Why Even Bother To Make Hodinkee Magazine?¶
Published on Sun, 5 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000
Chatting about the creation, content, and design in the latest issue of Hodinkee Magazine with Nick Merino and designer Mike Renaud.
Synopsis¶
This episode of Hodinkee Radio celebrates the publication of Volume 10 of Hodinkee magazine, a milestone achievement in modern print publishing. Host James Stacey is joined by Nick Marina, Hodinkee's SVP of Content, and Mike Renault, founder and co-CEO of Carrier, the design firm behind the issue's aesthetic vision. The conversation explores the intentional design choices that make this issue special, particularly the striking cover featuring a one-of-one Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight with custom engravings commemorating the tenth issue.
The cover watch, which will be sold at auction with proceeds benefiting an HSNY scholarship for underrepresented watchmakers, features intricate symbolic engravings on its caseback. Mike Renault details how each element represents the number ten through various visual metaphors—from Roman numerals to page-like lines to doubled H marks. The team discusses several creative editorial features, including sending ten Hamilton watches to different photographers worldwide to capture vastly different interpretations, and profiling ten people pushing watch culture forward through illustrated portraits. They also highlight unconventional stories like "Moment in the Sun," featuring California outdoor enthusiasts, and a detailed guide to aftermarket PVD coating.
The conversation delves into the philosophical question of why Hodinkee, a primarily digital publication, continues investing in print. The team frames the magazine as an intentional analog experience that mirrors the romance of mechanical watches themselves—impractical perhaps, but beautiful in its deliberate tactility. They discuss sophisticated design choices like varying paper stocks throughout different sections and soft-touch cover finishes that signal commitment to craft. The magazine is positioned not as a catalog but as a curated journey of serendipity, offering readers an escape from algorithmic content and screen fatigue while celebrating the deeper stories and culture surrounding horology.
Links¶
Transcript¶
| Speaker | |
|---|---|
| Cartier Advertisement Narrator | With the Santos watch, the first modern wristwatch was borne by the hands of Louis Cartier. In 1904, he fulfilled the wish of aviator Alberto Santos Dumont to be able to read at the time on his pocket watch mid-flight without letting go of the controls. Santos became part of a legacy of creativity, innovation, and timeless elegance in watchmaking, with its visible screws and precise proportions. It continues to be a pioneer. Shop SantosdeCartier at Kuttier.com |
| James Stacey | . Hey, it's me, James Stacey, and this episode of Hodinky Radio is all about volume 10 of Hodinky magazine. Seeing as we've now made it to double digits, I thought it would be fun to chat a bit about this latest and most special of issues. As such, I've invited Nick Marina, Hodinki's SVP of content, and Mike Renault, the founder and co-CEO of Varrier, the firm that helped form the design of this issue, to jump on a mic and chat about If you like fun engravings, thoughtful design, and the romance of print, this episode is for you. All right, Mike, Nick. Welcome to the show. Nick, uh obviously you're uh returning a frequent guest at this point, but uh Mike, it's a pleasure to have you on and I'm excited to talk uh volume ten. Thanks, James. Great to be here. All right. So we've got, like I said, volume ten of the magazine. That's kind of the point of this one. We're gonna chat through some of some of the things we brought uh forward and and that uh you guys kind of brought into this world in in terms of the cover of the magazine and a few other things. Uh Nick, do you wanna give uh give folks kind of a rundown of what what volume ten is and and you know, what it kind of encapsulates for Hodinki? Yeah, it's our t it's our tenth issue and um as a man who spent almost twenty years in the magazine industry. Um, I know that continuing to publish one in this day and age uh at all is sort of a miracle. And to to to have made it to 10 feels like a real achievement. So we wanted to sort of give ourselves that pat on the back, but really look forward. The way I sort of try to orchestrate Hodenki's coverage in print and in digital is constantly be thinking about what's now and what's next and not get too mired in nostalgia. Like nostalgia has its place, but I'm really about what's exciting now and where we're headed. And this issue that Mike designed um I think really points us forward in a in a really exciting direction. Yep, I would agree. Uh, you know, it's it's it's crazy to think that it's been 10. You know, I I remember buying before I worked for Hodinki, I bought the first one and I was crazy excited for it. I got the black cover, the limited edition black cover. And uh and I just kind of poured over it, but much like you would a book more than a magazine. I know everyone says that about their their nice expensive to print magazine, but like it did kind of hit me that way versus, you know, I've I've I've been a a car car guy since I was a kid, so I'm used to the stuff that kinda feels like it costs two dollars in your hands and and you read it, maybe you read it a couple of times, maybe you clip out your favorite one or a great photo and and you move on. This is s sort of a different thing. This is sort of the modern take on a magazine, is it has to offer something different and special. And really I think that starts with the cover. And and I would love to talk about what goes on with the cover because my guess is at least some of the folks listening to this think it's a Photoshop. So the the watch on the cover is uh Tudor Black Bay fifty eight. We had a few of these made especially for Hodinky friends and family and on the dial it's sort of double signed uh Tutor and Hodenke, which is super cool. These have never been made publicly available. And the one that we have on the cover of this magazine, the actual engraved piece that we photographed is is one of one. It's got the Hodenky stamp on the on the dial and the engraving on the back. And we're gonna sell it this fall with proceeds going to uh an HSNY scholarship for underrepresented watchmakers, which I think is really cool. And maybe Mike should should talk about the design itself, because a ton of thought and care was put into what what seems kind of abstracted, but actually is super intentional |
