Saturday morning, Nottingham, sometime around 1998. I'm standing in the magazine aisle of WHSmith on Listergate with two pounds fifty in my pocket. This is the weekly ritual. Mum's in the queue for the lottery counter or browsing the stationery, and I have maybe fifteen minutes to make the hardest decision of my week: which magazine to buy. Two pounds fifty gets you one. Maybe two if there's something thin on the bottom shelf with a lower cover price. The choice matters because it's the only choice I have that feels entirely mine.
The aisle is organised by category but I don't care about categories. I care about covers. I'm moving slowly along the rack, pulling things out, feeling the weight, checking the spine, looking at the paper stock. This magazine is glossy and thick, that one is matte and thin. This one has a cover that stops me. A photograph I haven't seen. A typeface that does something unexpected. A colour combination that feels right in a way I can't articulate because I'm thirteen and don't have the vocabulary for design yet. But the feeling is there. The pull toward certain things and away from others. The beginning of taste.
The Face was the one that changed everything, though I didn't know it at the time. I remember picking it up and it being heavier than I expected. The cover wasn't trying to sell me anything. It wasn't screaming. It just was. A photograph, a name, a confident simplicity that said: if you know, you know. And I didn't know. Not yet. But I wanted to. I wanted to be the kind of person who understood why this magazine felt different from the ones next to it. That wanting - that aspiration toward understanding - is the earliest memory I have of caring about taste.
The education nobody planned
Nobody told me magazines were an education. My parents weren't designers or art directors. Nottingham in the nineties wasn't a design capital. The WHSmith on Listergate was not a gallery. But the magazine aisle functioned as one, and the curriculum was extraordinary: editorial design, typography, photography, art direction, copywriting, brand identity, and the subtle art of making someone feel something before they've read a single word. Every cover was a pitch. Every layout was a lesson in hierarchy. Every pull quote was a masterclass in knowing which sentence to elevate above the rest.
I bought everything. Not all at once - two pounds fifty per week, remember - but over the years, I worked my way across the entire rack. The Face for the photography and the attitude. i-D for the wink covers and the feeling that fashion could be weird and democratic. Dazed for the boundary-pushing editorial that I half-understood at best. FHM and loaded because I was a teenage boy in the nineties and that's what teenage boys bought, but also because their design was sharper than anyone gives them credit for. The layouts in loaded, the early issues, were genuinely inventive. I didn't know the word "art direction" but I was studying it every Saturday.
The physical quality mattered more than I realised. The weight of the paper. The way a thick, glossy page catches light differently from a matte one. The smell - every magazine person knows the smell, that specific ink-on-paper chemical sweetness that hits you when you crack a fresh spine. These are sensory details that sound precious when you write them down but were formative when you experienced them. I was learning that quality has a feel. That good things have weight. That the medium is not separate from the message; it is part of the message. Every product I build now, I'm still trying to make it feel like it has weight. Like someone cared about the paper stock, even when there is no paper.
The cover decision
A magazine cover has approximately two seconds to make you pick it up. Two seconds, in a wall of competing covers, to say something that makes your hand reach out instead of moving on. The editors and art directors who made those covers understood something that I now think about every single day: first impressions are not superficial. They are the whole game. The person who scrolls past your product in two seconds is not being shallow. They are being human. You have to earn the stop. You have to make someone pause.
Every product I build, I think about the cover. Not literally - products don't have covers. But they have a first moment. The first screen. The first colour. The first typeface. The first sentence. And that first moment has to do what The Face did to me in WHSmith: make someone feel that this thing is worth their time, before they know anything about what's inside. I learned this from magazine covers twenty-five years ago, and I have never learned a more useful lesson about design.
The aisle is gone
The WHSmith on Listergate still exists, I think, though the magazine section has shrunk to a fraction of what it was. The titles are thinner. The rack is shorter. The kids standing in the aisle with pocket money are on their phones instead. This is not a lament about the death of print - print is dying in some ways and evolving in others, and the magazines that survive are often better than they've ever been. It's an observation about where taste comes from, and whether the replacement is as good as the original.
My kid will never stand in a magazine aisle making the two-pound-fifty decision. Their taste education will come from somewhere else - from YouTube, from social media, from whatever platform is dominant when they're old enough to care about these things. And maybe that's fine. Maybe the inputs don't matter as much as the instinct they develop. Maybe a kid scrolling through well-designed Instagram accounts is getting the same education I got from The Face. I don't know. I suspect it's different. I suspect there's something about the physical object, the finite choice, the commitment of spending your only money on one thing, that teaches taste in a way that infinite scrolling cannot.
But I'm biased. I'm forty years old and I still buy magazines. Not from WHSmith, usually - from independent newsagents and bookshops, the kind of places where the selection is curated rather than comprehensive. The ritual has changed but the instinct hasn't. I still reach for the thing that stops me. I still feel the paper. I still care about the cover. And when I sit down at my kitchen table at 9pm to build something new, I'm still, in some fundamental way, standing in that aisle in Nottingham, trying to make something that a thirteen-year-old with two pounds fifty would pick up and feel was worth it.
