I grew up in the magazine era. The Face, i-D, Dazed & Confused, FHM, loaded, GQ - whatever I could get my hands on. As a teenager in Nottingham in the 1990s, these magazines weren't just something to read. They were windows into a world I wanted to be part of. They shaped my taste before I knew what taste was. They taught me about design, about music, about fashion, about culture, without ever explicitly teaching me anything. The lesson was in the curation itself. In what was chosen and what was left out. In the sequence and the juxtaposition. In the feeling of holding a finite, considered object that someone had laboured over.
The internet was supposed to replace magazines. In many practical ways, it has. But in the process of replacing them, it forgot almost everything that made them great. The internet took the content and left behind the craft. It took the information and discarded the experience. It took the articles and abandoned the editorial judgment that made those articles worth reading in the first place.
Print magazines got several things profoundly right that the internet has got profoundly wrong. And I think the most interesting digital products being built today are, consciously or not, trying to bring those principles back.
Editors, not algorithms
A magazine had an editor. A human being with taste, opinions, and the authority to decide what went in and what stayed out. The editor wasn't neutral. Neutrality would have been a failure. The editor's job was to have a point of view - to decide that this story matters and that one doesn't, that this photograph belongs on the cover and that one belongs inside, that this topic deserves eight pages and that one deserves a single column.
The editorial decision was an act of curation, and the reader trusted it because the editor had earned that trust over time. You bought The Face because you trusted the editors to show you things you didn't know you wanted to see. You didn't agree with every choice. But you respected the point of view behind it.
The internet replaced editors with algorithms. Instead of a human deciding what you should see, a machine decides what you're most likely to click. The result is predictable: you see more of what you already like, more of what provokes you, more of what's popular, less of what's new, challenging, or surprising. The editorial function - the willingness to show you something you didn't ask for because the editor believes you need to see it - has been almost entirely lost.
Finite, not infinite
A magazine ends. You pick it up, you read it, you put it down. There are a fixed number of pages. The editor had to make hard choices about what to include because space was limited. That constraint - that finiteness - wasn't a bug. It was the most important feature.
Finiteness forces quality. When you only have 96 pages, every page has to earn its place. There's no filler because there's no room for filler. Every article, every photograph, every piece of typography has been considered against the alternatives. The thing that made it in beat the thing that didn't. Selection pressure creates quality in the same way it creates evolution.
The internet is infinite. There is always more. The feed never ends. The scroll never finishes. And because there's always more, there's no pressure to make each piece excellent. There's no selection pressure because there is no scarcity. The result is an ocean of content where quality is diluted to homeopathic levels, and the reader's experience isn't satisfaction but exhaustion.
The best newsletters understand this. A newsletter from a writer you trust lands in your inbox with a defined beginning and end. You read it, you're done. It respects your time by being finite. It earns your attention by being selective. It behaves, in other words, like a tiny magazine - edited, curated, complete.
Design as editorial statement
In a great magazine, the design isn't decoration. It is editorial. The choice of typeface communicates something about the publication's identity. The layout of a feature - whether it gets a full-page photograph or a text-heavy spread - communicates the editor's judgment about its importance. The white space is as intentional as the text. Everything you see on the page is a decision, and every decision expresses a point of view.
The internet treats design as a container. The same template holds every article. The same layout serves every piece of content regardless of its importance. A 5,000-word investigative report looks identical to a 300-word news brief. The design doesn't differentiate because the system wasn't built to differentiate. It was built to be efficient, not expressive.
This is why I care so much about design in the products I build. Not because I think a pub guide needs to win design awards. But because the design choices - the typography, the colour palette, the spacing, the hierarchy - communicate something about what the product values. They tell the user: someone cared about this. Someone thought about how it should feel, not just what it should do. That care is the editorial statement, expressed through pixels instead of ink.
The physical object
There's something about holding a magazine that no screen can replicate. The weight of it. The smell of the paper. The texture of the cover. The way a spread opens up to reveal a full-bleed photograph that you weren't expecting. These aren't sentimental observations. They're design features. The physicality of the object creates an experience that the content alone can't.
I'm not arguing for a return to print. The economics don't work, and the internet's accessibility is genuinely valuable. But I think digital product designers should study what made print special and find digital equivalents. Not skeuomorphic imitations of paper textures - that isn't the point. But thoughtful use of space, pacing, surprise, and texture that creates an experience beyond mere information delivery.
The dot grid background on this site isn't a print imitation. But it's inspired by the feeling of a printed page - the subtle texture that gives depth to an otherwise flat surface. The reading progress bar is a digital equivalent of knowing how many pages you have left. The finite article length - a beginning, a middle, an end - is magazine thinking applied to the web. These are small things. But small things are what magazines got right and what the internet, in its rush to scale, consistently gets wrong.
What we can bring back
I don't think the magazine era is coming back. But I think its principles are more relevant than ever. The internet has spent twenty years optimising for volume, speed, and engagement. The next era should optimise for the things magazines always prioritised: quality, curation, and the courage to have a point of view.
Build products with editorial judgment. Decide what matters and make those decisions visible. Create finite experiences that respect the user's time. Treat design as expression, not container. Have a point of view and express it through every choice - what you include, what you exclude, how you present it, and why.
The magazines taught me everything about taste before I knew that was what they were teaching. Every product I build is an attempt to apply those lessons to a new medium. Not to replicate print, but to honour what print understood that the internet has forgotten: that the selection is the art, the constraint is the craft, and the point of view is the product.
