Stack Magazines

"You can't deny there's something bigger than us out there..." Jay Armstrong is the editor and creative director of Elementum, a beautiful biannual journal that draws upon the landscape and folklore of the British Isles to create a totally original sense of place. Filling her pages with stories about nature, identity and spirituality means she could easily cross over into politics and religion, bu...

"It's a totally fresh look at cycling..." Josh Page started The Domestique as a blog where he and his friends could post their stories about cycling. Deliberately turning away from the mainstream coverage of the sport, with its focus on elite male athletes, they instead placed an emphasis on the sense of community they found from riding their bikes together. Now a print magazine on its second issu...

"People want their little treat, even when times are hard..." Scott Bentley loves coffee. A magazine designer for big brands like Men's Health, Arena and FHM, in 2013 he decided to turn his passion into print and launched Caffeine magazine. Distributed for free in cafes across London and the UK, plus at coffee festivals and other special events, the business has grown fast over the last five years...

"Music is a springboard for everything else..." Recorded live at The Book Club in London on Tuesday 25 September 2018, this episode is a panel discussion featuring the people behind four of the UK's most interesting music magazines: Hanna Hanra (Beat), Tom Armstrong (The Move), Paul Bradshaw (Straight No Chaser) and Woody Cecilia (Cool Brother). Of course they're all driven by a love for music, bu...

"The London Review of Books can be quite a daunting experience." Ed Needham loves books. And he also knows a thing or two about making magazines; he was the editor of FHM in its late 90s heyday, and he went on to edit FHM in the USA, then Rolling Stone and Maxim. But his latest editorial position is altogether more humble – Strong Words is a new magazine that takes a fresh and unpretentious look a...

"We have the dog as our muse." Marta Roca is the editor and creative director of Four & Sons, the magazine that mixes art, culture and lifestyle with dogs. There's a simple joy that shines off the pages of the magazine, and when she dropped into the Stack office earlier this summer, Marta explained that her approach is all about surprise: "You have to be ready for the unexpected... Because you're...

"We're celebrating the art and culture of magazines." Jeremy Leslie has been at the heart of London's magazine world since he launched his magCulture blog in 2006. Over the years he has turned his love for magazines into a business, with a well stocked shop, an annual conference that runs in London and New York, and a series of partnerships and collaborations. In this episode he looks forward to a...

"Trump was like a bomb going off..." Good Trouble is the great big newsprint magazine we delivered to Stack subscribers this month, published out of New York and providing a meeting place for arts, culture, protest and activism. In this conversation editor Rod Stanley tells the story of how Donald Trump's election in November 2016 spurred him into action and set him on the path to creating this im...

"Heritage is such an important part of place." Lindsay magazine launched earlier this year with a collection of idiosyncratic and absorbing stories from around the world. Editor and creative director Beth Wilkinson says it's often mistaken for a travel magazine, but in this conversation she explains why she wanted to present a deeper idea of culture and place that looks to history and heritage to...

"We plug into a deep history of pamphleteering, troublemaking and piss taking..." Paul Gorman is co-curator of Print! Tearing It Up, the independent magazine exhibition on at Somerset House in London this summer. In this conversation, recorded live on Tuesday 31 July as part of Stack's week-long takeover, he speaks about his surprise at the current boom in independent magazines, and traces the lin...

"It's important to have a little disturbance." NXS is probably the strangest magazine we've ever sent out on Stack – a brilliantly adventurous avant-garde title from Amsterdam, every part of it is designed to provoke and inspire. In this conversation, two of the team behind the magazine explain how they use the editorial structure, the typography, and even the physical shape of the pages to create...

"People will give you a million hearts on Instagram, but they might not buy your magazine..." Conor Purcell has been making magazines for a long time. He's spent the last 13 years working on both corporate jobs and his own independent projects, making mistakes and learning along the way, and now he's pooled all that experience in a new book: The Magazine Blueprint. Except he hasn't only written ab...