| Mike Renault | . At first glance, it might look a little bit esoteric, but it's meant to be sort of a timeless uh set of icons that can kind of exist to commemorate this issue, but also just be really handsome in and of itself. It's anchored by one Roman numeral X in the middle that provides four quadrants around the case back. And on the right side is 10 lines that sort of denote a publication that looks like a book opening. And those are 10 pages for the issue. At the bottom is the Hidinki word mark in reverse, which is a mirror image of the word mark on the dial itself. And when you look at it, it's backwards, but the O and the I are sort of raised up, which creates a 10 for the number 10. On the left side are 10 circles, just to commemorate the 10 issues and up top is the H uh icon from Hidinky uh with two lines in between uh and doubled to create uh hat |
| James Stacey | ch marks for the number 10. All right Mike so it's it seems like obviously 10 10 is the is the big thing here. We've got several sort of hieroglyphs or or references to ten. How did you get to this point with the design? Was this something you kind of came kind of naturally or is there like thirty-five Photoshop files that that were kind of testing out different concepts on Photoshop casebacks, as it which is what I would do. Yeah, there |
| Mike Renault | are definitely plenty of files that uh didn't make the final cut, a lot of back and forth, a lot of um compartmentalizing certain ideas into one one direction and tr trying to be really literal in in one sense. And then some of them are way more esoteric than these in other ways. So wanted to find a nice balance that was pretty straightforward as is a marker of this, but at the same time didn't feel like an advertisement on the back of your watch |
| James Stacey | . Right. And now with for this one specifically for the watch, which came first? The idea to have the engraving as the cover or to engrave a watch and then do the charity thing for HSNY. So we had a number of ideas uh that we knew we wanted to execute in some way for the magazine. One was that we wanted to make a watch cake. And so we ended up making a cake shaped like a Cartier tank. And we use that in the in the magazine. It's sort of the first page of the magazine and the last page of the magazine. First page, the cake is intact. Last page, we've eaten it. And that's how we sort of bookend the magazine with clock in and clock out. But we decided that for the the cover, we wanted something that felt a little more permanent than a cake, a little kind kind of monumental. And so to have this one just really stark, detailed case back on the cover in a way that you kind of had to you had to look at it to understand it. It's not an immediate read. We actually liked that it wasn't an immediate read. The cake would be an immediate read, but we thought what can we do that actually makes people pause and look at this and consider it? And that's how we knew it was going to be the cover. Yeah, it's a bit of a lure that way. You see something kind of shiny or or different and you go, Wait, I know that case shape 'cause it is pretty distinctive if you if you own a tutor, or even if you own something from the the greater family of you know the wider Rolex brand, you can kind of almost see that from across the the street or across the sidewalk at at in front of a display and see that kind of distinctive case back and then see this uh really kind of very clear and crisp engraving, but it has a bunch of detail to it that I think w does kind of draw people in. It did it did for me the first time I saw the image. So the the issue has a number of these little gestures toward 10. Like for instance, we um we we had this great story that you worked on, James, um the Hamilton piece. Can you sort of explain what you did for that? I think that's one of my favorite stories that I've worked on in the time I've been here. Yeah, it was actually really fun to work on because I got to meet a bunch of incredible photographers uh kind of by by nature of creating the story, but we had this kind of hairbrained idea and that's one of the things that a magazine helps with is sometimes it does ideas where you go, like, well, why would we do this? And you go, well, because we have a magazine, we do we get to do something like this. And we got 10 of the uh white dial Hamilton khaki field mechanicals on the the tan NATO, and we sent them to ten different photographers and uh and had them each kind of take a photo with essentially no oversight. Do whatever you want. Let's see what you do. And there's not one photo that's similar to another. I can guarantee you that you're not ready. You'll you'll start from the first one and start flipping. And it it's almost hard to describe how varied they are. Uh, but we have photographers from all over the world, from all different walks of life, uh, from different time zones, different hemispheres, different uh seasons when they shot it. Um and uh I think it came together to be something pretty interesting that not only speaks to the almost elemental design of of the the sort of field watch uh encapsulated