Exactly one week ago, after about eight months of hard work, my wife and I unleashed our new magazine into the world and I’m happy to say that — in case you missed the news — Lagom now is available to buy from readlagom.com and a growing list of stockists all over the world.

As you can see, it’s taken me a week to write this post. Partly because I’m still experiencing that post-release high that makes concentration hard; partly because we’re both coming down with some sort of flu now that we’ve ‘stopped’; partly because there’s just so much admin to deal with after a launch. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, though, and it feels great to have the mag out there — it’s such a thrill to see people posting photos of it online, and to see it literally sitting on shelves in bookshops. Here it is in Magma, in great company:

We’ve also been lucky enough to get some decent press coverage. Today we were interviewed on Creative Review’s blog, and there are more press appearances to come.

I’m immensely proud of Lagom. It’s the culmination of everything I’ve learned about publishing, print design, typography, logistics, and the entire editorial process from my previous print projects. It’s also the first project my wife and I have created together, and working with Sam has been an absolutely amazing experience. Her editorial direction is so much stronger than mine and it’s resulted in a magazine that is far more focussed and mature than any of my previous publishing attempts.

Lagom’s team — a total of 23 people, including us — have produced some incredible work. From articles to photos to illustrations, the pieces we got back were so good that we ended up giving each story more and more space to let the words and pictures breathe, until eventually the magazine literally doubled from our original estimate of 64 pages. Given the thick uncoated paper stock (140gsm for the interior and 300gsm for the cover), those 128 pages in a perfect-bound spine make for a veritable weapon!


For Lagom’s website, we opted for a Squarespace theme. Part of me feels like a cheat using a theme rather than designing (or commissioning) my own, but the reality is that Squarespace’s templates are so good, and my time was so occupied with the print work, that a bespoke website just didn’t make sense. Squarespace is so powerful, too: not only is the admin ridiculously easy to work with, but their commerce platform is robust. — far superior, even, to other platforms whose primary product is commerce. Crucially, it integrates with Stripe, the payment gateway we’ve been using for a while now with 8 Faces. It was literally just a case of connecting the two, which was so easy: pretty much like when you allow apps to access your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

I should add that, yes, Squarespace is one of our partners, but that’s not why we’re using them. It’s the other way around: we use (and pay for) their product because we love it and that’s why we asked them to be a partner. The same thing goes for MailChimp. Love those guys.

Anyway, I’ve probably waffled on enough for now. I’ll be writing more about Lagom in the near future; especially about the nerdy design details like its type system and grid system.

You can buy Lagom #1 — or a multi-issue subsciption — directly from readlagom.com, or from a growing number of physical shops. I hope you like it, and please do tweet photos to me if you get a copy!