It’s Nice That: What are your key reflections on the past ten years of the magCulture bricks and mortar? Any big successes or high-points?

Jeremy Leslie: First up, I can’t believe it’s been ten years. It felt like the shop was new for ages, and suddenly we’re something else… not old, but established, maybe? There’s a certain reassurance to that, but we can’t get too comfortable. We have to keep open minds and not rest on our laurels!

One high point came early on, realising, pretty soon after we opened, that the shop was so much more than just a shop. It’s a public space for magazine lovers to meet like-minded people: other readers, publishers, wannabe publishers. So many interesting people pop by to say hello. One example was fashion designer Junya Watanabe, who liked our black totes so much he bought several hundred and incorporated them into a shirt in his next season. We have other fashion people, DJs, opera directors and movie makers as regulars, mixing with students, graduates, and other magazine makers, as well as people who are just into a particular subject: literature, music, humour, whatever. Being a public space is hugely liberating, so much better than working in a closed office or studio.

INT: Likewise, any reflections on the wider indie publishing industry over the past decade?

JL: We’re a part of a very supportive, informal network of like-minded people: the magazine makers, distributors, customers, other shops, educators, all of whom share our desire to remind the world of the power of print. There’s not much money to be made in independent publishing, so rather than competing we all support one another. I relied on people like Mark and Jessica at Berlin’s Do You Read Me, and Martin at Magazine Brighton, to help me get the shop up and running, and I in turn have helped others, like Nicola at Issues in Toronto.

In terms of the broader indie publishing industry, it still excites me how inventive magazine makers are. The general sense of what an indie magazine can be keeps developing as magazines respond to one another. Magazines don’t exist in a vacuum, each one emerges into a context of other mags, and the way publishers respond to each other, and the wider world, by making a print magazine is always thrilling.

INT: How have you seen the industry change over the past ten years?

JL: The magazine world has changed dramatically; there’s now no avoiding the fact that the mainstream industry is withering away and the indie scene is booming. I saw that coming, that was one of the reasons I opened the shop, but it’s fascinating watching it play out. The big publishers lost the plot and jumped too fast into digital. That’s just one aspect in which they were out of step with their readers. And it is all about readers – a magazine is nothing without them.

What remains of the mainstream is looking to the indie format to save it – one of the first things new US Vogue editor Chloe Malle said on her appointment was that the magazine “should be released less frequently [...] and should be viewed more as collectible editions, printed on thick, high-quality paper”. What is that but the indie play? Higher quality, less often. Welcome to the real world!

INT: What do you think the future of indie publishing and retail looks like?

JL: The future looks really exciting; we’re seeing more and more people wanting to launch their own magazines – every day we receive emails from new publishers and samples in the post – as well as a growing enthusiasm amongst customers and readers to buy new magazines. Footfall is up and online sales are booming, we ship magazines daily across the world.

There will always be print magazines, the fascinating thing is seeing how they develop. I think of magazines as one vast churn of issues, each one influencing another as a cause-and-effect chain kicks off. Nobody can predict exactly what will happen, but today’s indies are fast and nimble, ready to react to what they discover works, and to what others do. That will continue.

People are tired of the algorithm, and as the enshitification of the internet continues, people will increasingly look elsewhere for better experiences and print will benefit from that.

The magCulture Live LDN25 conference is taking place on 13 November, you can get tickets here.

Below, find a selection of the best designed magazines of the past ten years, chosen by Jeremy:

MacGuffin, since 2015

The first issue of MacGuffin was published just ahead of the magCulture shop opening. It was the closest thing to perfect: a great concept – each issue takes a single man-made object as a starting point, the first issue was The Bed – brought to life with brilliant commissioning of stories and photography, and beautiful layouts and production. Not many magazines hit that level of execution with issue one. The editors were the guests at our first event at the shop in early 2016, presenting issue two, The Window, and they just returned a few weeks ago to mark our shared 10th anniversaries.

Civilization, since 2018

At first, the vast pages of this broadsheet newsprint zine were packed with texts and diagrams seeking to reflect the city of its origin, New York. As co-founder Richard Turley told us, at the time of issue one: “We want it to feel like spending a day in the city, with fragments of life interrupting you. Little scenes playing out, random conversations.” Issue by issue, its reference points have shifted, retaining the Dada-esque visual provocation of the design, but with editorial attention turning to language itself. It now feels more about the general information overload we suffer from today; the best magazines reflect the era of their creation, and I’m convinced that Civilization will be seen in the future as a key reflection of the 2020s.