in the in the Hamilton, but also the just the fact that watch photography or or product photography or anything like that has this huge variance to the way that anyone could possibly see it or express it. And as soon as you remove the watch nerd element, you really open the floodgates in terms of creativity. Yeah, and as, you know, as the magazine making kind of nerd orchestrating all of this, that variance, of course, is supposed to be a metaphor for like all the different ways that you can look at a watch and all the ways, different ways that you can think about a watch, which is what we're trying to do with the magazine as a whole. I don't expect anybody to sort of make that link. It's it's it's more just sort of gesturally what we try to do is constantly show watches in ways that you haven't seen them before. Um so that piece that you did, that the 10 Hamilton is one sort of commemorative move we made. The other is um I mentioned we were trying to look toward the future. So we we we considered for about five seconds doing like a look back at our greatest hits and instantly rejected that idea in favor of this feature called ones to watch, which is uh profiles, many, many profiles of ten people who are pushing watch culture forward. And that felt a lot more in the spirit of what we're trying to do here. And Mike commissioned these gorgeous illustrations. Yeah, they turned out really well. And that's something like you would never commission 10 illustrations for the website. You'd only do that for a print publication. And that's that's the other thing we really tried to do. Okay, so commemorative 10th issue, like got that. And then make print feel printy. Make it feel like a magazine. Make it feel worth your money. Like it's it is in fact a distinct experience from the website. With its own intent, I would say. Right. And and I think that's a lot. That's a lot of like an anything that kind of falls outside the normal route that you might take, even as a the way that you interface with the world, let alone the way that a piece of the world might interface back with you, is so tied to intent. And if there's intent behind something and some thoughtful element, then I think it it sells itself a lot better than just we packaged up, you know, 35 or however many stories that that could have been digital ones uh and and put them in print and and now we're gonna charge them for you. And I think this is has a little bit more intent in the value is a little bit more clear to people who who are kind of in in that in that vibe. That's right. James intent intention' |
| Mike Renault | s like such a good word to kind of use for the through line for everything that's that's done in this. One criticism you might see sometimes with photography in the magazine is that the watch isn't clear enough or it's not big enough. And you know, for starters, I'd say there's plenty of really wonderfully detailed watch photography in the magazine itself, but uh one thing we really want to highlight is uh this isn't a catalog. This goes deeper than that. It's about storytelling. It's about why we love watches, the stories that come with them, the memories that we have, the reasons that that go into why we make them them, why we wear. And so offering illustrations and offering photography that feels like something that you can experience more than covet is an important um thing for for f us to highlight when we do these. Yeah, th there's this |
| James Stacey | great feature called Moment in the Sun where we took a a handful of real sort of California outdoors men and outdoors women, hikers, bikers, surfers, climbers, th you name it, out for a day and just sort of shot them in the wild. And some photos have watches in them and some photos don't. And I I think everyone who picks this up knows it's a watch magazine. Like you're gonna get the watches, but the the the opening image that Mike chose for that is just a beautiful photo of a woman in amazing light holding a surfboard, sort of looking into the middle distance and there's no watch in sight. And I I I love the confidence in that design choice, Mike. The watches will come. Like and you're you're sort of just inviting people into this world with her. And and then you get the watch. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's it's it's cool to have these profiles of people whose lives aren't necessarily just watches, but that watches interface with kind of a little bit more normal than a watchmaker, which is kind of an esoteric thing to explain to someone who has never made a watch or like maybe even loves watches but isn't necessarily keyed in on on watchmaking itself. So it gives this sort of footing and and and kind of the I think the magazine does a good job and and maybe even in some ways a better job than digital in painting the the scope of what watch appreciation is and that it it it can be more than just um a fantastic profile on an incredible young watchmaker and and paying attention to that. It can also be in in where these products go after they leave a shelf that maybe the brands kind of have nothing to do with at all. Well and the that's a it's a perfect transition into cold PvD feature. Which you know some brands are down with PvD, uh, aftermarket PVD, some brands are not. But we really wanted to sort of take PVD seriously for a moment and say, you know, all right, this is a controversial thing to do if you're gonna do it, how do you do it right? What do you need to know? What are the steps? And and so Mike, Mike created this beautiful layout, and it's sort of walking you step by step through the process of how to do this and what it's gonna cost and what should you watch out for. That's another one that I I I don't know. My I I don't think that would really translate to the web. It would be diffic |
