Stack Magazines

"We thought we'd make a printed exhibition in the format of a magazine..." Anja Dietmann and Max Predinger are two of the people behind Pfeil, the Hamburg-based art magazine that we delivered to Stack subscribers in June this year. This isn’t a magazine about art – the magazine itself is conceived as an artwork and they’re absolutely committed to each issue’s artistic concept, which leads them to do some slightly crazy things with it.

Bijan Berahimi is the founder and editor of Joon, which he describes as a sort of love letter to Portland. Bijan runs Fisk design studio and gallery in Portland and the magazine is a collaboration between Fisk and Brown Printing, one of the city’s main printing companies, and you can clearly see that they’re using the project to show off the stuff they can do. It’s an absolutely gorgeous piece of print, with lovely bright colours, loads of different paper types, glosses, foils and finishes, but it’s also a really readable magazine with a lovely warm feeling of community and some genuinely surprising storytelling.

"It's a grind. You have to get out there and do it..." Chris M Walsh is founder and editor of Fifty Grande, the travel magazine that goes deep to uncover the real USA. Chris is an experienced editor, having spent time at Billboard and Zagat, and now he’s drawing on the lessons he learned from those big, corporate publishers, while also improvising and getting his hands dirty with the scrappy business of small independent publishing.

Andrea Leung is one of the team behind Aww, the magazine that mixes animals and illustration to create a little bundle of happiness and creativity. Aww is published in Hong Kong, and I spoke to Andrea a few weeks ago, before the changes in the law and the increased Chinese government control, but in our conversation Andrea makes it clear that the magazine is intended as an escape from Hong Kong's politics, and from the many other difficulties people are currently facing around the world, and instead focuses on providing readers with some animal-based "illustration therapy".

"It has this ambiguous position of being geographically inside but ideologically outside..." Nina Vukelić and Rafaela Kaćunić are the founders and editors of This is Badland, the magazine that presents “The other Balkan”. The question of Balkan identity has been central to the entire project right from the start, but this fourth issue is themed “Are we home?” presented as a question that allows them to dive deep into ideas around nationalism, nostalgia, power and politics. But of course they do all that along with brilliantly bizarre photo shoots, playful, provocative stories and amazingly characterful and disruptive typography.

"We wear all the hats..." Feeeels is one of the most impressive new magazine launches I've seen so far this year. Made by a core team of four graphic designers who met on the graduate programme at Rhode Island School of Design, each issue is themed around a different tactile adjective, with contributors using the touchy, feely, human messiness of real stuff as inspiration for a fresh consideration of the world. In this episode Lauren Traugott-Campbell, Sarah Mohammadi, Angela Lorenzo and Drew Litowitz explain why they started by investigating the idea of 'fuzzy', what they learned from making that first issue, and why they've decided that issue two is going to be the 'slick' one.

"We keep going. We keep publishing. We keep speaking..." Maya Moumne and Hatem Imam are editors and creative directors of Safar, the visual culture magazine that’s based in Beirut, and which we delivered to Stack subscribers last month, May 2020. It’s a totally fascinating magazine, because while it begins from visual culture and design, it pushes out far beyond that to tackle big, difficult stories based in politics and social justice, with a particular focus on Lebanon and the wider Arab world. In this episode they speak about their motivations in making this magazine, and also about the particularly difficult conditions they’ve had to endure: the political upheaval that started with last year’s October Revolution, the economic disaster that has accompanied it, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an extremely harsh lockdown across Lebanon.

"If you were running a successful magazine, why would you write about tripe or bins?" Eddy Rhead is one of the editors of The Modernist, the magazine we delivered to our subscribers last month, April 2020. Featuring a bin on the cover and including stories on bus shelters, concrete and the vagaries of 1950s planning permission, it makes for a decidedly strange read. But it's also beautiful and enlightening and unexpectedly idealistic: "There's a paucity of ambition in today's society," Eddy says. "There isn't that ambition to make the world a better place – modernism didn't always get it right, but that's what they were aiming for."

"At the moment it's more difficult to be daring..." Samira Ben Laloua is founder and publisher of Extra Extra, the erotic arts magazine that presents what it calls the “mundane and sensual city life”. The contemporary urban experience is right at the heart of this magazine, and coronavirus means that experience is more disrupted now than most people can remember, so I was interested to hear what they’re doing to adapt and cope with the restrictions.

"Journalism is in crisis and Europe is in crisis..." Kyrill Hartog is editor-in-chief of Are We Europe, the print magazine and digital platform that was launched in 2017 out of the chaos surrounding Brexit. It exists to tell stories about Europe in a non-divisive and constructive way, and since it’s a magazine that was born out of crisis, I wanted to speak with Kyrill to find out what they’re doing in the face of coronavirus, a new type of crisis that is affecting independent magazine makers around the world in totally new ways.

