I had the opportunity to bring back together members of the first team who helped develop Make: magazine, taking an idea I had and turning it into something real and tangible. I am grateful for all that they did. –Dale Dougherty
The OG Team
Mark Frauenfelder: Mark was the first editor for Make: magazine. He had worked at Wired and was a founder of Boing Boing. Today, he’s research director at a nonprofit think tank called Institute for the Future, and they’re in Palo Alto, California.
David Albertson: David came up with the design and format for Make: magazine. He is a graphic designer who has his own firm, Albertson Design in San Francisco.
Shawn Connally: Shawn was the managing editor for Make:, working with Mark as well as copy editors and designers to produce the magazine. Today, she divides her time between Occidental, California, and New Mexico. She is a master gardener.
Paul Spinrad: Paul was an early contributor to Make: and then joined the team as an editor. Today, he’s a technical writer at Broadcom.
Keith Hammond: Keith is the editor-in-chief of Make:. He started as a copy editor on early issues of Make: before managing the projects section.
Here on Make:cast is the original interview with Mark, David, Shawn, Paul and Keith.
Making the First Issue
Dale: Mark, when I first talked to you about a new magazine I wanted to start, you were in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.
Mark: I was there with my two young daughters and [wife] Carla. You had been doing the Hacks series of books at O’Reilly and you wanted to do a general-interest “recreational technology” magazine.
Dale: I had no experience publishing a magazine, but I had connected to John Battelle. He knew you from Wired.
Mark: About four months later, I came back from Rarotonga and I flew out to meet you with John. I was really excited about it. You asked about a designer and I had always been a huge admirer of David Alberston’s work.
So then, Dale and David and I met, and you said, let’s make a prototype. So that was several weekends — and weeks — up at David’s in his studio, putting stuff on the wall. We didn’t have a name for the magazine and I was pushing foolishly for the name Geek. You of course came up with the great name Make, which was perfect. And then adding the colon to it was just, like, the brilliance of that — what are you going to make?
Dale: My original idea was Hacks magazine. I told my kids, and they didn’t get the word hack. It meant nothing to them.
As an editor at O’Reilly, I recalled a book we had published about a Unix utility, Managing Projects with GNU Make. I wanted the magazine to be about projects, how to build things. The make utility was used to run a bunch of commands to compile a program. I didn’t care if anyone knew that connection, but I loved the word make because it was a verb for doing something.
David: Mark, I remember when we were here in my little office, just how much fun it was. Dale, you had shared with me old Popular Mechanics magazines. I loved those. They’re so beautifully done and they were so sincere. And so when we talked about this being like a shop manual, I really got excited about that.
Shawn: I had a 3-year-old at home. Dale said, come in, I have this crazy idea. He would never call it crazy; I called it crazy to do this stuff. But I thought it was a pretty interesting idea.
Dale: Your role, Shawn, was managing editor, which is really bringing all the different pieces together. Paul, you came on after the first issue.
Paul: I used to work at Wired but not at the same time that Mark did; yet we knew a lot of folks in common. I’d taken some time off to write a book about VJing, about live video performance, which I was super into. I pinged Mark looking for work and he said I’m starting this magazine. Do you want to write these two short pieces? There was one about this guy in Fremont who had built in his backyard a monorail. I love that stuff.
Dale: We have a photo of a puppy in the monorail that captures your interest immediately.
Paul: Totally. The puppy monorail!
Dale: Keith is our current editor-in-chief.
Keith: I had just moved to Sebastopol … like, why is there a magazine in this little town? And so I came in and met the magazine team that had been pulled together, right after the first issue succeeded. You guys were like, Oh, we have to really do this now!
It’s fussy work, scientific notations and abbreviations, conventions and nomenclature and dimensions … it’s really fussy.
David: It was a big part of selecting the typeface for the magazine. We had character sets that allowed for inline fractions and that had all the mathematical symbols, so we could keep them uniform with the whole look of the magazine.
Keith: On top of that, it has to actually work! The part number has to be the right part number; the length of the screw has to be right, or it won’t fit.
Paul: And it’s in print!
