Manchester’s publishing playground

Earlier this week I was up in Manchester working with some of the second-year students in the excitingly-named Unit X at Manchester School of Art. Unit X places students into groups and asks them to work together on a specific brief, and this term they’d been given the challenge of creating a Kickstarter pitch for a new magazine.

Freed from the need to actually create the magazine itself, they’d focused instead on the concepts behind their publications, asking why these magazines needed to exist and how they’d go about attracting their readers.

As such it offered a fascinating insight into what the students feel is missing from the print magazine market, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of the projects that really impressed me and my fellow judges (Dan Byrne, editor of Spiel, and Alec Dudson, editor of Intern).

Elnaz
Like Karen and Elsie before it, Elnaz is an entire magazine based around one person. But whereas those earlier titles were a way for their creators to chronicle their own lives, Elnaz would tell the story of a different ordinary person each issue, even changing its name in the telling (issue one is dedicated to jewellery designer Elnaz Yazandi).

There’s an obvious problem with changing your magazine’s name each issue, but the team had anticipated it by creating a strong, simple cover design (see below, and imagine that the masthead is in silver foil) that would be repeated issue by issue. Intended as a response to our obsession with celebrity culture, Elnaz encourages the reader to ask why we’re so interested in strangers’ lives, and its open submissions would allow readers to suggest themselves as the subject of future issues. I can imagine tons of people doing exactly that, and of all the magazines we saw, this was the one that felt like it could launch tomorrow and make a real impact.

Crowd International
With the European elections fast approaching and the general election looming next year, Crowd International takes the bold step of re-imagining political publishing for a young audience. Apathy amongst young voters is a massive problem across Europe, and the team behind Crowd International want to remedy it by creating a magazine that uses bold visuals and straight-talking, apolitical commentary to engage readers.

The unbiased standpoint is important – there are political magazines out there aimed at exactly this audience, but their tub-thumping partisanship is just as off-putting to the average reader as the dreary old men in suits. Of all the magazine concepts we saw, this is the one that made me wonder why there isn’t already somebody out there doing it for real.

Humdinger
Starting with a name like Humdinger puts any project on the front foot, and the concept here is for a magazine that boils the news down into the smartest, funniest, most easily digestible chunks and delivers them in print.

It was actually one of the more prosaic concepts on show – there are no high-minded ideals or complex concepts here, but there is a solid idea for a magazine that we all felt could genuinely take off. Whereas the group saw it as a fortnightly paid title, consensus on the judging panel was that it would do better as a free sheet, probably based around the Manchester area to start with and possibly expanding from there, but I could imagine its tongue-in-cheek style and snarky, up-to-the-minute style really striking a chord with readers who stumble across it in the pub.