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Is Not Magazine

Founded back in April 2005 as a form of street press that was more about reading than about extended gig information, the Melbourne-based poster publication – Is Not Magazine – has since staked a claim for being the most distinct new means of print content delivery in Australia and in the process has stolen back what has traditionally been used as a powerful advertising tool – the billboard. In the words of the publication’s co-creator Penelope Modra, it’s all about ‘pure editorial in pure advertising space’. It’s no fluke that the concept has been so well-received in its home town of Melbourne. There’s a real sense of cultural and creative enlightenment there that sets it apart from any other in Australia. Not so much a resurgence of ideas than a bustling undercurrent of energy and charisma that continuously seeps through the grey urban facade and into the side alleys that sit tight against the long city streets. Perhaps it’s a climatic thing; maybe it’s just a self-fulfilling proclamation. Whatever. There’s a real edge to the art, music, fashion, photography and print work coming out Melbourne at the moment. It just seems grittier, more experimental, uniquely progressive, and organically distilled. Which is where Is Not Magazine fits in. As the online world continues to boom, people are looking for new avenues in which to push the print medium. As a result, there are a number of interesting new approaches being explored, from magazine content delivered on toilet paper, into photographs, and onto t-shirts, to the Shelley Jackson novel that’s being published by tattoo, one word at a time, on different people around the world.

The idea for Is Not Magazine came about when one of the designers, Jeremy Wortsman (who was soon joined on the project by Modra, Natasha Ludowyk, Stuart Geddes, and Mel Campbell) lived on Elgin Street in Carlton, Melbourne, opposite a building site with posters on the hoardings. As Modra recounts, ‘he would see them every day and, being a recent arrival from New York, was noticing things about the city that we hardened natives were blind to. Around the corner was the Readings bookstore housing noticeboard, which is stuck in the window so everyone has to stand in the alleyway and read it. We suspect he used to hang out there a lot due to all the hot travelling chicks reading the notices. Anyway, he put two and two and the chicks together and came up with the street poster format’.

As Modra acknowledges, it was the ideal environment in which to launch this unique editorial concept. ‘There is a serious rock postering community and heritage in Melbourne that we never appreciated before Is Not’, she says. ‘The Rock Posters guys [Is Not's distributor] have taken us out to a few street poster functions and let me tell you, these poster people are cool! We’ve met all these seventies rockers and poster collectors and artists. We felt special.

We started with a run of 50 sites in inner-city Melbourne and have stuck to that since. From issue #6 we’ve done a run of around 40 sites in Sydney as well. But we don’t know whether Sydney gets it. The initial response in Melbourne was amazing. Heaps of people came out of the woodwork for our launch. Though that may have been because Cut Copy played for us! And we got a huge boost of submissions for Issue #2. The mainstream press in Melbourne weren’t really interested until we were on Wooster Collective and Gawker.com and then The Age [daily newspaper] rang and wanted to do a story – they took the foulest picture of us possible, from which Mel still has not recovered. This whole time I think the Rock Posters guys were a bit worried about any publicity at all, due to the shady laws involved. But they’ve come around in the end. When we won the Premier’s Award for Communication Design last year, they took a copy of the exhibition catalogue for their lawyer’.

The premise of Is Not Magazine is simple: each issue comes in the form of two giant posters which are billboarded in select locations in Melbourne and Sydney. The issues are thematic and designed using just two colours. The themes tend to oppose one another or present an overlap (love is/not lust, habit is/not addiction) and the content covers the spectrum of possibilities that this creates – incorporating poetry, creative writing, reviews, ‘everything from pop schlock to essays and lists’. People who stop to read the posters are encouraged to interact with sections left open to be written upon. So in a way it becomes a collaborative experience on a massive scale.

The two-colour approach was borne out of necessity originally but also lends itself to some interesting visual angles. As Modra says, ‘the idea of using two colours was a combination of cost and visual identity really. It was certainly cheaper, but we were also interested to see the impact of two-colour artwork in an environment that is overrun with four and five, and more, colour posters. Today two colour printing is mostly an anachronism, like Is Not is’.

Despite its growing popularity and reach (with online sales through the Is Not website booming), they’ve resisted the temptation to commercialise the product by selling ads into it. Modra is adamant that this stance will be maintained – for the short term anyway.

‘The idea of having ads was summarily ditched because the magazine would forevermore exist in a street advertising context, and we didn’t want the editorial to be interpreted as a giant ad. Then we started to think about the magazine as being the opposite of an ad. It was asking people to stop and read at length, whereas advertisements kind of try to sneak into your day, or shout at you from across the street. This thinking really informed the content structure. We want the magazine to have no particular message – creating a kind of rich and confusing grey area. So depending on how long you read, you might walk away thinking “those Is Not kids are left wing freak” or “that was a well considered essay on freelance pay rates”, or “great, New Weekly is publishing on walls now”.

It’s interesting to note that a lot of the interest in the posters comes from overseas as word spreads about this underground phenomenon. At least half of the people who buy the mag are from overseas; everywhere from Argentina to London, Poland, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and South Africa. A lot of our regular contributors are from overseas too. Our typeface sponsors are called Underware – they run a type foundry in the Netherlands – and they have taken the magazine to odd places. They hung it in an exhibition in the Dutch Bank. One of our subscribers is papering an Is Not feature wall in his house, to cover the horrible peach colour his ex-girlfriend liked. It is also on display at Australia’s smallest cafe, Jungle Juice in Melbourne. It is as big as an entire wall there.

People who write to Is Not are unreal. We found one of our best contributors that way. He used to leave messages in the Wiki on our old website. He would banter with the spam for Generic Cialis that appeared forty times a day. He tends to pull us up on what he thinks is our slackness but is actually us trying not to get fired from our full time jobs while party planning to raise money for the next issue. We have also met some horrific assholes like this visiting designer from Europe who thought it would be a real statement to systematically cover entire issues on the street by colouring them in with a black marker, leaving only a link to his website. We had a great email early on from an architect/writer in Helsinki who wanted to contribute. And she ended up writing our music review for the Seeing is/not Believing issue, which was an observational piece on Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Our favourite comment ever comes from Underware in their intro to our Take-Away edition: “Got curious for the real thing? Spend your day at Is Not Magazine.org and get involved. See what the poster magazine looks like at 1.5 by 2 meters. Join. Participate. Make something of your life”‘.

The Is Not team is currently promoting Issue #9, Talk is/not Cheap, which came out on February 19, and work on Issue #10, All That Glitters is/not Gold, is already underway. Modra has a strong vision for it. ‘I imagine there will be some metallic ink involved there’, she says, with a wry smile.

[see also Is Not A Party]

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