In October 2012, after a year of preparation, we launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new design magazine, Works That Work. We were asking our potential readers whether there was room on the market for a periodical aimed not only at designers in particular, but at the public in general, and we were letting them answer with their wallets. The response was overwhelming: we met our target in less than a week, and by the time we published the magazine over a thousand supporters had contributed over €30.000 giving us enough funds to cover the costs of the first issue and build our own platform for print and digital publishing.

For us, it was tremendously exciting to know that those readers were out there. We started Works That Work because we ourselves are fascinated by how, why and what people create. We wanted articles that would expand our minds with new ideas, inspiring us by example and surprising us with diversity. It’s nice to know that we are not alone! More about our goals in the editorial.

Works That Work doesn’t celebrate individual creators, as much as investigate the creative process. It prefers the practical to the theoretical, exploring unexpected manifestations of creativity in the everyday world around us and seeking to demystify the design process. We publish original, in-depth essays and stories on subjects connected with design, presenting projects that challenge and change the way you perceive them.

In that same spirit, we want to reinvent publication distribution. Instead of feeding an army of middlemen, we would like to deepen our relationships with our readers and make them partners in this enterprise. We call this social distribution. We have a number of magazine hubs where readers can pick up copies, bring them to their favourite bookstore, and earn money by doing it. More about the distribution model here.

We'll be publishing the magazine twice a year, in print and electronic editions. We don’t know where this project will lead us, but we are very much looking forward to the trip.

Official Press Release, PDF file (45 kB)

High Resolution Images, ZIP archive (102 MB)