Member Work/Life: Nicola Hamilton
The intersection of Dufferin and Dundas Streets in Toronto is a mess of high-traffic neighbourhood-in-transition chaos—where streetcars and express buses rattle past holdout Portuguese sports bars and newly minted vintage boutiques. Amid the bustle, is an oasis of stylistic and mental intrigue: Issues Magazine Shop, the slow-news antithesis to a fleeting deluge of #content poured like accelerant all over social media every second of every day. The brainchild of magazine designer/enthusiast Nicola Hamilton, Issues sprang up out of the pandemic to fill a void that many people didn’t even know had been sitting empty: a brick-and-mortar space devoted to magazines from around the world. Issues carries popular, glossy titles, but mostly showcases independent, beautiful, interesting, and hard-to-find (both physically and online) magazines that make you pause and invite you to flip through them (that latter of which is wholly encouraged, as that’s the whole point of the store). Nicola got her start at the beloved weekly city magazine The Grid (full disclosure, I also worked there), where she developed the design chops to work on redesigns for titles Chatelaine and Better Health, navigating the pivots to digital and video, to come full circle to her first love: print.
To start off, we’ll go back to the beginning.
⎯⎯⎯ The very beginning… the day we met.
We’ll come to that! But when did you first start exploring creativity through design?
⎯⎯⎯ So, I don’t have a good answer to this question. Lots of designers have a key moment that they recall where graphic design was a thing. I was a kid who liked art, because I found it more challenging than some of the more cerebral things. I took a really great communications technology class in high school and the instructor said, “Hey, you should think about graphic design.” So I totally did, and then I transitioned into post-secondary from there. The thing I do remember is the transition into magazines, specifically. In my final year of design school, I was like: magazines are the thing I want to do. This is where I get to look at photography and illustration and I get to read stuff and I get to dive into these weird research holes. And so in my final year of design school, I turned every project into an editorial project in some shape or form. So it was a book, it was a newspaper, it was a magazine.
What were you looking at during that time? What were you pulling in to inform some of those ideas?
⎯⎯⎯ I think music culture was a big part of it. Accessing any information about music at the time, in the late 2000s, was still hard to find on the internet. I remember vividly when I discovered Nylon magazine—which is back in print—as an alternative to your sort of traditional fashion title. I was also surrounded by magazines growing up, which is not a detail I recognized until more recently. My mom is an equestrian photographer, and her livelihood was selling photos of horses to magazines. Her office—that I had to walk through to get to my childhood bedroom—was plastered in her magazine covers. So they were around all the time, but I kind of didn’t make that connection—that this is an object that is deeply rooted in my life—until recently, when someone was like, “What was your first interaction with a magazine?” And I was like, I don’t know...
That makes sense though, if it’s in your house you kind of block it out. That’s just what mom does.
⎯⎯⎯ It’s like when I ask design students What’s the magazine that you remember growing up with? and they almost all say National Geographic because Grandma and Grandpa’s wall of yellow spines is the only thing they can remember.
Coming to where we met at The Grid. Did you start as a design intern?
⎯⎯⎯ No, I cold emailed [The Grid’s creative director] Vanessa [Wyse] and said, “Can I come in for a portfolio review? I really want to make magazines and my entire portfolio is magazines.” It was one of the best interviews I ever had—we talked for like two hours and I told her about magazines she’d never heard of, and I left with a list and immediately went to Indigo afterwards and bought some of the titles she was talking about. It was the first time I’d ever been able to sit down and talk about magazines with an actual magazine creative director, which was so exciting. And The Grid was so interesting at the time.
What was the experience of diving into that job as a designer? The fact that you could do something and it was there the next week was pretty wild.
⎯⎯⎯ Yeah, the instant gratification of it was bananas. I think there were two things that made The Grid such an amazing place to start: one was how templated it was. At least as a designer, it was such an easy-to-follow format, to see the rules and follow them to get to a point where Vanessa was like, “OK, mess it up here or do something—let’s add something more interesting here.” And then the other piece was, like, 48 hours later, the thing you made, you were holding. And then you didn’t have to think about it for very long because you were moving on to the next thing. Especially early on in your creative career, you spend a lot of time thinking about how good you are, how good the thing you’re producing is, and there was no time to think about that.
What did you learn and what lessons did you take away from that, early on and then maybe later on?
