The Best Independent Magazines of 2018, Each With Its Own Way of Caring About This Era

“Magazines that matter”

2018 is drawing to a close, and this year’s Stack Awards for the best independent magazines have been announced. The awards were founded by Stack, a website devoted to recommending good magazines, and they are the only prize in the world set up specifically for independent magazines. QDaily has reported on them before.

In the year now ending, there was no shortage of news arguing that print magazines are in decline: Interview, founded by Andy Warhol, and the American alternative paper The Village Voice, once called “one of New York’s urban icons,” both shut down entirely, one after the other.

There was plenty of nostalgia and sighing, but in an age ruled by social networks and video, people have long since grown used to print magazines folding, or moving their content experiments onto online platforms.

Independent magazines, though, have found a space of their own in this era, and unexpected attention. According to a report in The Guardian this past July, sales at Magazine Brighton, an independent magazine shop in Brighton, UK, tripled within three years of the shop opening. Vogue ran a piece back in 2014 declaring that “the trickle [of independent magazines] is turning into a flood” (quite possibly an exaggeration). It put the trend down to fatigue with the instant, sprawling, fast-moving information on the internet — “people want something they can hold, savor, keep, and revisit.” Compared with vinyl records, what independent magazines offer is not only a home for nostalgia but discussion of all sorts of subjects, an independent spirit, and odd, playful imagination (claims that may well be true).

Being popular and being noticed do not mean independent magazines have no problems. Not having to carry a large magazine’s costs does save money, but being small, having narrow distribution, and being “distinctive” on top of that are genuinely hard to pull off — every one of them stands between a magazine and survival. How they survive differs from one to the next as much as their content does.

As the appetite for independent magazines became visible, Stack turned into something impossible to ignore. Steven Watson, a fan of independent magazines, founded it in 2008; by 2014 its subscriptions had grown 76% from where they started. It offers two things — subscriptions and recommendations. You can subscribe on the Stack website to the magazines you like; or, if you have no firm preference, you can pay £7 a month and periodically receive whichever magazine Stack thinks is good.

On how Stack picks magazines, Watson once said in an interview: “I’m looking for magazines that have something to say, not the kind that look lovely but turn out to be empty once you’ve read them. Even if you didn’t know these good magazines beforehand, you should come away with something after reading them.”

He thinks an independent magazine should reach the point where “the founder takes part in making the whole magazine, and the person who makes the financial decisions also designs the content.” “Young” and “non-mainstream” are the labels most often attached to these magazines.

Those definitions call to mind Spain in the 1980s. The dictator Franco had died, and although the atmosphere of dictatorship and the forces behind it still hung in the air, a new social order was already taking shape. Young people in the capital, Madrid, started making independent magazines, writing about punk culture — still an import at the time — and its spirit of revolt. They arrived before the songs and the paintings, the first signal of the sweeping youth-culture movement that followed, La Movida Madrileña, a movement that directly pushed Spain toward constitutional democracy.

Curiosity, tastes that refuse to follow the crowd, and an independent spirit are all things independent magazines prize. But passion for the world and concern about it are the core trait that gives the independent magazines of every era their particular stamp.

Among 2018’s ten best magazines, we can see creators paying attention to today’s changemakers, to the anxiety symptoms of the young, to African creativity. Photographs, illustration, or long articles — these are all their own distinctive ways of showing they care about the era.

Magazine of the Year 2018 — Good Trouble

“Puts the pro back into protest” — that is how i-D, the classic independent magazine, described Good Trouble. The title says what the magazine is: a record of the creative stories of rebels, and a search for political change driven by rebel art and cultural change.

The magazine was born in 2016. Its founders, Rod Stanley and Richard Turley, “walked out” of the well-known industry titles Dazed & Confused and Bloomberg Businessweek respectively to make this magazine outside the mainstream.

Both of them talked about the 1990s, the decade of their youth, and together recalled the work of the radical photographer Matthew Smith, who from the 1980s on took 50,000 photographs of young people at rallies, raves, and protests. “The colors, faces, and energy in his work stay with you,” and “he made clear that young people had to choose to live in a spirit of rebellion.” Now this magazine lets them hear a faint echo of that time.

An echo of what?

“A lot of things today feel more nihilistic, violent, and unpredictable; the specter of climate change gives me the fear of nuclear annihilation I had as a kid,” Turley said. Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016 made him feel it was time to be a rebel again — he joined all kinds of rallies and protests, and finally decided to write down their views online and record protesters’ stories, then began printing the paper version of the magazine in April 2017.

The magazine’s palette is simple: black, white, gray, and one bright color that catches the eye (orange, magenta). Passages in the body text that need emphasis are marked in solid blocks of that bright color, some in the style of a hand-drawn marker, others like spray-painted graffiti on a wall. The black masthead throws off radiating lines in the bright color that connect to the article titles and lead the reader’s eye. Each issue’s most striking photograph takes up three-fifths of the space in the middle of the layout.

