The idea for this new print project was initiated by a small group across Lonely Planet’s editorial, design and photography teams that came together to “carve out space for more experimental, creative work”, shares Matthew, led by Nitya Chambers, the brand’s senior vice president. The team at Lonely Planet were keen to lean back into utility with the project, “because that’s fundamentally who we are: travel experts with real depth of knowledge. The interesting part is finding ways to express that with personality,” Matthew says. So the zine ended up taking visual cues from the earliest Lonely Planet editions: DIY photocopies, stapled stacks and stripped back colour palettes with hand drawn elements.
A refreshingly small, pocketable and energetic edition, the zine’s debut was all about creating something that drew on its rich heritage of print but felt distinctly separate from the function of the travel brands trusty guidebooks: something that “doesn’t exist to tell you where to go – it’s about reminding you why you travel in the first place. That shift opens up the format: it can be looser, more tactile and more expressive.” Despite being something that seeks to draw on the emotional connection readers have to the brands guide books, whether they are “kept as souvenir’s, passed between friends or become part of the story of a trip”, Matthew says, the zine is much more about inspiration than any instruction – a slower more considered reading experience and something that you can spend a bit more time with.
Now that Artifact’s first issue has emerged and seen great success, the team have plans for the next edition up their sleeves: “Issue one was something of an experiment pulled together on borrowed time by a small team,” Matthew ends. “It’s exciting to now build on that momentum with a clearer sense of what the format can be.”