New copies of Scotland Outdoors magazine have just landed and we’re delighted by how this issue has turned out and love the cover image kindly supplied by Woodland Trust Scotland.

If you’re a UK-based fan of the Scottish outdoors – and particularly if you have kids - we strongly recommend you pick up a copy at your nearest stockist.

Variety, as we all know, is the CSS of life – and so we’re pleased to say we’ve been spending a little time crafting web pages recently. The first of which is for our small but perfectly-formed Scottish airport magazine, aurora.

We’re delighted to say that Scotland Outdoors, the magazine we design for Big Bend Publishing won the award for Best Magazine From a Small Publisher at the PPA Scotland awards in Glasgow on Wednesday night for the second year running.

The team at Big Bend really do put heart and soul into this title and we’re absolutely delighted their efforts have been recognised – although sad that they couldn’t make it to the awards ceremony in person. Instead, Matt got the honour of rubbing shoulders with the event host, comedian Craig Hill!

Been really busy lately getting our own magazines out – The Keeper (for whisky drinkers) mails next week, The Gallery (for prisoners) delivered today, Practice Manager (for, er, Practice managers) at the printers. Not only have we been busy making mags, we’ve been buying a lot of them too. We have a fairly big backlog of new and interesting titles to tell you about – mainly after our trip to GmbH, the new mag store that opened in Glasgow last month. Plenty of splendid magazines on the shelves there. Here are some pictures, and yes, they are planning to sell coffee soon. Oh, and luckily, they take credit cards…

aurora is back, brighter than ever. The sun seemed to have gone down on the compact and covetable in-flight magazine that we at CMYK produced for Highland Airways, when the airline itself ceased trading this year, battered by blizzards and volcanic ash clouds. But we are delighted that aurora has risen again, this time as a customer magazine for Highlands & Islands Airports. It’s on display at the company’s 11 airports, ranging from bustling Inverness to the achingly beautiful beach airport on Barra. Look out for it and help yourself to a copy if you’re flying from any HIA airport. Our summer issue has an insider’s view of the Western Isles, an interview with songstress and DJ Cerys Matthews, a piece on superfoods that won’t break the bank and much more besides.

Earlier in the year, I stopped making mags for a while in order to take a holiday in New York.

All went splendidly – we stayed in a lovely place in Brooklyn, saw all the major sights and quite a few minor ones too. It was about time to come home and make some more mags when, all of a sudden, Iceland blew up. Didn’t see that one coming.

Filling our time with whatever we could find that didn’t cost money and thankful that, in spite of a raised eyebrow while we were packing, my macbook had made it into the hand luggage, we resigned ourselves to an extra week on holiday (I can almost feel your sympathy beaming through the internet…). During one afternoon of blog browsing, I noticed this call to action on Andrew Losowsky’s Magtastic Blogsplosion website.

This is an open call to designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, art directors and anyone else who is stranded by the ash cloud, and would like something to do.

If there’s one thing my ol’ ma taught me, it’s that when life gives you volcanoes, make magazines. And so we shall.

If you’re out there and interested, email me and tell me what you do. I’ll then give you an assignment to complete today/tomorrow. Depending on how long this thing lasts, we’ll work the rest of it out from there. The copyright will remain yours on anything you produce, I just ask for permission to include it in the currently-untitled ashcloud magazine (working titles include Grounded, SkyFail and Someday We’ll Fly Away.)

If you’d like to be a part of the core creative team who will put together this impromptu publication, let me know as well. The only criterion for any contributor is that, like me, you have to be stuck somewhere unintentionally.

If all goes well, the results will be published, probably via MagCloud and/or the Newspaper Club, and any proceeds sent to a charity that helps mitigate the effects of climate change on human populations. After all, we have to repent somehow.

Who’s in?

Well it sounded like a great project, a good way of keeping myself entertained and, critically from my wife’s point of view, a way to prevent me spending any more money so I got in touch and was swiftly briefed to produce an illustration depicting the volcano “as if by a people who worshipped it”.

I got to work in Illustrator and produced an image of a fiery maiden of smoke and ash. Andrew was pleased with the result and in the process of publicising the project, my little illustration featured on the Creative Review blog as well as the BBC website and the venture even received coverage in a number of UK national newspapers.

On my return to Edinburgh, Andrew asked if I wouldn’t mind helping out with the layout of the title. After brief consideration I enthusiastically accepted and the compiled content started to pour in from over the pond via the miracle of DropBox. To the outside world, things have been fairly quiet ever since.

Well, we’ve not been idle. The project continues apace with Andrew and I working away in our spare time whenever the opportunity arises and we are hoping to be able to offer the finished article via MagCloud very soon indeed!

In the meantime, Andrew has put together a small taster of our rough works in progress so you can see what kind of shape it’s taking. It’s not often you get to see magazine layouts at this stage but, as a project which is community generated in this way, it seems only appropriate.

Watch this space – or indeed this space – for a release announcement!