that box.

Worse even, any accomplishments I’ve had in the past no longer mattered. For the rest of that day, I felt like an impostor, a feeling that, ironically, Christopher Murphy describes so honestly and bravely in the very magazine that caused all this pain. By Wednesday evening I was actually contemplating about alternative career options. I really haven’t felt this down in a long time. And all this pain came from a simple cover!

In retrospect, the ‘faulty cover’ was probably just a trigger. Weeks of deadline anxiety and a lot of anticipation from everyone, including myself, built up to that single moment of receiving the actual magazine back from the printer.

It took me a couple of days to pick myself up again, largely thanks to my girlfriend’s incredible sensitivity and unshakable positivity. I’m personally still struggling to appreciate the magazine for all the things that I got right. All I see are the few mistakes I made.

There are a few lessons I learned:

• I need to triple-check and proof critical sections even if it delays the release date.

• As my girlfriend pointed out: “it always takes you a while to come around.” Like many other creative people, I go through phases of liking, then disliking, then despising, then eventually feeling OK about my work again. It’s a love-hate relationship that keeps me on my toes and, hopefully, helps me hone and sharpen my skills with everything I put out.

• I’m very lucky to have such an incredibly positive and encouraging audience. As more people follow and listen in, anticipation and expectations increase accordingly, putting a lot of pressure on me to deliver a great product. I love the fact that a large part of my readers are some of the most creative folks I know, but designing for designers can also be enormously intimidating.

• Had I received the wrong kind of feedback on that forsaken Wednesday, I think it would have taken me on a serious downward spiral. It reminded me to be mindful and empathetic when judging other people’s work. Mistakes happen to the best of us. Often the author/artist has already lost enough sleep over it, so be kind in the way you deliver your (honest) feedback.

• You may easily dismiss this little story with a notion of ‘first world problems’. Of course, there are certainly more serious issues, even though it’s hard see that when you are down. It always helps to remind ourselves that it all won’t matter in a few years. As time passes, nobody will judge you for a faulty print, a misplaced pixel or a buggy script.

The most important take-away for me personally is the realisation that my work is too closely tied to my level of happiness – with myself and life in general. It’s the typical dilemma of business owners and entrepreneurs: you made this thing and at some point this thing makes you. It defines you. Self-respect and self-worth go up and down with it.

I don’t yet know how to break out of that cycle, but I’ll have to try harder in order to make it sustainable – not financially but emotionally.

Phew, that was deep. :)

In particular, I had my eye on a range of Munken paper – a high-quality, ultra-smooth uncoated stock that is used by some of my favourite publications, like The Travel Almanac or Underscore. Munken Paper is a joy to touch and flick through, and it would give the entire publication a premium tactility. Although I was a bit worried about the low opacity of the paper, I was ready to spend a few thousand euros more for a superior experience. If just there hadn’t been the questions about sustainability...

The reason I chose EnviroTop in the first place was the fact that it was made from 100% recycled materials. Munken, however, was not. Though certified with various ‘green’ labels (the famous FSC sign is one of them), producing Munken means trees are still being chopped down and lots of energy and water goes into turning them into paper.

I remember listening to a podcast about how making recycled paper sometimes actually requires a larger carbon footprint than producing paper from new trees. So I went on a research mission to find out what my best option for Offscreen was. The results aren’t very clear. It seems to depend on how the recycled paper is manufactured.

While I was researching Offscreen’s environmental impact, I got word from the printer that the fire at the paper mill wasn’t as bad as initially expected and that EnviroTop could indeed be delivered with just a few weeks delay. I checked out the paper mill’s website and was positively surprised to find that the entire company is dedicated to a sustainable, low-impact paper production. Their production process is explained in detail on their site. For instance, the steam generated when boiling down recycled materials produces enough electricity to power the entire production process, making it self-sufficient. The Austria-based company has also won numerous awards for innovation and new ideas in regards to sustainable paper products.

With all this background information I feel a lot more confident in using EnviroTop. In fact, it made me appreciate the paper and its unique qualities even more. I’m still very much in love with Munken – it’s an amazing paper – but knowing that my choice of stock leads to one of the most low-impact print magazines out there gives me peace of mind.

As a sign of how much I care about sustainability, I’ve also decided to buy a quarter of an acre of threatened wilderness habitat through the World Land Trust (a reputable conservation organisation endorsed by Sir David Attenborough) with every issue of Offscreen Magazine.

I wish other magazines would also be more transparent about their stock choice. If you feel the same way, ask the publishers of your favourite magazines about the paper they’re using, and point them to this blog post.

