What happened to I.D.

Print‘s stablemate I.D.‘s demise was a sad tale to be sure, especially as told on Design Observer by former editor-in-chief Julie Lasky. Her piece also contains some lovely reflections on/mixed metaphors for the continual evolution of magazines.

Magazines are organic. They take on shapes and personalities that are independent of those who make them, and in this margin of self-sufficiency is something eerily close to life. Magazines are mammalian: warm-blooded, twitchy and dynamic…

And of course magazines are historical. The internet is a bottomless archive, but it spits information back to us in fragments, and we’re never sure which pieces might disappear forever. A magazine archive unspools to allow us to see aesthetic movements wildly imitated before they’re just as passionately revoked and to watch the youth of our industries mature and grow old and give way to new talents. Would anyone be able to make sense of so unruly a profession as design, with its vague and shifting borders, if it weren’t bound into our journals?

Amen.