I still think magazines should come back.

I still think magazines should come back.

Yes, I'm aware they never technically went away. But I miss the days when magazines felt like something worth collecting, displaying and occasionally moving house with despite having absolutely no intention of reading them again.

I remember poring over Dolly and opening the sealed section, browsing the Avon catalogue and sampling the rub-on perfume, or flicking through Reader's Digest when I was maximum bored.

The weight of a good magazine. The texture of the paper. The ridiculous satisfaction of a beautifully designed double-page spread. Flicking through the pages and finding something interesting that you hadn't gone looking for.

I love all of it.

And I think there's something to be said for media that exists outside a screen.

We've spent years finding ways to make everything digital. It's faster, easier to distribute, searchable and, when designed properly, can be considerably more accessible. You can measure ROI and eyeballs and direct conversions. I'm hardly going to argue against those things while publishing this opinion on my own website.

I’m going to say it though, we've been a little too enthusiastic about treating physical formats as something we've outgrown.

There's something interesting happening with the Y2K revival. Younger generations are embracing compact digital cameras, CDs, vinyl records and all sorts of things that seemed destined to become relics of the early 2000s.

Apparently, the technology we couldn't wait to replace is now vintage. Hateful development for anyone over 30.

Some of that is nostalgia and aesthetic appeal, of course. But I suspect there's also something appealing about owning an object, having a tangible experience and engaging with something that isn't another piece of content competing for attention on your phone. Something you can hold onto, that isn't connected to the internet, and that might become associated with a particular moment or memory.

And magazines have a particular place in that conversation.

A good magazine has a point of view. Someone has decided what belongs in it, what deserves a full-page photograph, which stories need room to breathe and what might surprise someone turning the next page.

There's an editorial personality that comes from those decisions.

I miss the experience of encountering that thinking as a complete, physical object. Something with a beginning and an end, rather than another feed that will happily keep serving me content while I pursue my apparently daily mission to find the bottom of it.

And there's pleasure in the design itself. The relationship between typography, photography, illustration and space. The creative decisions that make a publication recognisable before you've even read a word.

Of course, digital media can do wonderful things with editorial design too. I'm particularly interested in that, and I've borrowed plenty of inspiration from magazines for this website.

But a digital experience doesn't have to replace every physical one. There's room for both, and I think it's worth questioning the assumption that making something digital automatically makes the physical version redundant.

Maybe the renewed enthusiasm for older formats is partly a passing trend. Maybe we'll all be horrified by the price of film processing again soon enough.

Either way, I hope magazines get their moment.