Unless you are an established newsstand magazine like Monocle, Frankie or Vogue getting high-profile companies to advertise in your publication is really hard. It’s much more likely that you end up working with smaller companies that on one hand are often much more accessible and passionate about your product, but on the other hand don’t have the creative manpower to come up with high-quality artwork for their ads. Editorial designers spend hundreds of hours creating a beautiful experience for their readers, so it really hurts when cheap ads disrupt that experience.

When I started Offscreen I was trying to come up with a system that is less intrusive. I replaced annoying quarter-, half- and full-page ad slots half-way through an editorial piece in the magazine with sponsor pages: eight companies present themselves in a very subtle, unobtrusive, unified way in the center of the magazine.

I don’t make a secret of relying on those companies. They help make Offscreen possible. In fact, they now cover pretty much all of the production cost of an issue.

This idea worked out surprisingly well for everyone involved. It really does create a win-win-win situation.

Reader

After the first issue went out and people started sending me feedback, I received lots of comments about how nicely designed and beautifully integrated the sponsor pages are. In fact, many readers told me that, for the first time ever, they read every single word of a magazine from cover to cover – including the ‘ads’. I get a sense that most readers don’t just not mind them, they actually find them valuable. If they haven’t heard of one of the sponsors before, they are very much inclined to check them out because they trust Offscreen and know that I won’t feature companies that provide no value. At best, my readers consider the sponsor pages a catalogue of suggestions. At worst, they flick through them acknowledging the fact that these companies made the magazine possible.

Sponsor

What more can you hope for as a sponsor than an audience that actually sees (and I mean 'look at and read through’) your promotion. Instead of being part of a desperate, in-your-face shouting contest, the tone of the ads is subtle and thoughtful – an approach that creative people clearly appreciate. It takes a certain type of company to ‘get’ that and I believe our readers give our sponsors a lot of credit for that alone.

Publisher

Besides the obvious financial support, having those sponsors in the magazine serves another purpose. I’m very much proud of the quality of companies that support Offscreen. These are products and services I recommend to my family, friends, and colleagues all the time and not just because they pay me. I made a conscious effort to create a brand that is associated with companies that people in our industry trust and have high regard for. It adds credibility.

One thing I learned and what I find quite fascinating is the realisation that you can make something less intrusive and more subtle, and people actually pay more attention because of it.

Talking about money is something individuals in our industry often awkwardly avoid. We all know there is a lot of it going around, but everyone’s just in it for the love of solving problems and making the world a better place, riiight?

I’ve been thinking of opening my books too, considering that I’ve been very transparent with everything else happening behind the scene. Having spoken to a lot of folks in the tech world, there is a bit of a misconception in that some people think Offscreen is very successful in dollar terms. Those who are vaguely familiar with how traditional publishing works understand though that ‘success’ in this field is closer to ‘making it sustainable’ than ‘getting rich’.

So, here it goes. Here’s how ‘successful’ Offscreen is in numbers. (Don’t forget to read my notes below.)

Income through magazine sales (online and retailers): $138,963.08
Income through sponsorships and other channels: $42,880.53
Total revenue (financial year 2012/2013): $181,843.61

Printing costs: $36,526.17
Shipping/packaging costs: $42,701.87
Other expenses: $37,774.34
Total expenses (financial year 2012/2013): $117,002.38

My profit/income for the last financial year was $64,841.24 before tax.

Some important notes to keep in mind:

• The financial year in Australia runs from the 1st of July to the 30th of June the following year. All numbers in US dollars, converted from Australian dollars at the current rate of 1 AUD = 0.939 USD.

• This may seem like a high salary in some places in the world, like Berlin where the cost of living is low. Offscreen is based in Melbourne, Australia, where the cost of living (in my opinion) is closer to that of New York City.

• The financial year above covered the expenses and income of three issues of Offscreen.

• Offscreen is my full time job. I currently don’t have other sources of income.

• Offscreen does not employ any staff. I hire freelancers and contributors to help get an issue done. Their cost is reflected in the ‘other’ section of the expenses above.

Hi Kai,

Eight months back, last December, I got to know about your work and the publication of Offscreen. I am following the journey you have undertaken since and I admire the initiative of yours in bringing to life stories and experiences of individuals whose efforts otherwise remain hidden. I came to understand about the importance and emphasis placed on human interaction, collaboration and coordination in developing something worthwhile on web and beyond and its effects on many facets of life.

My life has also been enriched through an endeavour of mine since September, 2012 when I created Lucky Compiler. While chronicling the lives and creative processes of personalities from the world of art and photography I have seen how minute and often overlooked aspects defined them as a person and their careers professionally. This has also helped me in gaining deeper insights about life in general.

