An Illustration for Stack America

Stack America is a neat service in which subscribers get a curated bundle of independent magazines sent to them every other month. The titles change with each delivery, but all are selected by editor Andrew Losowsky from among the best of the many eclectic, hard-to-find titles produced by the independent press.

The subscription also includes bi-monthly installments from what Stack America calls “The Designers Series”: graphic prints created exclusively for Stack America by invited designers. Andrew asked me last year to create something for this series, but I was reluctant to say yes for lack of a good idea.

How To

Then in February I wrote a blog post called “Unnecessary Explanations,” citing the preponderance of explanatory screens for iPad magazines and other iPad apps as a sign of poorly executed user experience design. Andrew suggested to me I could parody the concept of instructional screens altogether by creating an illustration of an instructional screen for a print magazine, and after the two of us riffed on this idea over email for a while, we came up with this.

Stack America

Prints shipped with the March installment of Stack America, but anyone who subscribes this week through this subscription form will get a copy of my print with the next delivery in May. Even better, you’ll also get a print from that month’s designer, Emigre co-founder and a longtime hero of mine Rudy Vanderlans.

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