| Mike Renault | ult for it to translate to the web. And this was this was laid out specifically by the design lead Tom Ethrington who did an amazing job in this issue. And it's it's also a nice moment for uh the tone to sort of shift. As Nick said, PBD can be somewhat controversial. So we decided to have it sort of be more of a white on black layout and provide an opportunity for the magazine to sort of feel uh like there was a little bit of a narrative as as you page through the entire issue. |
| James Stacey | It's interesting because conceivably, I mean there's there's lots of sites that that play with this and use special layouts for their digital so stories kind of flow or overlap or integrate with with sort of scrolling motions and such. But really you're you can go north, south, east, west on a magazine page. You just have to be able to tell people which direction to go. And it doesn't necessarily work that way for a narrative story when you're on a a screen, especially when you have to account for all the screens. Right? Like we're we're running into this now and that so much of our photography for fourteen years has been landscape and, then a huge portion of the audience reads everything on their phone, and you want to be like, well, do I shoot two versions of every image? And the answer probably is yes. It's you know, you double down and you make sure there's an option for every view, but imagine if you were able to lock that view like you can with paper can make a lot of sense, right? Everybody reads magazines differently |
| Mike Renault | too. I I think people focus a lot on print being pretty rigid, but I don't know. When you get served an article on your phone, you're pretty much locked into the scroll and how you want to do it. But I read magazines from the back. Or if I want to, you know, if I have five minutes, I know exactly where to kind of thumb to to kind of spend five minutes versus all right, I made myself Manhattan. I'm going to sit on the couch and spend a half an hour reading a a coup cle great stories. And it's a little bit easier to kind of find yourself lost in that in in something like a print public |
| James Stacey | ation. We we do a couple of things for exactly that reason in this issue. One is that the paper stock changes from the different sections. So we know some people read from the back. And so we've we've sort of set off the back of the book as this second opinions section, which is what we call essays, arguments, and fearless rankings. And what you'll notice is that that section is an uncoded paper stock. And the section before it, the feature will, is a coded paper stock. It's a little bit glossier, which makes the images in the features section just that much richer. And then the front of the book is another uncoded paper stock. So it goes uncoded, coded, uncoded. And it's subtle, but if you're if you're really holding it in your hands, it's like your fingertips tell you |
| Mike Renault | where you are in the magazine. I love that move. The cover also has a nice soft touch finish uh on the coating. So attention to det |
| James Stacey | ails really kind of met it at every turn. Uh I'm not sure I would notice that. if I'm honest Like may maybe flipping through it the third time I would go like, Hey, is that intentional? And you go like, I guess all of it's intentional. And and it's cool that that that level of planning kind of went into it. But I I would love to zoom out a little bit because you know Hodinki is a digital publication, but everyone that publishes about watches online has learned a ton in the last decade about what it is to do that in an online sense and what it means to visuals and what it means to execution and timing and the audience and comments and the rest of it. Why take what could arguably seen as your best foot in s for some of these stories and put it into a print magazine versus uh some sort of premier presentation on on the digital side. I mean to me it's the same reason that you would wear a mechanical watch rather than looking at the time on your iPhone. It is a different experience to engage with something analog, not necessarily better or worse, but different and each has its own place in the world. Plenty of people have both the Apple Watch and the Mechanical, but I think there's there's a reason for both to exist |
| Mike Renault | . I think it nicely showcases Hidinki's commitment to craft and appreciation. It's it's a publication that's made for the collector in some ways, the attention to detail. I mean, you mentioned it, James. There's a lot of nuance and sort of under the hood stuff, but it's and it's not about each one of those choices. It's about the collection of those choices that creates something that just in the end feels really special and and wonderful. And it's something you want to hold on to and something you want to collect. And at the end of the day, it it shows Hidinki's commitment to that type of thing. You know, watch so many decisions go into making something beautiful. And we make the same choices with paper, typography, or grid system, every little detail. So when the finished product is done, it really does feel like something special. And with all of that said, something like this exists for uh bringing in new audiences too. It's it's a way to kind of it's it's if if you're not a watch collector but you're interested in it, you might run across across a web story here and there that you don't really engage with. But if you see something like this and you have a chance to thumb through it, there's actually a way that you can pretty quickly fall deeply in love with |
| James Stacey | Okay, it's time for our ad break, and here is a special message from this week's show sponsor, Cartier. |