In its pages they record the stories of rebel artists — the feminist artist behind an anti-Trump exhibition, a Tunisian singer from the Arab Spring — along with London’s women’s march and the making of an independent, rebellious magazine. They also run the photographs they love of British youth rallies in the nineties, taken by Matthew Smith.

New Magazine of the Year 2018 — Suspira

Both the magazine’s website and its cover are full of mystery. On the home page, the word “Suspira,” in white uppercase bold, nearly fills the screen, leaving only black gaps between the letters — the classic horror typeface. On the cover of the first print issue, white specks nearly cover a black background, and the debossed word “Suspira” is black, the same as the cover.

Every issue examines the source of one thing humans find frightening. The theme of the first issue is “monsters,” and it sets out to show the truth behind monsters and what people get wrong about them. Around that theme they discuss the relationship between women and monsters (why women are so often cast as the victims of a monster’s deeds; the link between young girls and demons), and how to use scientific psychological methods to deal with the fear of demons.

“Horror films and imagery have always been a reflection of contemporary society… I want to dissect these ‘frightening’ subjects, so that people understand the psychological, cultural, and artistic value of the phenomenon,” said the magazine’s founder, Valentina Egoavil Medina. She believes that looking fear in the face, rather than suppressing it, is the only way to beat it, and that Suspira offers one way to do that.

Best Editing of the Year — The Skirt Chronicles

The Skirt Chronicles is made by three women in France; the magazine grew out of their friendship and their shared interests.

But its content is not, as the name suggests, only stories about skirts. They start from skirts and wander off, or begin somewhere else entirely, trying to explore fashion and literature — and the people behind them — across different eras and cultures.

Nothing constrains them, either in the subjects they pick or in how the articles handle them: they tell stories, write poems, run interviews, or simply pose a question and try to answer it.

In the first issue, an article called “The Legend of the Mountain” looks at the effect of France’s 1968 student movement, May 68, on what women wore: a girl in a remote mountain area who until then had worn nothing but long skirts eventually, as the movement slowly reached her, switched to miniskirts and trousers.

The second issue’s article on French style opens with a run of questions: “What exactly do fashion brands mean by ‘French style’?” “Since when have people been telling girls to move, eat, and dress the ‘French way’?”

In an interview the three friends said they all work from home now and set no limits on their hours, hoping the magazine will finally come out the way they picture it. The layout follows the traditional image-left, text-right arrangement, with wide line spacing in the articles and wide white space beside the images, which makes it feel calm and unhurried.

Best Art Direction and Best Illustration of 2018 — Anxy

This magazine about the anxiety symptoms of modern life launched in 2016 and was named Best New Magazine last year.

It is not a serious, formal periodical popularizing psychology, and it will not give you much in the way of comfort food for the soul; it is more like a paper support group for people with depression and anxiety. Each issue gathers interviews, essays, and visual stories around one psychological problem, and occasionally includes guidance on healing and first-person accounts from people fighting their symptoms.

The first four issues were built around “anger,” “workaholism,” “boundaries,” and “masculinity” — each one the instigator behind feelings people find ugly, keep hidden, and would rather not admit to. “What we do is tell true stories about how people live,” the creators say.

The two awards it won this time are about its visual and art design. Flip through an issue and you see that Indhira Rojas, who leads the work, often renders dark, negative feelings in orange, pink, or bright yellow. Comic, illustration, a small ornament in the layout, the cover — everything reads at a glance as careful design, as though it carried some healing effect.

The cover of the first issue, the anger special, is a red human figure with no clear features and spikes all over its body, set against a pink ground — full of invention and slightly funny.

The cover of the second issue, the workaholism special, which won Best Illustration of the Year, is also in orange and pink, with spreadsheets, browser icons, computer windows, briefcases, and calendars floating in a crowd — lively and apt. The illustrator, Ori Toor, has always liked using many colors to convey feeling and imagery, and in this issue he built people and objects out of high-contrast blocks of color, pushing the healing effect of bright color as far as it will go.

On Anxy’s website you can also find merchandise carrying the magazine’s design: bright orange tote bags and pencils, postcards printed in different languages with private feelings and lines meant to heal, and other small things.

Best Cover of the Year — Eye on Design

This magazine collects good graphic design from around the world. It belongs to AIGA, the largest nonprofit design organization in the US.

The Eye on Design website has been running for three years. Magazines have always been one of Eye on Design’s subjects, and by now the team has made two issues of its own, with a third about to appear.

Each issue invites a guest designer to make the cover. The covers of the first two are both a single simple, emblematic image: an eye taking up a third of the cover, which shows that the magazine’s designers wanted to draw endless imagination out of that one element.

