So I want to fill everyone in on the course we are taking with the mag.  We are getting a lot of emails asking when issue #2 is going to drop.  Well we decided to make The Art of Storytelling  a book format, kind of a magazine/book hybrid.  We are increasing the page count to 200 pages and stepping up the paper stock.  It is going to be real thick and hefty and is going to be limited to 3,000 copies, released twice a year.  Our decision to go this route is two fold.

First off we have been developing articles and interviews that, in our opinion, are way more in depth than what other magazines are putting out.  We have been taking the time to get vintage photography and structuring the feature stories more as retrospectives and really digging in the past to give you a historical look at the subcultures that we cover.  For instance issue#2 features Zephyr, The Getup Kids, Shut Skateboards, and Joker Brand clothing amongst others.  All of these people went into their personal photo albums and pulled out photos going back some 10 -15 years, no stock or publicity photos were allowed, that to me is a waste of space…save it for the blogs.  Some of these people literally went into their mothers attic to get us the photos we needed. The result is completely original content and photography.  I would rather see all this hard work put into a more permanent type of publication.  On top of that, in terms of presentation, the book format gives us more pages to work with to give these articles the space they deserve.

Second,  the print industry is changing by the minute.  With the new “tablets” being released relatively soon we recognize that content will get even easier to deliver to the public.  If people are going to drop their hard earned money to actually buy content,  and advertisers are going to spend money to advertise then they want a solid, original product.  That is what we are producing with these books.

All that being said, we are super excited with the content we have compiled for issue #2.  There is no doubt that when people open this issue it is going to be a “what the fuck” kind of thing.  Post some comments regarding the new format, I would like to hear what people have to say.

Over the next few weeks I am going to do a series of posts about each of the feature’s stories for this issue.  I am going to talk about the process behind putting that section together, what problems we encountered, why we decided to cover a particular person etc.  I am going to talk to Chris and Justin and have them do the same for the design side of things.  It has been a fun process learning how to put a magazine together from scratch and I think by bringing everyone into our process will be a cool way to run our blog.