Offscreen Magazine
A few years ago while studying at Shillington College, in the midst of my blooming love affair with digital design, a young Melbournian man with a thick German accent came to give a talk at the college. His name was Kai Brach and he was the founder, writer and creator of a print magazine called Offscreen.
The first thing I noticed while the magazine sample was being passed around was how well designed it was. Crisp, minimalist, elegant without being pretentious, and beautiful. It was the type of magazine layout I always wished more mainstream news publications would adopt. Time, The Economist.. and Offscreen. It was, oddly enough, a print-only magazine about web development which featured articles about the lives of the people behind it.
As Kai slightly nervously delivered his presentation I was a little stunned to realise that he had given up an established career in web development to found this magazine. Wasn't web design the future of all humankind? Wasn't print a dead or dying medium? Why give up so much income to start again in a dying medium whose demographic happened to be the very people driving it out of business?
"Offscreen wants to give abstract products a real face by exploring the personal stories that lie behind million-dollar acquisitions, bootstrapped companies and passionate side projects. It’s a window into the lives of people that object established thinking and instead take risks to push forward with the aim to advance themselves, their company or, indeed, humanity through technology."
Offscreen is an amazing magazine. Not only is it one of the most gracefully laid-out print publications available, it was one of the first periodicals i can recall that really talked about the lives of the people themselves in the newly-glamorised tech industry, and in that way somewhat romanticised the digital age. All this in a magazine which is purposefully made only for print.
It's a special one. A year later, I found myself sitting at General Assembly learning front-end development and still thinking about Kai's inspirational talk.