⎯⎯⎯ Right away when The Grid ended, the thing I took away was our community: the people we worked with have gone on to be the most important people in my life professionally. Most of my closest professional friendships came from that gig. Part of that, I think, was that we were all trying to figure out this ridiculous thing together. We were really in it. Do you remember that line Laas [Turnbull, The Grid’s publisher] used to say when he would talk about The Grid? “It will either be a spectacular success or a spectacular failure, but either way it will be spectacular.” That has informed so much of my professional decision-making in the last little bit. So much so that I put it in a talk I did recently, and now other people have cited it to me. That will stick with me, just that environment of risk-taking, exactly that thing of, ‘let’s see if we can do it, it can’t be that hard.’
Fast-forward to two years ago, you opened a magazine shop, which is a very focused, niche thing. This is not something for everyone, but it is something that I'm assuming you care about, you know about, you have the focus to make it work. What was the decision behind this?
⎯⎯⎯ I think all that past stuff plays into it. Like, I do think seeing what The Grid was capable of doing from a sort of audience-building perspective—plus, how much fun it was to exist in a world that found so much joy in the creative work that we were doing. We just had so much fun doing it. And then I basically spent the next six, seven, eight years of my career watching that light go out, in a way, in everyone around me. And, you know, sometimes that was about the politics of a workplace. Sometimes that was about the pivot to digital and just the burnout of having to be on all of those platforms. But I kept making magazines.
In 2019, I was just, like, so resentful towards client work. I think part of that was that I wasn't making work for myself anymore. I wasn't designing anything for me. I wasn't having that much fun designing stuff anymore. So I spent a year experimenting with a lot of things. I started teaching design, which can be a really energizing space, started making art, started exploring what it was like to public speak, started volunteering, and sort of just got back into my design community. One of the things that The Grid did was give me this incredible international community, but when The Grid folded, I realized how disconnected I was from my local, creative community. And so all of those things came together, and I decided to take a sabbatical. My intention was to take a sabbatical, to travel, to take some courses, and then, of course, the pandemic hit, and none of those things happened. But I got really lucky that I got to keep making magazines. So another past colleague of mine brought Best Health my way. I got to redesign that magazine and make it with lots of people who I adore. That was really, really fun.
But you’re also coming at this well into the supposed death of print, which has been talked about since I started working in magazines. How did that factor in?
⎯⎯⎯ I was so energized making these publications and thinking about them with these small teams. We were having so much fun asking questions and pulling on threads that were exciting to us, but then I’d have wider conversations with magazine editorial, design and word communities and they were so tired and burnt out. Everything was a bummer. The thing that kept playing in my mind was like, we actually get to do the coolest thing in the world: we get to talk to the smartest people, we get a backstage pass to almost anything we want, and then we get to put it into something and share it with the world. So I started thinking about that a lot, and I was like: why are we so down on this industry? Yes, it's been really shitty. Yes, we're being asked to do so much more with so much less. Yes, things are shuttering. But I actually looked and the number of magazines in North America has gone pretty much unchanged since 2004. According to two different studies, one in the States, one in Canada, they come out to the exact same percentage of print magazine readers: 33% of the population still reads print exclusively. That they came to the same numbers, and that it is unchanged since 2004, is bananas. Is that not wild? That's pre-financial crisis. It's pre-Instagram. It's pre-Facebook.
I mean, it's similar to vinyl sales versus CD sales versus streaming. Vinyl kind of went away a bit, but it was always kind of there, and then CDs went way up, and then the bottom fell out. Streaming is gonna be the same thing. It'll continue—it's the only option—but no one's ever making any money on it.
⎯⎯⎯ I really started thinking about how to inject some energy into this industry that I love so much. What is missing? And the thing I kept thinking about was, like, my happy place. My favourite thing in the world is to be in a different city, get a coffee at a nice coffee shop, and stumble into a magazine store that is full of things I've only seen on the internet and spend three hours flipping through them. I was like, we haven't had a shop like that in so long.
I sent [Mag Culture founder] Jeremy [Leslie] a message, and I was like, “Hey, I think I might want to open a magazine store in Toronto.” He was somebody that I knew from The Grid. He knew my work, I knew him, and he was like, “Yeah, you want to Zoom on Tuesday?” When we got on the call, he opened up and shared everything he possibly could with me. Like, this place wouldn't exist without him. Then I just thought: I wonder if I can do it, I wonder if it would work. I wonder what would happen... Let's just keep pushing this forward to see how far we can get, and here we are, two years later.
