At the end of a personally tumultuous week, in which I left the BBC after five years and started straight away at Monocle as Director of Web and Broadcast, the first issues of the magazine arrived from the printers in the office on Friday evening, to huge excitement. Not the final production quality, but close. And it’s amazing. You might expect me to say this but I think it’s going to utterly delight people. The design and production quality are extraordinary; four different paper stocks across each issue; beautifully crisp layout and typography; stunning photography; and most importantly of all, fascinating articles with an editorial approach to a ‘global briefing’ that you won’t see anywhere else. You will get see all from Thursday 15th, when it hits newsstands globally.
Amidst the other titles on any of those kiosks, it’ll be completely distinctive. There’s nothing quite like it. We’ve had the magazine’s pages pasted up across on our ‘wall of wonder’ at Monocle HQ in Marylebone for a couple of weeks now, but seeing it in the flesh is something else. It’s a bloody book, I tell you.
I’ve had limited influence on the magazine side thus far, having been involved somewhat at a distance over the last few months, but I feel immensely fortunate to have been able to watch the team in action. As I mentioned previously, it’s both thrilling and sobering to see how the creative and industrial process of making a magazine has been honed to streamlined effectiveness, given a few hundred years’ practice. Sobering, as it makes new media seem a clumsy, gauche ingenue in comparison. I’ve been working flat out to ensure that the website on the 15th provides a sense of what’s to follow there too, from the broadcast side. It’s been hugely instructive already. I’ve been focusing more on content creation rather than design and architecture – that will follow – and hope to have a series of interesting, engaging features there on Thursday too. Apologies for the lack of posts here recently, but I’m sure you understand. More later.
City of Sound 
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