The 2017 Best Independent Magazine List Is Out: No Independent Spirit, No Good Magazine

What did this year's most important independent magazines give the world?

On November 20, the 2017 Stack Awards for the best independent magazines were announced.

QDaily has followed the Stack Awards for years. They were set up by Stack Magazines, a site devoted to independent-magazine subscriptions, and they are the only award in the world made specifically for independent magazines. Founder Steven Watson is a magazine fanatic. Independent magazines, he says, are like the monsters in Monsters, Inc. — every one a different shape, every one a different temperament.

Think of Stack as an online magazine shop: pay £5.50 a month and good magazines turn up regularly. Subscribers never know which title will arrive, but they learn Stack's taste. And when a magazine arrives, it comes with an explanation of why you should read it — which is why it makes more sense to call Stack a curator of independent magazines than a seller of them.

Print has been shrinking for years, and it is still shrinking. Meanwhile, countless posts go up on social platforms every day. In theory you can use Twitter's Twitterstorms to follow how a story develops over months, glimpse someone else's life on Instagram, dig through whatever tags interest you on Tumblr, and find all sorts of ideas and points of view in the video diaries people upload to YouTube every day.

In the middle of that flood, the common view is that this is a bad time to make a magazine.

In fact, more and more independent magazines have been launched in recent years. From the day they start, they drop the old talk of circulation, distribution channels, and subscriber numbers that traditional magazines revolve around. They no longer treat a magazine as a device for delivering information; they go after the things mainstream culture overlooks.

As Devin N. Morris put it: "Independent, self-made magazines have a power to encourage people to look closely at reality. It's not a simple like, or an easily sent text message, but a desire to interact with reality firsthand." Morris founded 3 Dot Zine, an independent magazine made for people of colour.

As for what counts as an independent magazine, Steven Watson's test is this: the founder takes part in making the whole magazine, and whoever controls the money also controls the content and the design.

Watson once co-founded Printout with Jeremy Leslie, who runs magCulture, another magazine-curation platform and bookshop. Printout is East London's most professional independent-publishing salon, and it meets every two months. In one conversation, Watson set out how he picks magazines:

"The most important criterion is what they say. Plenty of magazines look great on the shelf, but turn the pages carefully and there's nothing inside. I'm not saying every one has to be The Outpost, but you have to feel some connection with the people who made it, to understand what made them throw themselves into it. That's the most exciting thing about independent magazines — every time I see a new issue come out with a point of view, it gives me a jolt."

"At the same time, the magazines Stack picks have to cover a lot of ground, because the subscription is open to everyone. They can focus on one particular field, of course, but they can't be so closed off that people outside that field feel shut out. When we choose, we also try to keep a balance between fields and subjects."

Just as the slogan says: Magazines that matter.

Magazine of the Year 2017 — Buffalo Zine

"The era of serious fashion magazines is over. Buffalo Zine is one of the most interesting art and fashion magazines in the world right now." That is how the fashion and culture outlet Dazed described it.

Vice's verdict: "Smart without being smug, fun without being only about fun people, it defines itself as a pioneer of the magazine world through an aesthetic and a taste it keeps remaking."

But Buffalo Zine's "fashion" is not the fashion magazine we usually picture. It ignores runways, clothes, beauty, and celebrities. It is really a magazine about youth culture outside the mainstream — and, as the title suggests, a buffalo is a crude-mouthed boy, or a rebel.

Buffalo Zine has two editorial offices, in London and Madrid. With an independent, punk attitude, the team spells out what it thinks about society and culture, and reports on fashion, art, and youth culture without limits — unbothered by trends, and not trying to start them either.

The layout and art direction are an explosive mixture: photography and drawing, page numbers and features that seem to cut across one another at random, an impression of too much to look at and everything changing fast. Pick the magazine up for the first time and its young, furious punk spirit may fool you into thinking it is an angry magazine for artsy kids. Read on and you find that, in the poetic language and the photographs worth lingering over, the editors have hidden what they understand about society as a whole.

They did not want to shut themselves inside the lofty isolation of the small and independent. The shift began with the fourth issue, which took apart mass consumer culture in an overblown retro style.

"From issue four we thought about the real purpose of making a magazine. It is not purely a hobby — it is a business built on advertising and commercial relationships," editor-in-chief Adrián González wrote in the letter that opens the issue. "So we decided this issue would be about money, advertising, promotion, buying, selling, and love and desire."

