The Weird Way the 404 Media Zine Was Built

Summary

I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.What my Affinity interface looks like. It’s the Windows version, but it’s running on Linux.Why page layout on Linux is fairly uncommonThe meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops th...