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.

(I made a magazine.)

twenty-four magazine is sort of like a game jam, only you make a magazine. You pack around a dozen creative professionals into a Brooklyn apartment and make a magazine in 24 hours. This was started by my friend Sara Eileen earlier this year after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

I was not on staff for the first issue, and it’s only because she and the rest of the Issue One staff have agreed that I’ll say out loud – the first issue looked a little amateurish (nevertheless impressive for 24 hours). She invited me on the staff for Issue Two and she and the other organizers tweaked the process a bit to help make the magazine better. Last Friday at 10am we started, and by (er, roughly) 10am on Saturday, we had a magazine.

Forgive my Anglo-Saxon, but I am so fucking goddamn proud of what we made.

Myself, I interviewed Scott McCloud (author of Zot! and Understanding Comics, and the creator of the 24 Hour Comic) and James and Lisanne of Indie Game: The Movie. I also wrote a piece on science, did some of the online documentation, and showed up in a few photos. The Scott McCloud interview ended up being the front-page article, and I’m like holy shit.

It was a fantastic weekend. Everyone’s contributions were amazing, not least of all Jack’s layout (Jack being one of only 3 people that made it the whole 24 hours without sleep – I crapped out in the last 90 minutes). Please do click the link (oh look here it is again), you can see a few pages of the magazine for free (it is so pretty). The PDF version is only $3, so by all means, check it out!

And I’ll be on staff for the next one. Boosh!