Mankind Mag
A magazine for “creative and nice people”, Mankind Mag is an online spinoff from Erin Loechner’s blog Design For Mankind. I came across it this weekend because Stack has apparently been featured on the blog (though I can’t find the post), and I’ve been interested to see the different incarnations the magazine has been through over the last few issues.
Tracking back to the end of last year, it looks like it was available free to download, or available to buy from print on demand service MagCloud for $8.95. But now the download costs $1.99 and the print on demand option seems to have been removed.
It certainly doesn’t look like the new Mankind Mag is designed to be printed – the magazine’s PDF pages are now arranged over a series of spreads, but without any regard for the page fold, turning them into big landscape rectangles rather than spreads as such. It’s an unusual approach, clearly inspired by magazine layout but subtly different from it.
I’ll be interested to hear whether Erin manages to make more money selling her PDFs than she did the print on demand magazines. MagCloud sounds like a great idea, but the only people I’ve heard praising it have been hard up publishers – I still haven’t met anyone who actually uses it to buy their magazines. That might be because it’s a US company so it’s more expensive to have magazines printed and sent over here, but I’m willing to give it a punt. Any suggestions of great MagCloud titles to start me off?