Ordinary, 2016-2020

One of several indie mags that tested the idea of what a magazine might consist of. As the name suggests, the format was deliberately ordinary: A4 sized, with a flat CMYK colour across the cover and the title printed in that most ordinary of fonts, Arial. Attached to the cover of each issue was a plastic bag containing an ordinary everyday object: a plastic straw, a toilet roll, a dishcloth etc. Inside, there were no words, just full page images created by various photographers and artists featuring the object on the cover. Some were funny, some surprising, some disturbing, but for ten issues creativity oozed from its pages. For founder Max Siedentopf, Ordinary was the first step in his rise to advertising notoriety.

The Happy Reader, 2014-2023

Editor Gert Jonkers and designer Jop van Bennekom have a remarkable track record launching their own magazines: Butt, Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman all share an editorial playfulness and similar graphic references. They also applied their unique sensibility to The Happy Reader, a magazine for Penguin Books. Split into two parts, each issue opened with a long-form interview with a celebrity book reader, followed by a brilliant editorial examination of a single book on the Penguin list. The covers and page layouts cleverly referred to the classic fifties Penguin paperback designs.

Buffalo Zine, Since 2011

For all the directional content of fashion magazines, as objects they’re generally very conservative. Buffalo Zine changed this, coming up with creative themes that allowed them to change the shape and format of every issue. It has appeared as a hardback Victorian novel, a set of travel brochures and an interior design magazine. For their issue about copying (addressing fast fashion and copyright) they produced a series of ten covers that copied familiar fashion titles: i-D, Arena Homme Plus, 032c etc. A brilliant way to announce the theme, they published the covers without telling the magazines they copied. The only publishers unhappy about this were those who had not been selected to be copied.

Eye on Design, 2014–2019

This US magazine about graphic design helped drag design discourse into the new century. Looking beyond the established Western design canon and ignoring the tit-for-tat rants about type styles so common in design coverage, EoD brought together a new group of writers and designers to report on graphics as a living practice. Each issue was themed – Gossip, Invisible, Utopia – and looked brilliant, courtesy of Tala Safie, with the only constant element being a die-cut eye logo on the front cover. It featured issues like unionisation and the under representation of women at design conferences, alongside meme design and video games, as well as new takes on old stories. That it came from the longstanding US design society AIGA was a surprise, and a credit to founder Perrin Drumm. AIGA eventually pulled the plug but the six issues remain a vital inspiration.

Migrant Journal, 2016-2019

This magazine about our hopeless desire to contain our world’s borders was ahead of its time in 2016; how we could do with it now. A limited series of issues – such planned obsolescence is an idea that regularly pops up with indie magazines – addressed key challenges around the migration of people, goods and natural resources, as well as the mutable state of national boundaries. The high Swiss modernism of the design (by Offshore Studio) leant it a powerful identity, using maps and diagrams enriched with metallic inks. The series was published with archiving in mind, a beautiful and well-researched set of magazines created to become reference points in libraries across the world.

032c, Since 2001

This mag has been through several distinct phases since its 2001 launch. Originally a two-colour newsprint publication with a square panel of vivid red – the Pantone colour 032c of its name – on its front cover, it adopted a cool, glossy look for a period before turning back to bold red courtesy of new art director Mike Meiré in 2006 (Meiré deserves a side note here for the incredible number of indies he’s designed). Meiré and colleague Tim Giesen brought typographic experiment to the fore, establishing a look dubbed ‘New Ugly’ in 2007. This used clashing colours and over-compressed type that successfully pushed traditionalists into grumpy grandad mode. That harsh medicine freed up the magazine to advance confidently into the 2010s with a bold editorial and design outlook that is completely their own.

Editorial Magazine, 2013-2024

Most of the magazines on this list follow the rules of modern magazine design to some degree: even Civilizations’s pages display a knowledge of grid structure and type styles even as it ignores the basics. Editorial Magazine is my favourite example of a title refusing these rules. A chaotic collage of colour, Victorian display typefaces and hand drawn bubble type reflected founder Claire Milbrath’s fascination with Y2K, suburban architecture, Cabbage Patch Kids and vintage clothing. Eerie, weird and wonderful, plenty of indie mags take a similarly anarchic and personal direction but Editorial always had something extra, an aesthetic that Milbrath has subsequently taken into her successful career as an artist.

The Fence, since 2019

With 60 pages published quarterly in two colour black and orange-red, text-heavy and brought to life with bold brushstroke illustrations, The Fence is quite a traditional magazine. What makes it interesting is its timing, arriving as the 2020s began and offering contributors and readers alike the opportunity to enjoy in-depth investigative reporting, silly English humour and new fiction. What holds it together is its super-clear visual identity and a strong editorial tone of voice that has quickly built a loyal audience ready to enjoy material that is simply unavailable elsewhere. They also publish several excellent email newsletters, and a brilliant book about the London pub looks to be the first of many spin-offs.