| Cartier Advertisement Narrator | The Santos watch, the first modern wristwatch was born by the hands of Louis Cartier. In 1904, he fulfilled the wish of aviator Alberto Santos Dumont to be able to read the time on his pocket watch mid-flight without letting go of the controls. Santos became part of a legacy of creativity, innovation and timeless elegance in watchmaking, with its visible screws and precise proportions. It continues to be a pioneer. S |
| James Stacey | hop Santosde Carcartitierer at.com. Which is I think why it makes sense to the Hodinky audience, or at least a a slice therein that is already kind of keyed into wanting to have it in their hands, to wanting to take it somewhere where they're they don't maybe have screens or or power or even just a side of their house where they're getting away from the things that are constantly buzzing at them. Yeah, it's it's the same reason that you might collect vinyl. Right. I mean, none of this stuff is practical or rational. And to me, that's what makes it beautiful. It's the irrationality of it. It's the impracticality of it. It's the fact that you have to get up and walk across the room and flip the record over or wind the watch. There there's a sense of of of romance in it and um we could keep coming back to intentionality. That's why you make a magazine. You know, it's it's those say it's not because it's the most modern way to tell a story. It's a it's uh deliberately unmodern in the way that watches are. It's done. You it's in stone. You print it, it's printed. That's right. And where the interesting tension is, is you take this old fashioned analog format and then you write about the most exciting new elements of watches in it. That that's that that high low The other thing I wanted to touch on was a little note that you had made in your kind of letter from the editor about the magazine introducing this volume. You'd said that magazines are kind of a a journey of serendipity, an object of serendipity. And and I kinda like that because I think that's what I always liked about and still continue to like about the magazines that I buy in that I might know the topic or even one of the stories or two of the stories, you know, some magazines will cover their cover page with with little tidbits of what what it's about. But then you get into it and you just kind of go from one page to another and you end up on sort of a journey. And in my mind, it's a little bit like the difference between taking a direct flight to a city or a road trip where you've got to stop every every little while and try a different restaurant and and and find the right gas station and and find a snack you've never had before, that sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean to it is all about the journey and and to me that, I idea, got a magazine in the mail yesterday, and to open the mailbox and have it just have it there, that's a surprise. And then you open it up and you don't know what's in it. That's a surprise. And there are going to be some pieces that aren't for you. That's if every single story were sort of algorithmically driven exactly for every reader, then it wouldn't be a magazine anymore. So y part of what I love about it is that exchange between the editors and the designers and the reader and that trust that we don't know where this is gonna go. And it might go some places that we had never thought to go together. And that that willingness to be surprised. That I mean, that to me is what it |
| Mike Renault | 's all about. Yeah, we're so used to uh labels for things. And over the last 15, 20 years, defining why print's important, what is it a publication? Is it a journal? Is it a book? Is it a magazine? Our brains are still sort of programmed to define those things based on potentially what we knew better in the 80s or 90s or early aughts. And again, this is not a magazine. A magazine you might buy at Walgreens, you know, and it it might have the latest watches out. And you it you might think but it like a catalog and the advertisements might be a little more utility driven. But there's no need for that. That's why you have the website. But we spend so much of our lives sitting on computers these days. Everyone still needs to make time for experiences outside of their screens, outside of trying to just jam their heads full of relevant uh new information. And this is an opportunity to get away from that and have an experience with what you love beyond uh the |
| James Stacey | churn of of the algorithm. It's funny, James. Uh we we've debated whether to even keep calling it a magazine. In our in our more high minded moments, we refer to it as a uh biannual premium print journal. Um a magazine. But you know, I mean it it to me it's the the name is almost immaterial. Um what matters is it's a thing that you can throw in your tote bag, take on summer vacation, read and come back to, leave on the coffee table, someone else discovers it. Um you know the the the the name is just semantics |
| Mike Renault | . It sounds ironic, but this is I think all gonna make way much more sense to us in twenty years when |
| James Stacey | we look back on it. And isn't that what collecting's all about? Really? Yeah, no. And it you know, and and because I'm I'm maybe at my heart a pretty simple guy, I like that it works in bright sunlight. Totally. All right, guys. Look, thanks so much for coming on, talking about the magazine, letting me kind of play devil's advocate for w why we're still doing print when in in my estimation and hubris we do digital pretty well too. I think it's an exciting magazine. I think the cover is really rad and I can't wait to see what the the watch goes for at charity. Thanks, James. Appreciate that. Thanks, James. Glad to be here. So that's magazine 10. And you know what I always say if you're enjoying the episode, please just send it to a friend. Send them them a link, let hear it, and let us know in the comments what you think and if there's a topic you might want to hear on a future episode. Thanks so much for listening and we'll tattoo in about a week's time |