Catalogues from the 1980s, cheap gossip magazines, Italian Vogue from the 1990s, IKEA ads, fried-chicken brands, supermarket leaflets, junk mail — the editors used all of it as raw material.

The pages carry more than bold discounts and price tags, and more than good-looking men and women posing to shift product. There are also fashion shoots in which the film actresses Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Isabelle Huppert turn into ordinary shoppers, playing you, me, and everyone else living a boring life.

The writing in the issue is just as substantial. The editor-in-chief brought in Princess Gloria of Thurn und Taxis as guest editor, and she invited the artist Jeff Koons to go shopping with her, then interviewed him about "retail therapy."

New Magazine of the Year 2017 — Anxy Magazine

It is in these last two years that we have noticed, more and more, how anxiety, depression, stress, fear, and anger seem to leave everyone short of breath.

They work like a disease of the age: you cannot say why you slipped into this state, but you are certain to feel it. Mental illness is starting to be taken seriously; some argue it is as serious as cancer.

Unlike a physical illness, though, mental illness makes people ashamed, so they carry it alone and would rather not discuss it with anyone, let alone in public. Anxy was born to give them a channel.

It is a magazine made to help cultural workers deal with stress and bad feelings, and to give you a chance to face your own psychological problems squarely.

Founder Indhira Rojas assembled a group of experienced, capable people from publishing and design. What makes readers trust Anxy Magazine even more is its professional advisory team, which includes family therapists practising in the Bay Area and registered art therapists who teach psychology at American universities.

Take the first issue. Built around the theme of anger, Anxy worked in exclusive interviews, personal essays, special reports, visual stories, and practical advice, and even brought in the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, to describe the enormously creative energy she has drawn out of anger.

Editor of the Year — MacGuffin Magazine Amsterdam – Kirsten Algera & Ernst van der Hoeven

Art Director of the Year — MacGuffin Magazine Amsterdam – Kirsten Algera & Ernst van der Hoeven

Both awards went to MacGuffin.

MacGuffin was Stack's Magazine of the Year last year. It is not boxed in by the fixed sections and ad slots of mainstream magazines, which leaves its editors room to move.

A MacGuffin, in its original sense, is an object, event, or character that matters little in itself but sets a plot going or pushes it along. For the magazine's founders, a MacGuffin is an unremarkable everyday object that nonetheless shapes daily life.

The magazine comes out twice a year and each issue takes one object, following out the design, the people, and the stories attached to it, with the aim of bringing design objects out of the exhibition hall and back into ordinary life. Running one theme through a whole issue is exactly what tests an editorial team.

The latest issue of MacGuffin is about the sink. Next to cupboards, fridges, pots and pans, or good cutlery, the sink is the least noticeable thing in the kitchen — and the kitchen cannot do without it. Under the editors' plan, the sink finally got a full, three-dimensional reading: they wrote a short history of the sink in the sink's own voice, covering "who we are and how we live," and they also showed readers what the sink looks like to different people — gin drinkers, butchers, pathologists.

The issue also shows all kinds of far-fetched sinks — the kommunalka sink, the scenario sink, the bottomless sink — and what each one is for.

Cover of the Year — Eye Magazine

Eye Magazine, a London independent magazine founded in 1990, is about graphic design, printing, and visual culture, and runs profile interviews, pieces on design education, and criticism. One of its habits is to keep photographs of real people off the cover; instead it uses an original image by a designer, set against the word "Eye" drawn in plain lines — a rich visual experience inside and out.

Issue 94, published this year, pushed the cover further. The publisher worked with the design studio MuirMcNeil to make ten seed patterns, then used the Mosaic program on an HP digital press to generate a range of different patterns automatically, and digitally printed 8,000 copies of Eye Magazine. Every one of the 8,000 copies of issue 94 in circulation has its own cover.

If you want to know how those 8,000 covers were made, read the detailed piece we ran in August: 《How Did One Magazine Print 8,000 Completely Different Covers?》

Photography of the Year — Four & Sons

Four&Sons, an independent magazine out of Melbourne, has been nominated at the Stack Awards for two years running. It is about dogs, "humanity's most faithful friends," and it asks us why we cannot live out the good, heartening qualities dogs bring into the world, instead of complaining about how unjust and disorderly that world is.

Founders Marta Roca and Christina Teresinski are both enormous dog fans.

