Magazine Design Stuff | ‘96-’98

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In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.

A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some.

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My time at Stuff was the tail end of when magazines were still made the “old way.” These days, everything is done on a computer, and layouts barely see paper until it hits a press plate. Printers don’t even have a real pre-press (film to plate) phase anymore. Everything is direct to plate. For this reason, it’s gotten a LOT cheaper to make a magazine.

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So there I was, waxing layouts to boards, shooting things with a Stat camera to halftone them, and repeatedly stabbing myself with X-acto knives (not on purpose). But, somehow, I was making a magazine. The old fashioned way. As time went on I started pushing things farther and farther with typography, bringing things as far as the publisher and the parent company would let me. I had a lot of leeway. This was a time when Neville Brody, David Carson, Art Chantry, Martin Venezky, P. Scott Makela and others were making some really progressive typographic magazines. The Face, Beach Culture, Blue, Speak, Raygun, Bikini, Sweater, etc. These were magazines that where pushing visual interpretation as far as they could, offending a lot of design purist, and making a lot of others happy.

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Stuff went all over the board as I had pretty much open reign to fuck things up. Some of it, looking back is really terrible, but most of the stuff I hate is the stuff that wasn’t experimental. Some of it is still some of my favorite work that I’ve done. I was blowing things up on the copier, running things through the fax machine, even taking other people’s trash from the Stat camera room and reusing it. I started learning photography at Stuff as well, so really, that magazine was my education. There is no better way to learn than doing something. While I was going to school during that time, the real stuff I was learning was at the magazine. In school you learn the rules. At Stuff I could break the rules. Sometimes people got in arguments over it.

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In the middle of 1998 they hired a full-time art director. I continued to design the poetry page (Re:Verse) for a few months, but I otherwise focused more on school, and the magazine I was starting with Brian Tunney, Nine-Ninety. Later that year the publisher who gave me all the opportunities along the way was fired, and ultimately the magazine was rolled into a nightlife publication called Stuff@Night. This is a collection of work from “The Stuff Years.” Still some of my favorite work, over ten years later. Thanks to Robert Birnbaum and the rest of the crew for some good times.

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