Hello Kai,

Hope you are all doing very well.

Last year I got a surprise of my life, Offscreen Magazine. I found the first issue in an art and design book shop in Clerkenwell, London. At that moment paying £8 for the mag was not easy while this tiny amount of money once fed me for nearly a week. So actually I didn’t buy it at first.

However the elegantly taken cover photograph called me in my dreams continually even I had no idea what it was about. I knew I needed to buy it asap. I went back to the book shop a couple of days after and found it at corner of the bookshelf. I fell in love with it immediately. It was not only because of the beautiful look, but also the people and their stories reminded me something I used to do/have. (Now I am more than happy that I made a correct decision especially when many people moan that they missed the first issue.)

More than 10 years ago, an era when there were tables with backgrounds, Java Applet water reflections were everywhere, CSS was only for decorating text and hyperlinks, Macromedia ruled the animation world with Flash and Blackberry was only known as a fruit. I graduated from uni with a degree of digital design. I learnt how to construct a website day and night. When I was in high school, I built several websites for my own interest. I used to love web design so much! However I was disappointed with the reality in this field — no fixed deadlines like print media, people didn’t respect it enough. So I dropped out and became an editorial designer since I always collected beautiful and informative magazines. I do a very good job at balancing text and pictures together nicely. But when I have been getting better and better at InDesign and the user-interface of Dreamweaver seemed to be more and more unfamiliar, I thought I would be labeled as an editorial designer for my whole life and would never have any chance to code again.

Interestingly the web design field has moved in a different direction in the last few years: more intelligent, more creative and more fun. It makes me want to do some web design work. I was very lucky that I got the opportunity to have some web design training courses and do some web design work recently. It allows me to understand the stories in your magazine a bit more. But they always inspire and encourage me to practise more. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this magazine! As an editorial designer I can tell your efforts of managing nearly everything of this magazine yourself is uncountable; as a still-learning-very-junior-level web person I feel this magazine links this community in a brighter and stronger way and makes me feel I am not alone at doing this. Now I started to develop a better relationship with web design and hope I won’t give up on it again.

In a few words, thanks for bringing us such a great publication! Look forward to seeing more content either online or in print.

I wish you all the best,

Ting-Kai C.

Could not have a better start to the week. Thank you so much, Ting-Kai!