This was another thing I did this summer!

Sara and I have been talking forever about doing special editions of the magazine, and she was quite eager to have someone do an issue that she didn’t have to personally manage so’s she could focus on contributing content. We also wanted to make a broad declaration that all our content was Creative Commons, so it was remixable, and…

You know what? I’m just recapping my editor’s letter now. The whole thing is readable for free online; go read it. The short version is this: I coordinated and edited an entire special edition of #24MAG by my silly-ass self, and it was rad. I even made my own goofy contribution, remixing Issue 5 into a papercraft 7th stellation icosahedron.

That concludes my summer recap. Enjoy!

Here’s another thing I made.

Following the release of Issue 5 of #24MAG, I was tasked (read: I tasked myself) with making a zine of some of our extra content. Articles that didn’t make the deadline, excess photos, and so forth. This was largely a “waste not” measure, but I also wanted a safety net; making a magazine in 24 hours, it’s very hard to tell someone that their piece is awesome but is taking too long. But being loose with the deadline proves really hard on the designers as the work starts to bottleneck near the 10am mark. (I’m horribly guilty of this; one of my pieces for Issue 4 didn’t get a final draft til 8am, two hours before we were supposed to ship.) This zine was, among other things, the thing that allowed us to be hardasses about the content deadline. Even if we’re willing blow deadlines (and we are), this took a lot of pressure off the design staff.

I made this whole thing by my lonesome, with the Editor-In-Chief providing remote supervision. It was made with tape and printer paper and liberal misuse of the Cambridge Public Library’s scanner, and took two weeks. (I’d like to point out that our content-packed, gorgeous, well-designed, printed-on-fancy-paper magazine takes only a day, and yet most people hear the premise and think it looks more like what you see above.)

It was a lot of fun to make. Go check it out.

WE’VE DONE IT AGAIN!!!

Issue 4 of #24MAG is live. Go read the whole thing online. Or go here and buy a print copy.

This issue is super-pretty. I think we found a nice medium between Lucia’s stylish spareness and Jack’s lushness.

Lushness is a word.

Also: Felt & Wire liveblogged the entire magazine. Go check that out, too.

We had a record 20+ contributors this time, which is near-double our usual count. Meant we had fewer anxieties about hitting our page count (we exceeded our target by a good 6 pages) but it made a LOT of extra work for the editors. Maybe it’s something about the critical mass, but the post-magazine period has been more of a love-fest than usual. I think it scopes up a bit with each issue, but absolutely everyone is thrilled to have spent these 24 (er, 28) hours together. It’s really the most incredible thing most of us do.

Go forth. Check it out. It’s so ruddy nice-looking.