ZINES!
What purpose do they serve now that everything is a blog?
You actually have to go to a drop point to get a copy. It might even cost money. It doesn't alert you when new content is available. It can't be monitored by Analytics. It promotes deforestation. It ends up in a bankers box full of other flyers/posters/postcards/love letters and gets moved from apartment to apartment. Papercuts.
BUT!
When was the last time you felt nostalgia for a blog?
I don't even know what any of the blogs I read look like. They've been anesthetized by Reader (thankfully). They have no physical properties, no color, no smell, they consist of pure nonlinear information—that stuff that makes us Literate Culture people txt each other to death and interact with all of our friends simultaneously in tabbed chat windows.
Here's were the vernacular of materials comes in. I like the rare moments of being a graphic designer that allow me to be more of an industrial one. Objects are engineered, even if they are mostly two-dimensional. Publishers lose money on hardcover books, but there is a transcendent quality to reading one, touching book cloth. Size matters too. W magazine is so huge you forgive it for having 200 pages of ads and 5 of editorial content.
Speaking of zines, I picked up the new
Megawords recently and (content aside) I enjoyed flipping through. It was printed on that matte paper with the waxy ink that smells like crayons. It's my absolute favorite paper/ink experience. I feel like a kid with a coloring book and a box with twelve perfectly conical Crayolas.
Now that paper is nostalgic, or
retronovative, what do we do? I say we fight. I'm starting a zine called Poster. Guess what, it will unfold and one side will be a huge print. The other side will have sweet content. It'll use recycled paper with hippy ink. It'll be impossible to re-map-fold. It'll make you feel something while you read it, and maybe even after.
