Steve Watson: “Next we have a magazine called Offscreen. It’s always kind of tempting to pick out movements in magazines, trends, but this isn’t a trend. There’s two magazines. So this magazine Offscreen is made by a guy called Kai Brach, who is based in Melbourne. He is a freelance webdesigner but has decided to try to get out to the world an idea of what it’s like to be a webdesigner—he made a magazine. And this came out a couple of months after a magazine called The Manual, which is made by a guy called Andy McMillan who’s based in Belfast. The Manual is more kind of the philosophy of web design and the ideas behind it. Offscreen is very much about the people who make it. In fact, I interviewed him recently and he is very open in saying that Monocle is his main kind of inspiration. I’m not sure he travelled the world himself, bu he emailed lots of people around the world and puts together a really, really good looking magazine which goes into web designer studios, talks to them about their working day, what can they see out their window…

Julienne D: “It’s interesting that they are using print to do that, not some online blog.”

Steve: “Exactly. So both of these guys whose entire lives are based in web have chosen print as away of getting the message out there. So I asked Kai, why he decided to do that and he was saying that he’s always loved independent magazines and these days a good magazine is the only thing that can make him put down his iPhone, his iPad, shut off the computer… and just focus specifically on one thing. I’m very careful of not saying … I think people expect me to be the guy to come in and say “print is just magically and beautiful and it will always live forever”, but I don’t think that’s the case. I do think it does some things really really well and I think it’s pretty interesting that these two web guys have picked out some of the things that print does well.

(…)

Andrew Mueller: “But I do think it’s a beautiful looking magazine. It smells nice as well!”

Steve: “They all smell nice!”

Andrew: “This really is one of those magazines that really, really does.”