I have an online magazine that's supported by crowdfunding. It's called The Moim, as it's a small gathering space between me, my contributing writers, and YOU the reader. It's been a dream of mine to publish an actual physical magazine for a very long time and I am PSYCHED to say: I finally have a physical magazine in my hands!
I've been fascinated by these physical things, probably because I've spent most of my life as a digital guy. How does my dad's writings become a book? How do you build a computer?
Part of why I find my wife so attractive is her craft skills. She's able to create bracelets and resin art out of nothing and it always amazes me when she gives me tangible out of nowhere.
So the magazine printing is like two dreams coming true simultaneously. One dream of making something tangible, and another dream of making a magazine. I've talked extensively about my interest in having a magazine in the announcement of my magazine so I'll stop talking about it here.
Magazines were a big thing in Korea when I was growing up. There were children's general magazines, there were science magazines, there were gaming magazines (that came with CD's, who remembers that era? Also one episode had a virus in it so every gamer's PC got infected with that virus one time lol).
Every month in the children's magazine there was some kind of an "enter to win" sweepstakes. I, being so young, thought if I just send them my name I automatically win. Reality ended up being very disappointing for 3 months in a row and I figured it out: They must be making up the winners (I was not a very bright boy)!
Anyhow, in the 3 months time I recognized something. Every month there would be some kind of an errata section saying certain parts of the previous edition was wrong. I remember thinking, "are these people stupid?" (what a judgmental ass I was!).
It just didn't make any sense to me. These people literally have a job of making a magazine and they make a mistake? What's up with that? Then I went to America and saw that even textbooks had mistakes that were corrected in the next edition. How are so many people miserably bad at their job? I remember feeling just dumbfounded.
WELL FAST FORWARD FUCKING TWENTY SOMETHING YEARS, and voila! I'm making my own magazine and I had NO idea it was this difficult. The especially difficult part: how do I make sure that pages line up correctly?
For example, in my PDF my pages go like this:
Front Cover | Back Cover
1 | 2
3 | 4
5 | 6
and so on. But this means when it's double side printed and stapled, it will look like this?
Front Cover
1 | 3
5 | 6
and so on? I can't even do the mental math on how it's hypothetically going to look when it's wrong. Actually even before this stage I needed to get estimates for the print job and that was another whole thing that took a few weeks.
So by the time I decided on the printer I wanted to work with, I was already sort of behind schedule. I got antsy and excited about moving forward, then came across this problem. I think honestly if I just left the printer alone he would have done a fine job anyway, but I kept on asking him to confirm that everything will look as I expected it to so he asked me if I can just come by to confirm we're talking about the same thing.
Then I learned that in print page 1 is actually the RIGHT hand side! Through this face to face conversation I learned a lot about how to set up pdf's correctly for print jobs and I told him I would give him the edited pdf file.
Then holy crap! I made the edit and at the time of edit for some reason I was logged out of my Adobe account and all my fonts were reverted to basic font. I didn't realize this so I sent the file over and paid him a visit again. I gave it a bit of a thorough look and asked him, "why does the font look like this?" which confused him because he had just opened what I had given him.
You know what? Even before the choosing the printer times, I had a really difficult time converting my digital magazine into a print-friendly PDF format (Affinity I couldn't have done it without you!). I had made so many revisions and edits I made a typo of my friend Teresa's name and I hadn't even recognized it. I literally wouldn't be surprised if some of the links in the copy don't work.
So I went home, signed into Adobe, made sure that all the fonts were correct, spliced all the spreads so everything is in an individual page, everything looked good finally after about 9 takes. My printer is a patient sage and I aspire to be like him one day.
Now that I'm done with everything, I finally understand why there can be a typo in a magazine. I just have no brain space to double verify everything after looking at words and files and fonts and such for weeks after weeks. It is SO easy to be judgmental about something you know NOTHING about, and through this experience I learned that humility comes from experience.
They weren't stupid, I was just really ignorant. I couldn't see outside of my perspective, and that's the danger of ignorance (and perhaps insistence of ignorance).
I have about 20 copies remaining if you would like a physical copy. If you're interested please email me your address and I would be happy to ship it to you. I hope you use this writing as a reminder: when you're judging someone, it's highly likely that you don't know what the other person's going through.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
