What is So Young Magazine?

A magazine that mixes contemporary illustration with underground guitar music, So Young was first imagined as a photocopied zine. But as the contributions to issue one mounted up, creators Josh Whettingsteel and Sam Ford realised that their project called for a full-colour, high quality print finish.

Josh Whettingsteel said this in an early interview...

"We’d both just finished university and we were doing these boring jobs in Southampton. He’d started a blog that was about promoting Palma Violets and a group of bands that came out around the same time as them, and I was doing a blog of my own illustration. The idea was to merge the two blogs as a very DIY photocopied black and white zine that referenced punk fanzines, but the illustrations we were getting in were so good we thought we had to go full-colour."

My Thoughts on the Magazine?

I recently bought a few copies of So Young and was surprised by the finish quality for a project of this scale. With only 60k followers on Instagram this really targets a specific audience within the music and art community, with other magazines such as Vogue having over 27 million followers. I love the collage style the magazine uses - as Josh states "The idea was to merge the two blogs as a very DIY photocopied black and white zine that referenced punk fanzines". It's done a great job to retain that asset, whilst still feeling high end and unique. Without a doubt one of my favourite publications in terms of style and aesthetic!