Gary suffers some seasonal anger from the subscription department.

Have a good one.

The picture’s her, not me, btw.

AdAge has the lyrics and some titles they couldn’t find rhymes for (via Media Bistro).

No sooner do I bemoan a lack of distributor imagination than one saunters in and does something marvellous. Motto is a Swiss magazine distributor whose blog has been mentioned in posts passim; it has just opened its first physical store in Berlin (open Saturdays only, it seems), and to celebrate has a week of special magazine presentations from Mono.Kultur, Spike, Piktogram, Gagarin and Kilimanjaro, starting today (Dec 16th). Screenings, talks, the unveiling of Mono.Kultur’s new box set, and much more, all in a warmly wooden surrounding. Can’t wait to visit.

Here we have one of the futures of magazines: bespoke spaces for bespoke mags. More, please.

Timeless image for a timeless fallback story. Great cover, and good to see them getting away from the big number theory (“1803 reasons! 935 reasons! 32,803 reasons!”)

History of Time magazine perks
“Put it down as lunch”

Those perks didn’t make the list issue
But I like that cover. Feels very New York magazine

Mag editor celebrates 50 years at the helm
Who’s the longest-running designer?

Looks like print, distributed via blog
Very lovely online fashion zine that I’d love to see on newsprint, created by Romeu Silveira and distributed via blogspot since 2006 (via Thinking for a Living) UPDATE: Bandwidth currently exceeded on the images, but do download the PDFs

Digital magazine association needed
Or at least a digital section of the ones that already exist, to provide sales teams with research to back up their assertions. Though would it really make much of a difference?

Aussie men’s mag loses 130,000 inflatable breasts
Somewhere out there is a floating island that will surprise passing cruise ships

Exact Editions is feeling bullish about Google Magazines
The Big G’s 37% fee and inability to customise among their reasons to be cheerful

A day at the press
Eye gets our hands dirty

Stack offers a different independent magazine every month
Sounds good – but why didn’t any of the big distribution houses come up with this? There’s a huge lack of imagination in distribution that means they miss out on ideas like this one, that can inject a bit of excitement for an audience craving new things outside of the mainstream.

Anyway, once there are many more mags, I want to be able to choose between the person selecting the mag. So I could get, say, Jeremy‘s selection for 3 months, then switch to Ralph and Sarah‘s, with a small note inside explaining their choices. Prediction: I foresee a tie-in between Stack and Distill. They’re made for each other.

Amelia’s Magazine has long been a reference point for the independent magazine world.

Founded in 2004, each book-thick issue has been painstakingly put together by a gang of talented interns, illustrators and Amelia herself, to the acclaim of fans around the world. And the latest issue, number 10 (now available to pre-order) is its last.

Though the pop-culture/fashion articles mixed with illustration (and occasional free stickers) have always made its pages distinctive, Amelia’s is probably best known for its cover innovations: scratch and sniff, encrusted with Swarovski crystals (before Harpers Bazaar did it), covered in flock, glow in the dark, printed on metallic foil (before Interview did it)… the last issue’s logo is covered in lime-green glitter, ending a visually striking sequence.

The website will apparently continue, but the print is no more. Though some have blamed the financial situation for its demise, in fact Amelia decided to stop at the beginning of the summer, before the credit crunch really hit. In a Magtastic blogsclusive, she shares stories of ongoing financial hardship, fighting mediocrity and why she always suspected that ten might be enough…

Did you have a particular vision for Amelia’s from the beginning?
Only in so much that I have very much pursued my own vision, without much regard to whether it will be a financial or critical success.

Was it aimed at a particular audience?
No, I’ve never been that way inclined. The magazine is purely based on the things that I like and think should be promoted, in the hope that others will appreciate what I have to say – it seems to have worked!

Why the printing innovations?
Because I am a very tactile person, and since the start I always wanted to produce a magazine that was desirable because it was special. In a sea of mediocrity I wanted to stand out – and I feel that if printing is to survive in its current form then it needs to adapt – information can be easily imparted on the internet but to hold something in your hands should be special. And yes, I think it has been part of my success and also my downfall because it hasn’t been cheap to do.

Was Amelia’s Magazine ever profitable?
No, it has been a total labour of love and I have barely eked a living for five years now, but it has got a lot worse recently – there is a lot more at stake now because my print runs are so much bigger, and because most of the magazines are sold on sale or return I am constantly chasing money that is owed to me to pay my printer, and in some cases I never get it. So my printer is constantly chasing me for money and it’s just too stressful. Plus I now have hardly any advertising, which I never anticipated, but I guess it is the times and I can’t survive without it. So the decision to stop making the magazine is partly financial but also creative – there are so many other things I want to do and I just don’t have the time at the moment, so I want to free up that time to pursue other avenues.

What do you wish you’d known when you began Amelia’s?
That the ability to get advertising revenue has nothing to do with how well your magazine is known or loved. If you don’t have your foot in the advertising world then you are screwed.

Is it possible to make money from publishing your own magazine?
No, probably not unless you are a total workaholic lunatic (I’m not, I have a life) or are willing to compromise your values to make money (again, I’m not)

How much has it cost you to publish Amelia’s?
Oh god, I’ve never added it all up – I dread to think! All I do know is that issue 9 has cost me in the region of £40,000 just to produce, and that’s not including any overheads or salaries. And I still owe money for the production of issue 8…

Is issue 10 a retrospective?
No, it will be like all the rest – I always planned to do 10 magazines and then go out with a bang if I felt like it at that point – which it turns out I do. So the 10 issues should stand as entities on their own – I would rather Amelia’s Magazine was remembered with fondness as a great design magazine of its time than petering slowly out into nothing.

