Stack Magazines

"We get to be the seagulls following the trawler..." Rob Orchard is one of the editors behind Delayed Gratification, the quarterly news magazine that looks back at events once the dust has settled and takes a slow, considered approach to retelling stories with the benefit of hindsight. Their current issue covers the period from January to March this year, which of course was when coronavirus first emerged from Wuhan and started spreading around the world, and in this episode Rob talks about how he and the team brought a clear and fresh perspective to a story you might think you already know.

"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.