Is Not Magazine was a project initiated by Stuart and Jeremy (with Mel Campbell, Natasha Ludowyk and Penny Modra) in 2004. It was published as a four-sheeter (2m x 1.5m) bill poster on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney from April 2005 to July 2008. It published a range of fiction and non-fiction content in many forms including, but not limited to, 2000 word essays, 300–500 word columns, comics, illustrations, diagrams, and 160 character (text message length) ‘flash fictions’. There was also a crossword.
Is Not was an experiment in publishing, design, reading and community building. It explored a grey area created by the crossover of two themes for each issue (love/lust, seeing/believing, habit/addiction, etc), carried no advertising, was funded through launch events for each issue and thus lived by the participation of the community that sprung up around it.
In 2006 Is Not Magazine won the Premier’s Design Award for Communications Design as part of the State of Design festival. In 2009 the final issue was nominated for the Designs of the Year award at the Design Museum in London. It has also been presented at conferences and been written about at length innumerable times in the design press and mainstream media in Australia and internationally.