The theme of Eye on Design issue two, the one that won Best Cover, is “Psych,” meaning both cool and psychedelic, and the cover design of course follows from that: the iris is glowing fluorescent orange and deep blue, the white of the eye is gray, and radiating lines, horizontal waves, and circles around the eye cross through it, which hits hard visually, feels floating and psychedelic, and gives the eye a sense of motion.

The designer of this cover is Shira Inbar, based in Brooklyn and skilled in animation; mysterious, psychedelic subjects and a sense of movement are her strengths. She has also designed the big screens for the dance floor at House of Yes, a well-known underground club in Brooklyn.

She believes that moving and still images are connected and that both can carry rich meaning: “Things that don’t move have their own richness too.” On this cover, what she wanted was for “the lines of the eye to make it look raised, until it finally becomes a flower.”

The cover of the third issue is out. Because the theme is “Gossip,” the elements on it look at first like one huge open mouth; look again and there is a black eye between the teeth, with the word “Gossip” written across the iris.

Best Photography — Archivio

This English-Italian bilingual magazine put out its first issue last December. On that cover, above the uppercase “ARCHIVIO” (“archive” in Italian) run the words “Hidden Memories”; below the title is an old black-and-white photograph of two young people with punk mohawks.

This is a magazine about historical archives, and it ranges widely across entertainment and culture: fashion, design, film, sport. It is published by Promemoria, an Italian company devoted to restoring and recirculating historical archives.

Playing with the past and remembering it is of course not the point; giving the present something to learn from is. “We want to look at everything from a contemporary point of view, because what archives teach us is how memory becomes the future,” reads a line on the magazine’s website.

In the two issues published so far, the magazine revisits a 20th century of radical change, taking in youth subcultures of the Soviet era, poetry and art from Catalonia in Spain, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, a central figure of Italian cinema’s golden age and its neorealist period.

Old photographs are, as you would expect, the high point. You can see Milan during the postwar “economic miracle,” and you can see the classic, trend-setting images of Anna Piaggi, the legendary editor at Italian Vogue known as a walking fashion museum.

Best Non-Fiction of the Year — Nataal

This is an Africa-themed magazine published in London, England, which records the continent through fashion photography and long articles.

Avoiding poverty, backwardness, and social upheaval, Nataal wants to look at the creativity on this continent, and at how it extends into different places and different forms. As the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Helen Jennings, put it, “this magazine is about the cluster of visual art, fashion, and culture that draws inspiration from Africa, and it serves anyone who wants to connect with these things, who has been touched by them, or who already knows the rich energy in them.”

As with many good independent magazines, youth and the avant-garde are its most pronounced traits. It wants to uncover the new language young Africa is contributing to the continent — trying, for instance, to break the patriarchal gaze on women that runs through so much African imagery, and so find another kind of beauty in African women.

Nataal only began publishing its first print issue in 2018, though it has had an online platform since 2015. Several of the people behind it, Helen Jennings among them, had worked together earlier on Africa-related projects, which became the starting point for the magazine. At the time there were very few international platforms for young African artists and designers; Vogue only set up Vogue Africa, with a similar purpose, this year.

Best Original Fiction of the Year — Ecotone

This literary magazine launched in 2005 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the US. It has now put out 25 issues, and it is still run by students from the university’s art and literature departments.

It looks like a serious magazine, but that does not stop its makers from using it to show a great deal of imagination and curiosity. It tries to join literature to science and the humanities: it can take up people and other living things, and it can take up cities and the countryside.

That is also what the name “Ecotone” means: an ecotone in nature is a transition zone between two neighboring ecological communities. Which implies that this is a testing ground, full of new possibilities.

Every issue has a set theme, and writers are invited to produce literary work in different forms around it. The themes show off the magazine’s cross-disciplinary character well; past ones include “sound,” “joy,” and “craft.” When poems, fiction, and essays are laid out around these themes, the effect is one of interweaving and of wandering.

Best Student Magazine of the Year — Brasilia

This annual is made by students at Hannover University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Set beside the student magazine you might picture, one given over to academic research and abstract argument, Brasilia shows its concern for the times in a far more concrete way.

Each issue has a theme, and the students do profile interviews and follow-up reporting around it. Since the magazine started, the themes have included “neighbors,” “hope and doubt,” “waiting,” “mother and child,” and “pollution.”

The students come from the public relations and design departments, and they work with the design studio Bureau Bordeaux, which makes the magazine’s pages stand out. Every issue has a typeface designed for it, and the layout and the choice of images are worked over carefully, discussed by several parties.

Take issue three, on the theme of “waiting.” To bring the theme out, the front and back covers both put black-and-white photographs on a yellow ground: the former Soviet chess player Boris Spassky, and his opponent Bobby Fischer, the two of them waiting for each other in different postures at the 1972 World Chess Championship in Iceland.

Cover image from Stack and Anxy.