Six inventive ways to make a newspaper magazine

Though the cost of making a magazine is much lower than it used to be, it is still far from accessible for many aspiring publishers. That’s when newsprint can offer a cheaper option, and we’re noticing more and more inventive ways publishers are reimagining the inky format. But the real experts in this field are at Newspaper Club, the platform that lets people easily design a newspaper online and have it printed and delivered from £15.

Read on to see Community Manager Sarah Belfort’s top six newspapers, all of which are printed by the Glasgow-based team. Those in London can also pick up their sample broadsheets at Magazines for Good, our charity sale this Saturday at the Ace Hotel (they include a promo code for first orders!)

Nothing in the News

The media cycle is more exhausting than ever – but how much of it are we really processing, anyway? In thought-provoking Nothing in the News, artist Joseph Ernst imagines the front pages of international newspapers – like The New York Times and Die Zeit – wiped clean of their headlines. It’s not that what’s happening isn’t important, Ernst says, but to make sense of it we need to find time to enjoy the silence, too.

sidelinecollective.com/nothinginthenews
Image: Joseph Ernst

Girlfans

“Shrink it and pink it” is too often the philosophy when it comes to football club merchandise for women. In Girlfans, we see what female fans – who make up close to a quarter of the game’s supporters, according to recent Premiere League stats – really wear to show their allegiances: customised scarves, flowers in club colours, temporary (or not) tattoos.

Founded in 2013 by Jacqui McAssey, a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University, Girlfans focuses on one team per issue – Liverpool, Manchester City and Everton so far. In a sport that’s become heavily commercialised, the project shows there’s still a place for individual expression: “What we actually documented were a range of ‘looks’ on fans of all ages – some subtle, some not,” McAssey says. “But all fascinating in their love for the team.”

instagram.com/girlfanszine
Image: Jacqui McAssey

Lecture in Progress

What’s a typical day like for the Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy, or a freelance production designer working with Kanye West and Kylie Minogue? Lecture in Progress, a new resource for creatives, produced by It’s Nice That co-founders Will Hudson and Alec Bec, wants to lift the veil on jobs like these and others across the industry.

The platform launched online in April 2017, and the print embodiment – a tabloid newspaper that Stack subscribers will recognise from their July delivery – features a selection of honest, insightful interviews published on the site so far. Lecture in Progress has been distributing the newspapers at talks around the UK, and we love seeing people holding up the front cover (below) with Anthony Burrill’s advice in letterpress: “Work hard and be nice to people.”

lectureinprogress.com
Image: Francis Augusto

Woza

In 2016, Italian music label Gqom Oh! and radio station Crudo Volta travelled to Durban, South Africa to meet the young musicians behind gqom – a minimal, homemade genre of house music with a dark, hypnotic beats. Published alongside the Woza Taxi documentary (which premiered on The Fader last year) the 32-page Woza photozine is a rare and poignant look behind the scenes of an emerging music culture.

gqomoh.bandcamp.com
Image: Gqom Oh!

NYT Mag Type Specimen

At 119 years old, The New York Times Magazine had a major redesign in 2015. The logo was redrawn, new columns were introduced and a bespoke suite of typefaces made its debut.

The exhibition ‘The New York Times Magazine Type: 2015–Present’ – presented by the Type Directors Club this summer – showcased some of the most memorable covers, spreads, and special issues since then. (Like the skyline-inspired issue you had to flip sideways to read.)

To accompany the show, the magazine’s design director Gail Bichler and art director Matt Willey also produced a neat type specimen that visitors could take home. “We kept [the specimen] classic and printed the whole thing in black,” Bichler told us. “But opted for the salmon newsprint to give it a pop of color.”

tdc.org
Image: Chloe Scheffe

Printed Web

Collecting internet ephemera like image grabs, site scrapes and search queries, the Library of the Printed Web is no ordinary library. Writer and teacher Paul Soulellis started the project in 2013, and has since published five issues of Printed Web, which puts online material in a new, tangible context.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that digital information can be experienced in profoundly different ways when it changes states,” Soulellis wrote in Vice earlier this year. “We’re forced to give it another kind of attention.” More than 220 artists have contributed to the Library of the Printed Web so far, and the archive was acquired by the MoMa Library in January – a permanent home for its fleeting content.

printedweb.org
Image: Paul Soulellis

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