Grub Street: A cover story...
Discover more from The Magazine Diaries from Grub Street
How do we 🧡 thee?
Let us count the ways.
LOADS of you have already pre-ordered Issue 1 of The Grub Street Journal. Thank you. You’ve blown us away. If you’ve 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.
We’re also very much loving the feedback we’re getting on the cover. Favourite comments so far include:
“Pass the sunglasses!”
“Could you not have got any more colours on there?”
“NNNNNNNGGGG…”
Keep ‘em coming.
And speaking of the cover…
A couple of people have asked us, “Why ‘The Don Quixote Issue?” 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 don’t 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 Houston’s 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 – but to us, they’re still worth fighting for. We hope this cover will remind people of that.
And to really hammer our ‘brutally honest but relentlessly optimistic’ message home…
We got our cover designer, Sara Jane Gillespie on board.
I met Sara through Lauren Currie’s UPFRONT course – she’s currently getting a lot of attention for her brilliant UPFRONT and Centre conference asset design – 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 ‘push and pull’ 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 that’s the cover – now we just have to finish making the bloody thing. Will we end up pulling our hair out in despair? Will ‘Shopify’ end up as the new swear word in our house? Tune in next week to find out…
Wish us luck, friends,
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