thursday, january 14, 2010
Friends and type
My college has a student-run poetry magazine, and I worked on it from freshman year to senior year. I like poetry, but more importantly I like publishing! Sorting bad writing from good writing, and then distributing the good stuff, is a lot of work and is pretty fun. This is a tiny publication, with printing funded by a donation; we sell some copies to students, faculty, and friends. Each year brings a mostly-new staff of volunteer students, and each year they have the chance to make something out of it.
We end up doing what Literature students are supposed to do: reading lots of writing from a wide variety of authors and talking about them in a small self-directed group, dissecting reams of terrible free verse about boyfriends and traffic jams and iguanas. Sometimes I convinced people to talk about product strategy, and sometimes we all went out to eat crepes.
I also rearranged the website, but I mess with websites all the time. More unusual: I got to design the last two print issues (Spring 2008 and Spring 2009), and I chose to make new templates and style guidelines based on the layout in the magazine’s first issue from 1999. They’re not complex, but I liked re-reading The Elements of Typographic Style again and trying to apply what I’ve learned.