What’s next?
At the moment I have so many ideas churning around that I am not quite sure where to start – I would hate to leave the world of publishing altogether as I love producing something tangible. I am toying with the idea of producing an Amelia’s Annual, sort of based on those annuals that kids used to love, but for adults. It will be a creative, ideas-based publication, and would encompass anything that I am interested in.

However, at the moment I have no idea how I will be able to fund it, and as publishing lead times are so long I may look at a different publishing model based on my reputation – I may only print what people order online before it goes to print, thereby decreasing all the usual risks! (but probably not selling very much either)

I might also start working with illustrators to produce environmentally friendly, high-quality notebooks, or I might work with a music company on the idea of bespoke limited edition USBs like the one that comes free with issue 9. I also want to start work on a book about sustainable communities and ecovillages around the world, which may mean that I do a fair bit of travelling next year and blogging en route. I am not sure how my website would run if that happened because at the moment I have 8 interns helping me to run it and it seems that is barely enough!

So maybe I will downsize everything, I don’t know. I want to start running the sustainable arts camps that I had hoped to start running this year, whereby artists and environmentalists and activists will get a chance to work together on ideas to improve our world.

In the end so much of my time has been taken up with other projects like helping to run Climate Camp at Kingsnorth that I just haven’t been able to get the idea off the ground yet. And I have lots of other ideas but they are all a bit up in the air – I am trying not to do too much as that is my usual default setting and I think I need to chill out a bit! But in the long term, I want to set up a sustainable arts community somewhere in the UK, and I need to learn a lot more about how to do that first…

I am also working much more towards the Climate Rush – and it looks like I might produce a book with illustrators and climate change thinkers (well, it’s an idea anyway!)

This morning via FedEx I received something that could be significant – a special edition of the new issue of Clear, created for Design Miami. And it’s 100% Tree Free.

It feels and looks like a normal print magazine, but it’s not made from paper at all. This is the world’s first pulpless printed magazine, produced on premium synthetic paper by YUPO – a kind of polypropylene plastic already used for detergent labels, maps and menus.

How is it? Mighty strange.

It looks and feels like a normal issue of Clear. Semi-translucent cover, usual size, maybe slightly thicker paper. And then you put your nose to it, and smell it. Me, I’m a fresh ink junkie, but this smells vaguely… chemical, in a way I wasn’t expecting.

The pages feel like a usual glossy, extra-thick stock fashion/design mag, printed perhaps on 130gsm or thereabouts. Up close, the images aren’t incredibly crisp, but they’re more than usable, if a little dark at times – which could just as easily be a result of the pre-press (though there is a slight increase in dot gain on this type of material – see below).

It may feel normal, but the real fun comes when you put it to the test.

Test one: A splash of water

Oops, did I do that?

A quick wipe and it’s gone. I suspect witchcraft.

Test two: A 30-second bath

In she goes.

And out she comes, uncurled and wipe-cleanable. Following this, I noticed a tendency for pages to stick together slightly with the water, but you can prise them apart and wipe them dry without much trouble.

Test three: Sweet Mango Chutney

Mango chutney.

Sweet. A small dab of water removed all grease stains.

Test four: Let her rip

Try as I did, I couldn’t tear the thing. The best I got was a slight wrinkle. Pretty much passed all my tests – all that’s left is to ask Tom Dixon.

In other words, it looks like paper, feels like paper, acts like a kitchen counter. There are definitely certain kinds of magazine that would benefit from printing on this material – magazines designed to be read in bath, for instance, recipe magazines or those that will get a lot of use, such as inflight magazines. Also magazines that are designed to last a long, long time – I suspect there will be little yellowing and fading of colours in this over time, compared to the rest of my crumbling, acid-free paper-covered collection.

Although YUPO doesn’t quite claim that their paper is environmentally friendly, by using less water and no timber, they trumpet it as a greener alternative to paper pulp. However, being a category 5 polypropylene (PP) plastic film, presumably it needs oil to make it.

As a category 5, it can be recycled alongside your plastic bottles (though you may need to include an explanatory note to your local recycling plant), and to greater effect than paper, which suffers fibre shortening with each recycling. It also claims to be lighter than paper – so reducing shipping costs and carbon footprints related to shipping. As with everything green, there are many conflicting calculations to be made, and I’m not going to claim that this removes all of publishing’s room elephants.

It’s also not a simple substitution for paper – currently there is a stack of specific printing restrictions on using synthetic papers, including a 4-7% increased dot gain, limits on press speed, humidity and more, and YUPO’s papers require both special inks and much longer drying time than your normal magazine ink / paper combo. On the plus side, they do offer a version that works with HP Indigo printers, opening up the possibility of using it for POD and short-run pieces (just imagine the client’s face when you drop your magazine sample in their fish tank).

Overall, it’s a leftfield introduction to the marketplace, applicable in the main to a few very specific solutions. For now, the latest issue of Clear remains a technological curio – but one that hints towards a possible future for print that may also be print.

Details of where you can pick up copies of the limited-edition tree-free Clear magazine here.

Interesting new development from the HP labs: Tabbloid, a free way of creating regular PDFs from your favourite RSS feeds. The basic template isn’t bad, all things considered – a clear two-column grid that reproduces both the images and all of the text (depending on your feed), unlike the vaguely unsatisfying Print Screen Print demo featured on Boicozine recently.

I’m not sure if it comes from the same HP limb as its POD magazine service MagCloud, but there’s definitely potential for a crossover there.

Speaking of grids, here’s a bonus link of designy usefulness via the wise words of Mark Porter.