Yesterday in Des Moines, four ReadyMade editors---Andrew, Stephen, Amy and I---sat down in the same room together for the first time for a creative summit of sorts. Our objective: to open the hood of ReadyMade and get in, elbow-deep. We were there to talk frankly about what we love about ReadyMade and what we think it could be doing better; to dream up a bright future for the magazine and then begin to hatch a plan for how to get there.
We showed each other the 'look books' we'd put together while we were interviewing for our jobs: pages of photography and scraps of print torn from other magazines, stories whose tone or content inspired envy in us.
We also talked about our backgrounds and how we came to ReadyMade. I learned some very interesting things about all my colleagues: That Stephen holds an M.Arch. from MIT; that Amy spent six weeks visiting a Peace Corps friend in a village in Senegal, miles away from electricity; that Andrew in his teens built, with friends, the biggest skateboard half-pipe in Northern California. (Bonus Andrew trivia: when he was 15 his band, the Knobs, opened for Green Day.)
Over breakfast in the offices, lunch in downtown Des Moines, and an afternoon coffee break at West End Architectural salvage, we shared our likes and dislikes about the magazine and talked about tone, design and topic.
And of course, we talked about the over-all feeling. We all agreed about wanting to preserve the combination of playfulness and depth that's been part of ReadyMade's DNA from the beginning.
And then, we discussed projects. Here's an anecdote about me: I think we've been falling back a little too regularly on lamps. Luckily, my fellow editors agreed.
It's too early to reveal all that was said, but we think that a lot of things came together on Thursday. ReadyMade is a magazine about projects and it's also, of course, an awesome (in the old-fashioned sense) project in itself. We're looking forward to sharing our notes about how it goes, and of course, we want your feedback as you road test our work-in-progress.
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