The archive · Content & Film · Product decision · 2024
Footnote journal's first issue turns one A.K. Blakemore story into a full issue
Footnote builds each issue from responses to one central text; its debut issue responds to A.K. Blakemore's story Peg.
Footnote
What it had to solve
Footnote launched as a journal dedicated to fostering artistic exchange and interdisciplinary dialogue. Its founding format makes that mission concrete: each issue invites contributors from around the world to respond creatively to one central text.
How it works
Footnote is a new journal dedicated to fostering artistic exchange and interdisciplinary dialogue. Its founding idea is a format: each issue invites writers, photographers and artists from around the world to respond creatively to a central text.
For the debut issue, the poet and novelist A.K. Blakemore wrote Peg, a hallucinatory exploration of mutation and decay. That single story becomes the shared object a dynamic and diverse range of responses grows from, connecting disciplines around one piece of writing.
The device gives every issue a spine — the source text — while leaving the responses themselves open. Footnote Issue 1 sits in the D&AD awards archive under Magazine & Newspaper Design; the page records no circulation figures.
Why it lands
- One shared text gives different disciplines a common object, so their responses genuinely connect instead of merely sitting next to each other.
- Commissioning the central text lets the journal set a strong foundation and then respond to it with complete freedom.
- The format is repeatable: each future issue needs only a new text and a new circle of responders.
What it did
The format gives the journal a repeatable identity: every issue is defined by the text it responds to. The first issue sits in the D&AD awards archive under Magazine & Newspaper Design; the archive records no circulation figures.
What you can take
Make exchange structural: when every contributor must answer the same source text, interdisciplinary dialogue is designed into the issue.
Since then
Footnote Issue 1, built around A.K. Blakemore's Peg, is preserved in the D&AD awards archive under Magazine & Newspaper Design. The archive page records no circulation or audience figures, so the case rests on the editorial format itself: a journal whose every issue is a cross-disciplinary response to one central text.
Sources
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Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
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