Webbed Sadness

I found out today through Airbag that Design-in-Flight has shut its doors. This is truly a sad day for the Web, for Web designers, Web developers, and online folks everywhere. For a small fee, Andy Arikawa produced a beautiful PDF magazine that focused on Web standards, productivity, design tricks and tools and it was illustrated lusciously and elegantly. It was the first (and I guess only) PDF magazine that I had (very) hopes for. I still haven’t found the answer to the qustion “Why?” yet but when I do, I’ll try to post it.
I know what it’s like to start a publication and end it. The work that goes into producing a regular periodical is voluminous and never-ending. I edited a small zine called Soup Magazine back in the early 1990s when the desktop publishing revolution was alive. We took ads and I eventually had a small staff of friends to help produce the thing. It eventually sold in Tower Records throughout the U.S. and Europe and got picked up by Printed Matter as well as many other small print distributors. After leaving for a year to live in Poland, the zine couldn’t get rescusitated and it failed. [It’s hard to believe but Printed Matter still has some of these issues available!
I also found through Hicks that Joshua Ink is no longer writing. I don’t know his work well but there seems to be a big community of folks that are missing him.
These things always come in threes, right? I’m going to take it as a good sign that there’s no apparent three there.
[Note: The last DIF issue can be downloaded now (July 15, 2005). I have a small piece in it.]