Dale: David, one of the things I’m really proud of is the design of Make: and it has stood the test of time. We’ve had other designers follow David but he laid the foundation. We took a category that often didn’t have much design, either it was grungy or just plain, the equivalent of Courier font.
David: I didn’t have to pitch it too hard; it was great to have you guys as collaborators to push things along. It was really worth the effort because we wanted those pages to look great.
Dale: David, you had a particular vision, and I trusted that. We didn’t do a hundred variations. You were pretty close from the beginning.
David: I really wanted this to stand out, to not look like a typical techie manual, and I wanted — your vision, Dale, of this thing being for, like, dads and kids, that kind of age range — I wanted kids to look at it and say, this is exciting. It’s not just the gear.
Dale: A lot of the computer magazines were based on classes of gear, mobile phones or laptops or PCs or Macs. They were overly business focused — plain, straightforward. I wanted making to be fun and playful. That’s one of the reasons people do it.
Mark, you have a great sense of what’s cool. I think it’s honed in Boing Boing, and I don’t mean affected cool but authentic and genuine, something original that you haven’t seen before — like, someone actually did that!
Mark: That’s always been my thing. Like when Wired hired me to do their review section, and also they had a section called Fetish, which was new gadgets and things like that, and it was just tapping into my natural interest for interesting new things out there that intrigued me.
Dale: But Mark, you actually have a degree in mechanical engineering.
Mark: I do.
Dale: I think the secret touch you had, and I see it in places like Japan, like our Maker Faire Tokyo, it’s combining pop culture or the sense of what’s popular or cool with technology.
David: I remember when Mark said, OK, we got a scoop! The big scoop was that there are a bunch of students in Hong Kong who were going to like the local Pizza Hut. They had architected the salad bar so that they could maximize a single bowl by building platforms out of carrot sticks. I love that Mark was like, We got it! We’re going to be the first ones to get that out there.
Dale: One of the things that we tried to do was have illustrations for the projects.
Keith: The exploded diagram or cutaway for that big opening illustration for major projects — it sets this context for how the whole thing works. It was not a boring diagram, it was beautifully illustrated with a lot of character.
Dale: Again, that’s a connection to those old Popular Mechanics that had wonderful line art. It did something that photographs don’t do the same way. It was clear and easy to understand.
Mark: We made a connection to Roy Doty who was the fantastic “Wordless Workshop” illustrator for Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. He was in his mid-80s doing illustrations for us. He was such a great bridge, and a thrill to work with.
Dale: The first issue had four major projects. I think they were a pretty good reflection of what Make: wanted to be. One was the mag stripe reader by Billy Hoffman, which was a hack. How do you know what’s on that mag stripe on a credit card or a hotel room key? And then Johnny Lee’s $14 Steadicam. It had a weight at the bottom of a pipe and a bracket to hold a camera.
We had a challenge to figure out what was going to be on the cover. What would be the most different and inspiring project we could find? We found Cris Benton, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley who was putting cameras up in the air hanging from a kite. He was flying them at 200 feet so he could get different views of buildings.
Our goal was to share the instructions of how to build something and not hand-wave over the process. Cris had many different camera rigs but the one he made for the magazine was a harness made with popsicle sticks and it was designed for a disposable camera.
Mark: It had the Silly Putty viscous timer. Cris made this project for us especially, because we said: “Your rigs are expensive. Can you do a low-cost version?” The shutter mechanism was a little film canister with Silly Putty inside and a rubber band. You wound it up in the Silly Putty, but it was super viscous. So the little lever that pressed the shutter button …
David: It was a toothpick with rubber bands.
Mark: It took 3 minutes to finally hit the shutter, but it was enough time to deploy that kite and get it up to altitude.
Dale: It was a Rube Goldberg kind of contraption.
Mark: That first project makes you realize how long ago this was. Now there’s just so many other options with Bluetooth and all that stuff.
Dale: Cris was also using a Canon camera and he was able to hack the firmware in to do the same kind of thing, getting a delay. I’ve found it fascinating that we covered hacking consumer technology to make it do something that you want it to do, but it wasn’t really made to do.