My satisfaction lies in creating something meaningful and I thank you for creating something as significant as your publication.

Warm Regards,
Dhruba

Made my weekend. Thanks Dhruba!

Hello Kai,

Hope you are all doing very well.

Last year I got a surprise of my life, Offscreen Magazine. I found the first issue in an art and design book shop in Clerkenwell, London. At that moment paying £8 for the mag was not easy while this tiny amount of money once fed me for nearly a week. So actually I didn’t buy it at first.

However the elegantly taken cover photograph called me in my dreams continually even I had no idea what it was about. I knew I needed to buy it asap. I went back to the book shop a couple of days after and found it at corner of the bookshelf. I fell in love with it immediately. It was not only because of the beautiful look, but also the people and their stories reminded me something I used to do/have. (Now I am more than happy that I made a correct decision especially when many people moan that they missed the first issue.)

More than 10 years ago, an era when there were tables with backgrounds, Java Applet water reflections were everywhere, CSS was only for decorating text and hyperlinks, Macromedia ruled the animation world with Flash and Blackberry was only known as a fruit. I graduated from uni with a degree of digital design. I learnt how to construct a website day and night. When I was in high school, I built several websites for my own interest. I used to love web design so much! However I was disappointed with the reality in this field — no fixed deadlines like print media, people didn’t respect it enough. So I dropped out and became an editorial designer since I always collected beautiful and informative magazines. I do a very good job at balancing text and pictures together nicely. But when I have been getting better and better at InDesign and the user-interface of Dreamweaver seemed to be more and more unfamiliar, I thought I would be labeled as an editorial designer for my whole life and would never have any chance to code again.

Interestingly the web design field has moved in a different direction in the last few years: more intelligent, more creative and more fun. It makes me want to do some web design work. I was very lucky that I got the opportunity to have some web design training courses and do some web design work recently. It allows me to understand the stories in your magazine a bit more. But they always inspire and encourage me to practise more. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this magazine! As an editorial designer I can tell your efforts of managing nearly everything of this magazine yourself is uncountable; as a still-learning-very-junior-level web person I feel this magazine links this community in a brighter and stronger way and makes me feel I am not alone at doing this. Now I started to develop a better relationship with web design and hope I won’t give up on it again.

In a few words, thanks for bringing us such a great publication! Look forward to seeing more content either online or in print.

I wish you all the best,

Ting-Kai C.

Could not have a better start to the week. Thank you so much, Ting-Kai!

After running into a few minor consistency and quality problems with the last issue, I felt a bit let down by our paper supplier. IGEPA’s Circle offset, the stock we had used up to that point, was my all-time favourite choice of paper. Using 100% recycling material, it boasted a superior quality with an unusually smooth finish. Unfortunately, it lost that superior quality when the manufacturer recently changed paper mills.

Since launching issue No4 I’ve been discussing alternatives with our printer. Again, the environmental impact was my main filter. I only considered 100% recycling papers with no whitening bleach used. After a few test prints on two different stock options, I decided to go with EnviroTop.

The next step turned out to be more nerve-racking. When selecting a stock type, its grammage will determine how heavy your magazine turns out to be – and in turn, how much you’ll end up spending on shipping. This is measured in grams per square meter (gsm). A standard office paper usually has somewhere between 70gsm and 90gsm.

The weight itself however doesn’t determine its perceived thickness. That’s where the paper volume comes in. A paper with a volume of 1.3 contains 30% more air and is therefore less compressed. Higher volume means thicker but not necessarily heavier paper.

Both variables define how thick and heavy a paper feels. The challenge is to find the best fit for your specific publication. Thicker, high-volume papers often convey quality, but depending on the format and binding technique, more solid papers make it difficult to keep the magazine open (my German printer calls this Klammerwirkung, the ‘peg effect’).

It eventually came down to making a decision between EnviroTop 100gsm and the next heavier option, 120gsm – both with a volume of 1.3. In the end I opted for the heavier version which will make Offscreen about 2.5mm thicker and around 50gm heavier. I’m aware that it will add to the Klammerwirkung, something I’m a little concerned about but the 100gsm version just didn’t have the same superior feel to it.

And that is what’s so nerve-racking about choosing good stock. There are many variables that need consideration. Due to our small magazine format, we print on larger sheets to be most efficient. These larger sheets are custom-cut by the paper mill and therefore need to be ordered several weeks in advance, and in large quantities.

In moments like this I really miss the transient nature of making things for web.