Growing up in Nottingham in the nineties, the world felt both enormous and completely out of reach. London was two hours south. New York was a film set. Tokyo was another planet. But every month, for the price of a few quid, the world arrived on a shelf in WHSmith and suddenly everything felt possible.
The Face: i-D. Dazed & Confused. FHM: loaded. Arena. Whatever I could get my hands on, basically. I wasn't discerning about it at first - I just wanted to absorb everything. The photography, the fashion, the typography, the interviews with people I had never heard of doing things I didn't know existed. Each magazine was a portal. A curated window into a world that was bigger, stranger, and more interesting than anything I could see from my bedroom.
I didn't realise it at the time, but those magazines were training me. Every page was a lesson in curation, in editorial judgment, in the idea that how something looks is inseparable from what it means. That training never stopped. It just found new outputs.
The editor was the algorithm
Here's what people forget about the magazine era: there was no algorithm. There was no feed. There was no recommendation engine analysing your behaviour and serving you more of what you already liked. There was a person - an editor - sitting in a room, making choices about what mattered and what didn't. What deserved a full spread and what got a single column. What went on the cover and what got killed entirely.
That was curation with conviction. Not curation by committee, not curation by data, but curation by taste. Someone like Terry Jones at i-D or Nick Logan at The Face wasn't showing you what was popular. They were showing you what they believed was about to become popular. They were placing bets on culture. And when they got it right - which was often - they didn't just reflect the zeitgeist. They created it.
Think about what that means. A single person's taste, applied with rigour and confidence, could shape what an entire generation cared about. Neville Brody's typography for The Face didn't just look good. It created a visual language that defined an era. That's the power of editorial conviction. That's what happens when someone trusts their own eye over the data.
Every algorithm I encounter now feels like a pale imitation of what those editors did. The algorithm shows you more of what you've already consumed. A great editor showed you what you didn't yet know you needed. One reinforces your existing taste. The other expands it. They're fundamentally different acts, and we've confused them for the same thing.
Typography as identity
Before I ever thought about strategy or branding or product design, magazines taught me that visual choices carry meaning. Not decorative meaning - actual, communicative meaning. The font on the cover of The Face told you something before you read a single headline. The layout of an i-D spread communicated a philosophy. The white space in a Wallpaper* feature said as much as the words.
This wasn't something I intellectualised at the time. I just felt it. Some magazines felt cool and others felt try-hard, and the difference was always in the details: the weight of the typeface, the generosity of the margins, the confidence of the colour palette. I was learning a visual vocabulary without knowing it.
That vocabulary is now the foundation of everything I build. When I'm designing CultureTerminal, I'm making the same kinds of decisions those art directors made: what typeface says "this is serious but not stuffy"? How much space does this content need to breathe? What does the colour palette communicate about the tone? These aren't aesthetic questions. They're strategic ones. The visual language IS the strategy, expressed in pixels instead of paragraphs.
The cover test
There's a test I apply to everything I make, and it comes directly from magazines. I call it the cover test. A great album cover tells you everything about the music before you hear a note. A great magazine cover tells you everything about the editor's worldview before you turn a page. It's a promise, made entirely through design, about what you're about to experience.
Every product I build has to pass the cover test. When someone lands on Modern Retro for the first time, before they scroll, before they read a word of copy, they should feel something. They should understand what this is, who it's for, and whether it is for them. That happens through typography, colour, spacing, and tone - the same tools a magazine cover uses.
This is why I obsess over first impressions. It's why I'll spend an hour adjusting the size of a heading or the opacity of a background gradient. Because I learned from magazines that the first visual impression isn't a preliminary step before the real content. It IS content. It's the most important content, because it determines whether anyone sticks around for the rest.
Digital never replaced it
I've heard the argument a hundred times. Instagram is the new magazine. Pinterest is the new mood board. Substack is the new editorial. And I understand why people say it. The surface-level similarities are there. But none of these platforms capture the thing that made magazines actually work: the constraint of physical space forcing better decisions.
When you have 120 pages and 50,000 words to fill, every inclusion is a conscious choice. Every image earns its place. Every headline competes for real estate that can't expand to accommodate weakness. That constraint - that brutal, beautiful limitation - is what produced the quality. It forced editors to be ruthless. It forced designers to be inventive. It forced writers to be concise.
Digital has no such constraint. An Instagram grid can expand infinitely. A Pinterest board has no page count. A Substack post has no word limit. And without those constraints, the quality dilutes. The curation loosens. The intentionality fades. You end up with more content and less meaning, which is roughly where we're now.
This is why Tumblr, at its best, felt closer to the magazine spirit than anything else digital has produced. Tumblr had constraints - the format, the reblog culture, the visual primacy. It rewarded taste over volume. It felt curated rather than algorithmic. And it's no coincidence that the generation who grew up on Tumblr are some of the most visually literate people working in creative industries today. They learned the same lessons I learned from print, just through a different medium.
The magazines are mostly gone now. The Face relaunched and it isn't quite the same: i-D is digital-first. Dazed exists but the culture around it has shifted. The newsagent shelf that once held a hundred different visions of the world now holds a fraction of that. And whatever has taken its place online - the feeds, the grids, the algorithmically sorted content - isn't the same thing. It isn't even trying to be the same thing.
But the instinct those magazines built in me - the eye for layout, the feel for typography, the belief that how something looks IS what it means - that lives in every pixel of every project I ship. When I'm choosing the typeface for Taste OS, I'm channelling Neville Brody. When I'm deciding the colour palette for CultureTerminal, I'm thinking about the art directors who taught me that colour isn't decoration, it is communication. When I'm agonising over the spacing of a heading, I'm doing exactly what those magazine designers did: making sure the visual impression carries as much meaning as the words.
The medium is different. The tools are different. But the discipline is the same. And if there's one thing those magazines taught me above all else, it's this: in a world drowning in content, the only thing that cuts through is taste. Not more content. Not louder content. Taste. The confidence to choose, the conviction to commit, and the craft to make those choices feel inevitable.
That's the magazine era's real legacy. Not the magazines themselves. The people they trained.
