Once a month we invite our member magazine publishers and enthusiasts to guest-edit our email newsletter. The aim is to inspire others with magazine-related content, connect members and build our community so we can learn from each other.
This month our guest editor is Nicola Hamilton, who will be one of the guest speakers at our upcoming Meet the Retailers event on 25 February.
Nicola is the Founder and Creative Director of Issues magazine shop in Toronto, and Creative Director of Serviette magazine. You can find Nicola on LinkedIn and Instagram – remember to connect and say hello!
Tell us about yourself
I have a lot of job titles. I’m the founder of Issues Magazine Shop in Toronto, Canada. I’m the creative director at Serviette, an independent magazine about food and all the ways it’s tangled up with culture, science, history, and design. I’m the President of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, where I advocate for the value of design, help organize Canada’s largest graphic design conference and host the DesignThinkers podcast. At my core, I’m a magazine designer.
What’s on your mind?
At this very moment, I’m at my desk, which is tucked away behind the shop. I’ve spent most of the day working through details for our annual magazine conference. The event is called Cover to Cover. We’ll spend a day celebrating the people, ideas, and stories shaping independent publishing today. The lineup is kind of wild: Megan Schertler, In Real Life Media; Anja Charbonneau, Broccoli; Hillary Brenhouse, Elastic; Ojus Jain, Esses; Isaac Nikolai Fox, Lore; Whitney Mallett, The Whitney Review of New Writing; and Inori Roy, The Local. I’m still kind of pinching myself that all these folks said yes!
What’s the best article you’ve
read this month?
There are two articles that come to mind.
The first one wasn’t actually something I read this month. It was published in November, but it’s been my most shared article as of lately. It was written by writer Nicholas Hune-Brown and published by The Local, a really wonderful non-profit journalism platform here in Toronto. The piece is called “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era” and is a real eye opener.
The other is a piece from The Mortar, a new newsletter where Steve Watson from Stack is surfacing great writing by independent outlets. The piece is called “ICE vs Everyone” and explores what Minneapolis has learned about community mobilization since the George Floyd protests. It was written by Erin West and originally published in n+1.
Show us an incredible magazine cover
I have so many favourites! The two that came to mind immediately were Wired’s “Sex in the Digital Age” from March 2015 and the New York TImes Magazine’s “So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped” from November 2019. Both are brilliant, cheeky visuals.
What’s your top tip for publishers?
One of my favourite editorial design case studies as of recently is all of the paper cutting experiments at The Guardian. This isn’t new. The Guardian’s creative team started making all of its election artwork by hand in 2024. It’s Nice That covered it, then. The idea was pretty simple: make things by hand as a response to the rise of both fake news and AI-generated everything.
Last fall, I had the privilege of watching The Guardian’s Creative Director, Chris Clarke get up on stage at DesignThinkers and present his talk: Make Play, Work. It’s a brilliant exploration of how curiosity, experimentation and silliness aren’t distractions from serious work, but actually the beating heart of it. Chris talks about all the ways that embracing play actually helped his team find some joy in dark times.
What I love about this case study is that it addresses something art departments often forget: designers got into this industry because they like making things. And sometimes, that making helps us make sense of the world.
(I am also obsessed with Chris’ Substack.)
Questions for the community
What subject or issue would you like the International Magazine Centre Members Group to discuss and untangle over on LinkedIn?
My question is: What will define this era of magazine publishing?
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