They plan each issue's writing and photography around the idea of dogs colliding with culture. In other words, they want the magazine to record the relationship between dogs and people. Through interviews and shoots they dig up stories about dogs and their owners, and use words and pictures to document the daily life of dogs and owners from all kinds of backgrounds — which also teaches readers about the habits and culture of different breeds.

The bond between people and dogs is not confined to daily life, of course. Dogs also have a lot to do with human creativity, and Four & Sons covers that too. Dogs became the editors' source of inspiration; the whole magazine is built on dogs and culture, taking in art, photography, music, literature, even mathematics, with traces of dogs turning up in every art form.

Imagine what a team like that produces when it photographs dogs. Judge the pictures by subject or by feeling — either way they are hard to fault.

Illustration of the Year — Weapons of Reason

Weapons of Reason won New Magazine and Best Illustration at the 2015 Stack Awards. Taking Best Illustration again this year shows how strong its illustration work is.

Go by the name alone and Weapons of Reason looks scholarly and dry. The subjects it takes on are indeed serious: global warming, megacities, the rhetoric of political slogans.

But Weapons of Reason chose plain, easy writing and a layout that gets close to the reader fast — round, friendly typefaces and illustration colours borrowed from the brightest of pop culture.

Its bright, heavily designed pages would — to make a joke of it — beat the interchangeable Kinfolk or Cereal as a prop in a styled photograph by some distance. While the artsy crowd is still busy with the aesthetics of daily life, you are already thinking about the hard tests facing a world that never stops fighting.

Fiction Writing of the Year — Harvard Design Magazine

Harvard Design Magazine, founded in 1997, is an important publication in the design world and has long supplied design students with expertise on urban design, landscape architecture, and related fields.

After a complete redesign in 2014, the magazine reached past its old boundaries into art, science, and literature — in the words of editor-in-chief Jennifer Sigler, to "overcome the isolation of design discourse." It kept its scholarly standards and enriched both its writing and its images, and now digs out and listens to voices from architecture, science, literature, and art.

For the latest 2017 issue, the editors picked millennials in their teens as the way in. Seventeen is a dangerous, exciting age. So what would the 17-year-old version of a building, an object, or an idea look like?

Non-fiction Writing of the Year — Rouleur

Rouleur is a British independent cycling magazine published every six weeks, covering everything large and small about bicycles and road racing. Unlike other titles in the category, which read like advertising catalogues, Rouleur is far more human: a lively, thoughtful cycling magazine that concentrates on photographs shot from unusual angles and on stories worth telling.

Rouleur never settles for plain race news or standard equipment reviews. It would rather tell the stories of retired road-racing greats, old European and American brands, and the craftsmen who build frames by hand.

In Rouleur's telling, a bicycle is not a cold piece of racing equipment but a work of everyday art. Cycling is not speed and power output but a declaration of love from people to nature.

They once ran a piece called "A Visit to the Fizik Factory in Italy," on how the saddle maker Fizik managed, in a short time, to sell its saddles to serious cyclists and get many professional riders to use them too.

In the latest issue they tell the story of Alasdair Fotheringham, a rider who won the Tour de France five times in a row.

Student Magazine of the Year — Crumble

Crumble comes out every two years. It was founded by a group of architecture students who wanted to start a public argument about architecture in Edinburgh.

In the first issue the students asked one question: what actually counts as an emergency? The answers took in mushrooms as a building material, refugee camps built after disasters, sustainable architecture in Iran, and the housing crisis.

The second issue, "What Is a Plan?," comes out in January 2018. If you are curious, look at how this young group spends two years editing a single issue, arguing about architecture in a wider cultural setting and with a strong feeling for the real world.

Having read this year's list, you may wonder how these niche magazines, which look unlikely to attract advertisers, stay alive at all. We recommend the piece we wrote when the Stack Awards were first handed out: 《Here Are 2015's Best Niche Magazines — We Also Talked About How to Run This Business》. It may answer the question.

Plenty of "minority" independent magazines never planned to turn this into a business. As Shakar Mujukian, founder of The Hye-Phen, a magazine about immigration, put it: "Making a magazine is a way and a means of shouting. You can create a platform of your own, define your own way of describing things, and do whatever you want."

Even watching how well Kinfolk and Monocle are doing, not all of them want to end up looking like those popular titles. What matters most is still the expression of an independent spirit.

Image credits: It's Nice That, Anxy Magazine, MacGuffin Magazine, Four&Sons, Rouleur, Crumble