A webby win will expand horizons for this Mumbai-based design magazine

Paper Planes founder and editor-in-chief Nupur Joshi Thanks (in white), with editorial director Fabiola Monteiro and design director Madhav Nair. Pic/Shadab Khan

When Nupur Joshi Thanks launched Paper Planes back in 2014, it was to bring independent print magazines from around the world for readers here in India. With a roster comprising publications like The Gentle Woman, The Paris Review, Little White Lies and Monocle among others, the Paper Planes shop has since diversified to offer an eclectic shopping menu of design accessories, maps, and books. The store notwithstanding, Nupur wanted her passion project to contribute to the growing pool of quality writing and design in India. That's how the Paper Planes digital magazine was born.

Four-and-a-half years later, Paper Planes finds itself at a most curious point in its journey. The magazine, which is focused on design and culture, and is put together by a small yet dynamic team of creative collaborators, was last week nominated for The Webby Award, a leading international award, instituted in 1996, to honour excellence on the Internet. "It's an award that we had been eyeing for a while," Fabiola Monteiro, editorial director, tells us. "Being a Webby nominee means that our work has been singled out as one of the five best in the world in the ‘Magazine' category. We've also been informed that we're among the top 12 per cent of the nearly 14,000 projects entered." Paper Planes is competing for two awards - The Webby Award and The Webby People's Voice Award - and is the only Indian publication to be part of the magazine category this year. For an independent digital publication, seeking to win a title previously won by the likes of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and National Geographic, the nomination itself, admits Monteiro, is a huge win.

Paper Planes re-launched as a digital magazine in November 2018

The attempt by the team has been an exceptional one - to make design and architecture part of everyday speak. "Design often seems like a gate-kept concept. As non-designers ourselves, we've always believed that design is for everyone," says Monteiro. "When we launched the magazine in November 2018, we realised very quickly, that while we were reaching readers, and these readers really loved our content, we needed to allocate resources and funds strategically. We didn't want to be in this race of publishing hundreds of articles a day," Monteiro says.

Quite early on, Paper Planes began documenting design elements and architectural details under "Local Attractions". "These are personal accounts of people's interactions with design," she shares. From the conservancy lanes in Bengaluru to the stone-carved Chausath Yogini Temple in Hirapur, Odisha, the balcaos of Goa, and swadeshi sculptures on a building in Fort, the stories travel through the wide and varied built heritage that India's cities, small towns and villages have on offer. "With this section, we are trying to build a repository and create something that's of use - these are not just nice stories, but useful pieces of information, especially for someone travelling between Indian cities, and looking for something new." Apart from this, the digital magazine also publishes comics by visual artists under Thinking Aloud, which tell stories of everyday lives. "We get artists to think about issues like postpartum body-shaming, or friendship breakups."

The pandemic became a vital part of their journey. They were barely a year-and-a-half into publication, when COVID-19 struck. Instead of churning content at random, the team used the time to "reassess what we wanted to do". One of the things they did was to revamp the website. "It took a long time to go live... We also spent time working on our ‘local attractions' section, and commissioning the right kind of stories." This consolidation of ideas and re-strategising, she feels, made the Webbys a reality. That the website is not on pay-wall, meant that they had to also look for other sources of funding. "We set up The Paper Planes Agency in 2021, which does editorial work for brands and organisations, helps make print and digital magazines, and handles various aspects of communication, be it writing or design. "The agency has helped us sustain the magazine."

A Webby win, they feel, will open up a lot of doors, whether that's creative collaborations or partnerships.

The team hopes to soon re-start Oddly Enough, a series of offline events, which they were forced to hold off during the pandemic. "With Oddly Enough, we were talking about ideas like the climate crisis, the future of food, and things that do involve design very closely, but the people on those panels, whom we invited to be part of the sessions, weren't necessarily designers themselves. The idea being that this is an interdisciplinary pollination of ideas, and design doesn't happen in isolation."

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