"I couldn't give a shit what the medium is." Jeff Taylor is the founder of Courier, the London-based magazine dedicated to covering startup culture. But as Jeff explains in the podcast below, print is not sacred to Courier's mission, and while he values it as, "an immersive, evocative but still authoritative long-form format", he is also excited about the opportunities afforded by other ways of re...

Independent magazines are renowned for their loveliness: the thick paper, gorgeous photography and enticing design are all there to make you want to buy a copy. But what is their own definition of beauty? And how does that compare to the sort of images we're used to seeing in mainstream editorial and advertising? Recorded live on 22 May 2018 at The Book Club in London, this panel discussion brings...

"If art is about football it's really boring." Eddy Frankel is the editor and founder of OOF, the self-proclaimed 'art and football magazine'. But as he explains in this conversation, he's really interested in what football can tell us about the wider world, using the sport as a metaphor to explore changing ideas of society, health, corporate sponsorship and more.

"There's still a desire for long-form photo essays." Francesca Sears is Director of Special Projects at Magnum Photos, and in this episode she explains why the legendary picture agency decided to publish its first ever newspaper. Drawing upon the Magnum archives, A Brief Visual History in the Time of Isis takes a long view of history to tell a fresh story about how the group has managed to draw so...

"The only thing for sale in this magazine is our ideas." Everyone knows that food magazines are supposed to be full of delicious recipes and gorgeous photography of dishes that you can either buy or make for yourself in your fantastically successful life. But Mold takes a different approach – instead of promoting aspirational images, it questions why we eat the things we do, and how that might nee...

"Everyone has an opinion on this..." Exploring conflict and visual culture, Contra Journal wants readers to think again about the images they see everyday on the news and elsewhere. Very few people would consider themselves an expert on the subject, but almost everyone has strong feelings about it, and in this episode three of the editors discuss the ideas and motivations behind the magazine, and...

"We like to go beyond the landscapes we visit." Cartography is a beautiful, photo-led travel magazine that documents not only the people and places it encounters, but also their unseen histories and "holiness". In this conversation, editor and creative director Paula Corini explains the ideas and motivation behind their uniquely spiritual approach to travel journalism.

"The process comes first and the results later." Flaneur magazine is the experimental, reflexive magazine that builds each issue around a single street. The strapline has always been 'Fragments of a street', but for the latest issue, based around Treze de Maio in São Paulo, they've intensified the fragmentation and broken their stories up into numbered chunks that flow through the pages. It's thei...

"You come for a week and you never leave..." Slightly Foxed is the literary magazine that launched 15 years ago when three friends decided to take a stand against chain bookshops and celebrity publishing. As the magazine grew the team expanded, and in this episode they tell the story of how they became an extended family of book lovers, and why everything comes back to keeping their readers happy.

"Making a magazine is the best way to get to know a country." Froh! is a magazine and media NGO based in Cologne, and they've built a reputation for telling fascinating, unexpected stories from places like Armenia, Moldova and Lithuania. Their latest project is a book called Tbilisi – Archive of Transition, launching now on Kickstarter and based on three years spent working with locals and archive...

"I just can't think of anyone else who could do this job better than I could!" Andrew Diprose is group creative director of Wired in the UK, and in this conversation he reflects upon a career that has seen him working on iconic titles including i-D, Smash Hits and GQ, and for the last nine years Wired. He's a genuine magazine fan, and while the print publishing world has changed around him, he rem...

"Let's just make a poetry magazine – how hard can that be?" Megan Conery and Molly Taylor launched their poetry magazine hotdog in 2015, and quickly found out just how hard it could be. We delivered the third issue of hotdog to Stack subscribers last month, so Megan came over to the office to share some of the things they've learned along the way, and to talk about what drives them to keep on maki...

"Magazines can be more than just pieces of paper." The Party Next Door is an attempt to push beyond the established definition of what constitutes a magazine. Presented as a 12-inch vinyl record in a screenprinted sleeve, with gatefold outer sleeve, it looks to all intents and purposes like a standard record, but it's presented as issue one and its creators intend it to be a publication. Co-founde...