One week about

Dutch Design Daily

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Mary Hessing www.woth.co

The edition

By 02-09-2016

ONE WEEK ABOUT WOTH Wonderful Things Magazine by Mary Hessing

And then you’re actually going to create such an edition. Compiling an issue from several contributions, selecting productions that complement and enrich each other. Devising the ultimate line-up for the series of interviews: “We still need a renowned name, preferably no Dutchman and if possible a guy.” And: “Jeez, they’re all over forty!” And: three of the five houses are in The Hague. In terms of form and atmosphere they are well suited and they are quite different to boot, but if you want to use an international title, that might just not be possible. Have I received all the credits of all products in the inspiration shopping? Are all of those prices accurate? How do we give shape to this?

Questions, questions, questions. Everything is loose sand until you build a castle with it. This first issue was a roller coaster. Even though I normally find it a piece of cake to take an issue to the printer’s. During my long career in magazines (years at Libelle, including a job as deputy editor and then as general editor of two interior magazines, i.e. EH&I and MTC) I really learned how to score on D-day, the day you take the edition to the printer’s. Even the restyling edition of Eigen Huis & Interieur that we together with Pentagram New York produced on two continents, arrived at the printer’s on time.

But this first issue of WOTH was a different story. A Dutch version and an international English version, both with the same content, turned out to be an exciting and quite complicated exercise. We worked on the issues with varying teams, while I was the point of contact for everything (quite complicated if you also need to do things yourself).

Beldan, our image editor, was the constant factor in all this hustle and bustle. Quietly and politely, she continued doing her work. Anita Bijlsma, my former chief editor at EH&I, proofread everything and corrected it if necessary. Rachel Lancashire, also a veteran, did the same for the English edition. Wilmar, a designer living in our street, did the news items and the agenda sections and came to the rescue if there was something that we couldn’t solve ourselves. Swan Lian Kwee came over one day to bring the design into focus.

During long nights, sometimes until the early hours of the morning, I convinced myself that the next issue will proceed more smoothly. We have learned so much! I have to adjust my resume, technically supervise printing, create PDF files, translate, delete, and so on and so forth. As a small start-up, there is of course a lot that you have to do yourself. That’s not a problem, it’s super instructive, but it does take time.

Finally a day went by without a call from the printer to tell me that he “still needed a corrected PDF”. Would it really be finished at last?