Creating Selfish Permanence in a Digital Design World

[responsive]offscreen-1[/responsive]Kai Brach admits that the initial motivation for creating his new print magazine was purely selfish.

“I was doing web designs for clients and I got really tired of producing something that didn’t last very long; whenever you create a website or some other digital design, it lives as long as the next release cycle or the next version number,” Brach told Samir Husni.

“So you produce something and it’s online now and two weeks later it’s already changed or it’s gone and disappeared into the ether that is the internet,” continued Brach.

“This process was not fulfilling at all and I really wanted to produce something that lasted longer than the average website. I wanted to create something that I could put on my shelf and say, look, this is what I made, and it will last as long as I have it on my shelf,” he notes.

The magazine is called Offscreen, and is published by former web designer Brach, who found “he needed something more tangible than the virtual worlds of the internet to fulfill him. He needed to feel his work would last beyond mere pixels; he needed the collectability of print. He needed more than a software update; he needed the final version,” Husni explains.

In addition to creating that tangible “final version,” Brach wanted to create something that was non-interruptible.

“I personally find myself either reading something on my Kindle, iPad or my iPhone, which I don’t have an iPad any longer, but when I read something on any of my mobile devices, I get probably 10 minutes of read time before I’m interrupted by an email or some other notification,” he explains to Husni.

“And I noticed that whenever I read a book or a magazine on my travels, when I’m on the train or on the plane, that’s when I actually enjoy reading.”

This enjoyment is a real benefit of print, and our own research shows that consumers prefer print over digital magazines. Offscreen is a great example of innovating thinking beyond the limits of platform and expectation, and we applaud this type of creative selfishness.