As soon as I heard about it, or maybe saw it on Instagram, that you were doing this, I was just like, ‘That's the fucking best idea ever. Why didn't I do that?’ That's also my happy place. If I'm in any city: what am I gonna do? Go into a record store. What have they got? What's different, what's cool? Talk to the person behind the counter. Ask them about what's local and something I can check out. So as soon as I heard about Issues, I thought, ‘This is perfect. I know so many people who would be into this.’ That was the hypothesis, but I didn't know if those people would actually show up, right? I hoped they would, and they have—they have totally shown up.
What has the reaction been like, and maybe, specifically, what has surprised you about the reaction?
⎯⎯⎯ I mean, the fact that it has been able to continue sustaining itself for two years has been surprising. I think it's supernatural to doubt yourself and to doubt your ideas. Again, a lot of people along the way, while I was building this, told me that this did not make sense. I think part of that was because the popular narrative is that print is dead, that print has gone away, and one of my insights was that, well, of course, print has gone away in Canada, because we're not actually exposed to it. If there's nowhere for us to buy it, then it's really easy for us to believe the narrative that it is gone. And I'm watching this community of independent magazine makers around the world make incredible, interesting, really smart things, knowing that it's not gone, right? There are cool things, they're just harder for us to get access to.
Having this place has opened my eyes to just how much bigger the infrastructure is, but also how many holes there are, or broken systems in place. The scaffolding of magazine land is not great, and it never had anything to do with the newsroom. It doesn't have anything to do with the quality of journalism that we're putting out in a lot of these places. I do think one of those things is considering where my audience wants to meet them. I think that's one of the reasons so many of these independent print magazines are only choosing to be in print and on Instagram, or in print and have a podcast: they're picking one or two channels where they know they're accessing their audience instead of trying to access everybody. They're speaking to a smaller group of people, a smaller audience, but in a more meaningful way.
Speaking of finding the audience, how important is being a brick-and-mortar place? I'll get into the community aspect of it in a second.
⎯⎯⎯ I mean, smelling ink and paper is so important to the ambience of a magazine store; having an opportunity to actually flick through something. The magazines that we sell are $35 magazines—they're not six bucks, you know. You are parting with a decent amount of money to take one of these home, and hopefully, it's gonna live on your coffee table, or your bookshelf, for more than a week, right? It's gonna be there for a while.
And it's probably not something that you can read the whole thing online to begin with. Most of them, you can maybe see, like, the cover and a few pages.
⎯⎯⎯ Having a physical location means you can also come and flip through these things. We are so open to having people come and sit and look at something and flip through it and take photos for, you know, their school design project, and not have to buy the thing; to be a place that really just platforms and gives access to publications, and to see the breadth of what's out there. They’re physical objects. They deserve a physical place to be. You know, when we first opened, I talked about the sort of interior design, and wanting to display the magazines in a way that honored the attention to detail and the love and energy that goes into making them. Because, having made publications, we know how much energy, time, and blood-sweat-and-tears goes into making a publication. To see them thrown on the floor at the grocery store, or half hanging out of the shelf makes me sad. It makes me really sad. So the brief when we were trying to figure out what the shop should look and feel like was ‘art gallery meets record store.’ That was the vibe.
And part two to that: obviously you do events here, like the collage classes. Has that been an important part of kind of continuing to build this out, and finding all those people, finding all the people out there who care about this stuff?
⎯⎯⎯ At the very beginning, I talked about our store as being a clubhouse more than it was a retail store; as a place, you could come as a magazine and print lover of any sort and find something or someone to talk to. There were such cute kismet things in the beginning. There'd be these really sweet moments where you could make connections, and that brought me a lot of joy because I think so much of making publications, of making magazines, of making any kind of art, is about collaboration, right? Whether it's just you collaborating with the medium, or it's you collaborating with somebody who's working on another piece of it, there's some interaction happening, some physical interaction. But, honestly, so many of our community events have happened organically. I think it's all in the spirit of making stuff together. That idea that making art or beholding art are both important to the creative process. Looking at stuff, but then also making things. The bigger mandate is to support the people in projects that are keeping print alive. That's the thing that I'm striving for.
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