Sophia Epstein, Digital Frontier
Digital Frontier is a London-based digital media company that launched a print magazine earlier this year. Editor Sophia Epstein introduces the project as she shares her inspirations and her week.
Sophia has been a journalist for ten years, starting as an intern at Wired, before moving to creative magazine Contagious. She joined Digital Frontier in 2023 and quickly worked her way up to edit their quarterly print magazine.
What are you doing this morning?
I wake up late, as usual, grab a Yorkshire tea before jumping on my bike to the office. It’s a rickety, second-hand thing that needs a lot of coaxing to change gears, but the 45-minute trip to Old Street usually glides by. I have a quick shower in the bougie basement of our office building, then head up to the 24th floor—we’ve only been in this office a few weeks, so I’m still getting used to the gravity-defying speed of the lift and the ridiculous view out the windows.
I pick a desk near our design director and transfer the contents of my backpack onto it—I really lean into the messy-desk cliché, though hot desking has cut the clutter down a little (just give me time). This week we’re having the first ideas meeting for issue three, so I send out a note to our editorial team with some (hopefully) inspiring prompts, then hide in a quiet corner while I update the digitalfrontier.com homepage.
Describe your work environment—what can you see from your desk/ through the window?
I have two distinctly opposite work environments. The first, for three days a week, is a fancy, free-flowing workspace that our founders spent the better part of a year fine-tuning. I can work from anywhere on the floor, but I’m usually on a lumbar-supporting chair near the whiteboard where we stick up the magazine pages as they are designed.
The second spot is my sofa: dark green and velvet. It’s comfy, but most importantly long, so I can use on arm as a back rest. Outside my window is my front garden, where my Japanese anemone has finally stopped drooping. If I leave the window open, I can usually hear the near-deaf guy next door listening to loud instructional videos, which is bearable most of the time but savage on a deadline.
Which magazine do you first remember?
Animals and You. I’d save my 60p pocket money for a few weeks in a row so I could splurge on it at the shop around the corner from my primary school. I’d hang the posters up on my wall—huge images of puppies and kittens—bit weird, now that I think about it.
Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine?
When I was a kid, Dolly (rip) and Nylon were basically my entire personality. In my twenties, I was obsessed with Lucky Peach (RIP, and this one really hurt). I distinctly remember the Chicken Issue—that cover was glorious—it came out while I was attempted to be vegan, but I devoured it anyway. I have sent my design director so many photos of old issues for inspiration.
Now, the magazine I read religiously is Broccoli (still spell it wrong every time). It’s marketed as ‘a magazine for cannabis lovers’ but really, it’s this absorbing, magical thing that combines these deep, human stories with photospreads of snails on carnival rides—even the ads are aesthetic. It’s got that slow-living vibe, while also being incredibly modern, I wrote a piece for them once and it was a real pinch-me moment.
Describe Digital Frontier in three words
Nuanced, sanguine, audacious.
Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first… you’re covering cutting edge digital tech, using print.
Print is just everything, isn’t it? We’ve got a website too, but nothing compares to the feeling of holding something weighty in your hands, turning physical pages, it’s a whole different experience and I don’t think that’s just a romantic notion, I think people—even digital-tech-loving people—want that. I also think, as a massive tech nerd myself, we’ve been very poorly served when it comes to beautiful, curated print mags. You might find a tech-themed issue, or an interesting article here or there, but not much you can dive into.
That’s why we’ve chosen to make a big, beautiful, coffee table mag, that you can sit down with and pore over, with content that will stay relevant and interesting over time, so you can come back again and again, finding new bits of inspiration.
What did you and the team learn from issue one that you’ve applied to the new, second, issue?
Our design is a real calling card for us already, so we thought a lot about how we could level up from issue one—that led us to wrangling a visit to the printers. After we went to press, we went to see the first round of pages and asked for a few tweaks. We use a lot of colour in our layouts, so having that in-person eye has really made such a difference, issue two is incredibly vibrant. A joy to behold, some people (me) might say.
On the editorial side, the best change we made was having a theme: Connections. Not only did it tie the whole issue together, it also made the brief for our writers and freelance contributors a lot more clear. Next issue we’re already planning to incorporate some design easter eggs around the theme we’ve chosen too.
Also, a lesson that can never be learned enough: start earlier! We’re all working across multiple products so it’s very easy to let a few too many weeks pass between finishing one issue and getting going with the next. For issue three my mantra is, ‘you’ll never have as much time as you do right now’.
How does the magazine combine with the other parts of Digital Frontier?
We’ve got a website and put on events—everything feeds into each other. All the ideation that happened around our digital content, for example, really helped us find the right theme for the magazine.
Some of our online articles also go into the mag, but with a bit of a twist. For example, a piece I wrote for the website, looking at what happens to your data after you die, became the starting point for a whole section in issue two on the ephemerality of our online lives, and what that means for our collective history. We commissioned amazing illustrations, freelancers contributed their own pieces to the section and we did our first gatefold!
The events side is one I’m really excited about. It’s still early days, but before we’d even put together issue one, I was imagining putting on exhibitions of the illustrations and photographs from the magazine, perhaps even alongside the artists we’ve hired or profiled.
We are writing about the human side of technology, so building an actual community around the magazine feels like a natural next step. Our new office has a bar, an AV studio and a huge space to host editorial-led events (our first one is happening in December). Some of our best pieces have come out of random conversations, so I’m sure getting a whole forum of techno-optimists together to share ideas will end up feeding back into our content as well.
Highlight one story from the new issue that sums up the magazine and its mission.
Such a mean question! One piece that stands out is one our reporter Charlotte Krol wrote about the role haptics will play as we move into a phone-less future. A lot of AI-enabled devices are being developed, and a big selling point is they’re screenless, but the physical sensation of touch, even touching a screen, is so important to building human connection—so Charlotte investigated how we could maintain that physical touch in a screenless world.
That really echoes who we are as a publication. We are always looking far into the future, optimistic about where tech could take us, but also not naïve to its faults – and when we uncover a problem, we try and solve it. It’s playful, experimental and often quite speculative, but we want to project some positivity about technology into the world. If every tech story you read is all doom and gloom, what are the chances the outcome won’t end up following that trajectory?
What advice do you have for anyone planning to launch a magazine?
Don’t worry about what’s been done before, let your mind work its hectic, creative magic, if you think it’ll work it could totally work—take it to the point just before the printers start laughing or crying. Also, having a theme makes writing the editor’s letter a teeny bit easier.
What a you most looking forward to this coming week?
This is the week we officially start issue three, and I can’t wait to hear the first round of our editorial team’s ideas and to read all the pitches from freelancers. We’ve happened to end up with an all-women writing team at the moment, and though not intentional, it’s quite special. I won’t give this issue’s theme away just yet, but there are so many potential interpretations, I can already envisage the wild variation in the design!