"You can have way more fun in print..." Ricarda Messner is one of the editors of Sofa, the Berlin-based magazine that dedicates itself to exploring themes like teenagers, cyber love, masculinity, and most recently play. We delivered their play issue to Stack subscribers this month, March 2020, and Ricarda dropped in at the Stack office a few weeks ago to speak about making "a print magazine that feels like the good old days of the internet."

"Somehow all our eclectic tastes combine and we get this glorious mess..." Dzenana Vucic is one of the volunteer editors behind The Lifted Brow, the literary magazine that styles itself as “a quarterly attack journal from Australia and the world”. Providing a platform for underrepresented voices, they do a great job of tapping talent that might otherwise be overlooked, uncovering experimental forms of literature and producing brilliantly exciting work. In this conversation she speaks about how the team make that happen, the pressures they face as a group of volunteers working without pay, and the many ways in which the Brow is growing beyond the magazine itself.

"We may not make it, but if we don't we'll go up in flames..." Jacob Barnes is editor-in-chief of Soft Punk, a new literary and arts magazine that’s working hard to tell stories you won’t come across elsewhere. Jacob and most of the team are navigating the move from university into work, and it seems like almost by accident they’ve found themselves creating this magazine as a way of showcasing the sort of stories they love. But there’s also something more deliberate and ambitious going on; they’re also committing themselves to a demanding quarterly publishing schedule, and engaging with the sort of serious work that can make a lasting impression on readers – at least it did for me.

"Why can't we talk about identity in a way that brings people together rather than divides us?" Luc Hinson is the editor and co-founder of Between Borders, the new magazine that aims to straddle some of the dislocations that are currently dividing Britain. The project began in 2017 and was inspired in large part by the fallout from the Brexit vote, and after publishing online for a couple of years and gradually figuring out their editorial voice, they’ve released their first print issue, themed around transit, a familiar subject they use as a way of uniting very different people from very different backgrounds.

"We take a very deep and holistic view..." Dörte de Jesus is the editor and founder of The Lissome, a sustainable fashion magazine based in Berlin. She became fascinated by the fashion industry while working at Elle Germany, and although she quickly became disillusioned by the wastefulness of fast fashion, she says she felt inspired to champion the people and companies working at the forefront of more sustainable making. In this conversation she tells the story of how she started publishing online, before moving into print while making some major changes in her personal life along the way.

"We believe these stories deserve to be told..." George Wright is the driving force behind The New Issue, a new print magazine published here in the UK by Big Issue North. The Big Issue helps homeless people by recruiting street vendors to sell copies at a profit, which the vendor then keeps, and The New Issue is dedicated to helping the same people but via a different route. It’s intended as a slower, longer read; it’s more expensive with higher production values; and its quarterly publishing schedule allows the team more time to find and develop the stories they want to tell. In this conversation George speaks about the motivation behind the new magazine, and how they're reaching readers without selling on the streets.

"Obviously it was just me in my bedroom..." Joel Seawright is the man behind Rotten, an extraordinary magazine that reveals and comments on the process of magazine making. Joel left school aged 15 and struggled to find work without any qualifications, but he knew he loved photobooks and started playing around with the idea of making a magazine as a way of working with the photographers he admired. He had no experience of publishing; he felt like he didn’t have a voice; and moreover he felt like he needed to prove himself to his dad and show what he could do. The result is a magazine unlike anything else I’ve seen – scrappy and handmade, funny and opinionated, it’s intensely personal but also intended as a general demonstration that these days virtually anyone can make a magazine.

"There are lots of horrible assumptions and stereotypes around disability and I just wanted to smash them all to pieces..." Claudia Walder is the editor of Able, the magazine that provides a platform for people with a wide spectrum of disabilities and chronic illnesses. She was diagnosed with ME when she was just 23 years old, and in this episode she speaks about the frustration and shame she felt at having to stop work and become "a disabled person", and also the revelation that made her want to turn that around and create a bold, confident magazine that communicates a wide range of disabled people’s experiences.

"We're just a big group of friends who make a magazine together..." Daniel Milroy Maher is the editor of Swim, the art and photography magazine that takes a refreshingly unpretentious approach to the work on its pages. As Daniel explains in this episode, the magazine was initially intended as a way to showcase the work of friends, and while it has grown since then and now also includes some really big names, it’s managed to keep that same feeling of easy accessibility.

"I've never found anything interesting to read about soil..." David Reeve and Luciane Pisani are the editors and art director of Where the Leaves Fall, a magazine that focuses on our contemporary relationship with nature. It’s the sort of subject that can easily feel overwhelming, but they explain that they’re on a mission to tell stories about sustainability and the natural world that feel human, and which ultimately inspire readers to take positive action. They’re also keen that their magazine should help give a platform to voices that aren’t normally heard, and so they search far and wide, looking particularly to the global south for local stories about these global environmental issues.