Grub Street: A cover story...
How do we 𧥠thee?
Let us count the ways.
LOADS of you have already pre-ordered Issue 1 of The Grub Street Journal. Thank you. Youâve blown us away. If youâve not earmarked your copy yet, you can preorder via the button below. Go on, give us your support.
Quite a few of you have been promoting the mag on social media, in newsletters, etc. YOU ARE GOOD EGGS. We have a tight budget and only two pairs of hands, so all the help we can get spreading the word is very much appreciated.
Weâre also very much loving the feedback weâre getting on the cover. Favourite comments so far include:
âPass the sunglasses!â
âCould you not have got any more colours on there?â
âNNNNNNNGGGGâŠâ
Keep âem coming.
And speaking of the coverâŠ
A couple of people have asked us, âWhy âThe Don Quixote Issue?â Well, sidestepping the mental health issues the book brings up, Don Quixote just seemed to be the perfect metaphor to hang our first cover on.
If you donât know the story: There is this guy, Don Quixote, who decides to re-introduce chivalry to Spain by becoming a knight. His adventures with his sarky sidekick Sancho Panza can be read as pretty much anything you want: a comedy, a tragedy, a social critique, a commentary on mortality. Like Peter Houstonâs career, eh?
Anyway, for us, the image of an idealistic wee man on his knackered old horse charging down a windmill struck a chord. To some people, magazines are done â but to us, theyâre still worth fighting for. We hope this cover will remind people of that.
And to really hammer our âbrutally honest but relentlessly optimisticâ message homeâŠ
We got our cover designer, Sara Jane Gillespie on board.
I met Sara through Lauren Currieâs UPFRONT course â sheâs currently getting a lot of attention for her brilliant UPFRONT and Centre conference asset design â and frankly, I loved her attitude as well as her full-on design aesthetic.
By contrasting the energy, exuberance and chaos of her illustrations with the classical image of DQ, we were trying to capture the constant âpush and pullâ of idealism/realism, imagination/reality, routine/creativity that forms, for many of us, a day to day job in the magazine industry. Did we nail it? Let us know!
So thatâs the cover â now we just have to finish making the bloody thing. Will we end up pulling our hair out in despair? Will âShopifyâ end up as the new swear word in our house? Tune in next week to find outâŠ
Wish us luck, friends,