Making Printed Pages
Sometimes It’s Nice That looks to the casual observer like it might be the best place in the world to work. The website is a constant source of cool inspiration, the podcast is a weekly half-hour of knockabout fun, and their magazine is one of the smartest, most editorially adventurous pieces of print on the newsstand.
But how do they get it all done? I caught up with Printed Pages editor James Cartwright to talk editorial decision-making, competing deadlines and personal projects, and discovered that the key to it all is “sitting around a table, trying to light each other’s faces up”.
When Printed Pages launched it was staple-bound and fairly thin, and that was a deliberate response to the old It’s Nice That. Now of course it’s perfect bound and getting thicker – what was the thinking behind those changes?
Everything we do in the magazine is in-depth. So even though we were saddle stitched and putting together something that felt quite zine-y, all the stories had sufficient depth that you felt you were discovering something new with each article.
But the problem we immediately discovered was that we couldn’t really do enough with the images. With every magazine we made last year we were culling great visual content because we didn’t have space for it, so there was a very immediate reason for the change, in that we wanted to show off all that lovely imagery and give it as much space to breathe as possible.
But we also felt that the content of the first four issues was potentially a bit one-note; the stories were all a similar length and covered the same number of pages, so we also wanted to add in a few regular features to provide some variation in content and change the pace a bit.
Some of those regulars are amazing. The Ugliest Thing I Love [a single page at the back of the magazine, in which designers and artists talk about hideous but treasured possessions] felt instantly iconic right from the start. Are the new regulars untouchable, or is there room to change things around issue by issue?
There’s definitely space to change things up. With the Nice writing at the start and The Ugliest Thing I Love, we’re all so keen on them that I can’t see them changing for a long time. But then we’ve got things like Archive, where we’re just providing a showcase for people’s collections of images or objects, or Show and Tell, where we’re getting people to talk about design objects and things that have inspired their careers, and we’re not dead set on those being exactly as they are and not changing format.
Talking about experimentation, you’ve got an entire comic in the middle of the magazine. How did that come about?
We decided that we always want to have something very visual in the middle. In the Spring issue we had Bruno Drummond and Gemma Tickle doing a still-life shoot, which was all based on repeat patterns. They came to us with the idea for it last year and we didn’t know whether we’d have room for it, until we decided that each issue we wanted to have room for ‘personal projects’, whether that was someone coming to us or us going out and commissioning somebody to do something you wouldn’t get anywhere else.
With Rami [Niemi, author of Lonely Boyz, the comic within the magazine] we’ve been really keen on his work for a really long time and we know he’s got a killer sense of humour, so I just gave him a call and said, “I don’t know what your time’s looking like at the moment, but we’d love you to make this 16-page comic for us.”
He was initially a little bit hesitant, like, “Man, that’s a lot of comic!” But a week or so later he got back to us and said he wanted to do it. The idea is that there are seven key narratives that underpin all of literature, and they’re all combined in this comic. At first we thought he’d take the narratives separately and do two pages on each, but then he decided he’d spin the whole thing together in this crazy, crazy story. I can’t see that he’d have been able to do that anywhere else!
I have to say I didn’t get the seven narratives thing on first reading, but that’s definitely helping me to think about a pretty weird story!
Reading it back I tried to pick it apart, and when I spoke to him about it he was like, “Yeah, I don’t know… I kind of got a bit lost!” But the way he works means he was just playing it by ear, and every week he’d send me a bunch of updates and the whole story was just pouring out of his head.
It must be amazing for you as a magazine editor, to be able to play with something like that. Printed Pages is always full of such amazing stuff, and your brief is so broad you can just include the most fascinating, beautiful work out there. How do you decide what goes into the magazine?
It’s similar to how we do all our editorial – it’s all of us sitting around a table throwing ideas at each other. We stash things for a while, so everyone has their pet stories they really want to put in the magazine, and once you’ve chewed them over it comes together quite naturally.
But it has to be a real story – you can’t just profile someone and talk about their work. It’s about humanising your subject and finding that great story, and you know when it’s going to be great because when you share the idea with someone else their face just lights up. So I guess that’s it – it’s us sitting around a table trying to light each other’s faces up.
And of course you’ve got so many outlets to do that across. The blog has always been there, but there’s also the podcast, the magazine… How much time in a week do you actually spend on the printed magazine?
The blog is a hungry beast and we always have to feed it, so for the most part that takes priority and the magazine simmers away in the background. Obviously when we’re putting an issue out everyone’s working really hard on that, but once the issues have arrived it’s quite relaxed.
We’re slowly putting together the Autumn issue now, so we’ve had a couple of content meetings and one or two articles have been commissioned, but it’s just chipping away at it in the background really, because as you say we’ve got a lot of platforms and not many people. And it only comes out four times a year, so you want to have that level of quality, and the slower you can take it the better that final product is.