Paul: There’s something very subversive about DIY and doing things you’re not supposed to. The design of Make: was very approachable and appealing. It was not anti-establishment in any way. It was very direct and clear. That’s what made it so subversive.
Make: Authors: Where are they now?
Cris Benton, Berkeley, California, writes: Like Make: I find myself 20 years older and this places me in the state of contented retirement. I continue to play around with KAP, using low level photographs in sustained, longitudinal projects to document and understand landscapes of interest. My South Bay Salt Pond work led to exhibits at the Exploratorium and to Saltscapes, a book with Heyday Press. Another KAP project documents the coastal defenses of San Francisco Bay. These days I am splitting my time between grandkids, camping, and travel but still get a kite up now and then. flickr.com/photos/kap_cris
Johnny Lee, Redmond, Washington, writes: I am working on AI experiences for wearable devices like AR glasses. Very “buzzwordy,” I know. Previously, I developed spatial computing technology for Google, and did a short stint in robotics. The $14 camera stabilizer was my first real exposure to the power of the maker community. Being included in the premier issue of Make: is still a badge of honor … I even got to ride the coattails of the magazine when it was included in the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Triennial in 2006. It definitely encouraged me to continue making other projects accessible to the community such as my Wii-remote hacks and funding the Adafruit OpenKinect prize.
Mike Ossman, Evergreen, Colorado: Mike writes and designs open source products at GreatScottGadgets.com, which he calls an “effort to put exciting, new tools into the hands of innovative people” — notably the HackRF One software defined radio (SDR) transceiver featured in Make: Volumes 84 and 87.
Billy Hoffman, Atlanta, Georgia, writes: Writing for that first issue of Make: was not only rewarding but also very validating: there existed other people, like me, that were obsessively curious with how things worked, and with building things. In early 2005, I was about to graduate from college. I had been active in the hacking/2600 scene, but working with Make: and O’Reilly helped me see there was a much broader appeal. Since Make:, I’ve made a career of figuring out how things work, as a researcher, founder, and then CTO at a series of computer security and web performance startups. Nowadays I do my making with my daughter, who loves to download, modify, and print models on her 3D printer. In her eyes, hackers are people who know how to mod Minecraft!
Dale: One of the questions I got early on was, why are you doing a print magazine? There was something about it being tangible that really appealed to me. This was a magazine about objects and we wanted to create the magazine as an object about those objects. I hoped people would want to collect them and hold on to them.
David: I think we were all aware that it was comfort food for some people too, like the people who would have a subscription to Martha Stewart Living and they never make a recipe.
They just felt really good about going through the pages and looking at the pictures and the elaborateness of some of these little projects. We heard from some readers: I comb through every issue, I make maybe one project a year.
Dale: I also heard from people who said “I grew up reading magazines like Popular Electronics and that’s how I learned about technology. I read it under the covers at night with a flashlight.” We’re filling people’s head with ideas for things, and then their own ideas emerge and they then know how to do it because they saw someone else do something like it.
Keith: Now that’s all in your bag of tricks. And it demystifies technology, what’s under the hood. It’s not a magic black box from some big company. It’s just technology — you can figure out how it works and you can point it in a new direction.
Paul: I remember it was like the peak period for magazines going out of business. It was so funny, working for Make: while reading that so-and-so is going out of business. I kept thinking, there is an exception here.
Keith: We somehow started a magazine right when all the other magazines were going off a cliff. And it only got worse. But we were like Wile E. Coyote. We just went out over the cliff and just kept going. We’re still going.
Dale: I like that image. I didn’t know if we’d get any advertising. So we had a higher cover price than most magazines. Tim O’Reilly said, when people pay for something, they value it.
Keith: I think reader-supported publications are the ones that have kept bumping along steadily.
Dale: Mark, you mentioned our first project, kite aerial photography, was long, over 30 pages in print. We had to back up the release of the first issue because of the complexity of it. One thing that distinguishes Make: is how we provided detailed step-by-step instructions for projects.
David: It’s recipe building. We really worked on that and kept trying to hone it so that we had a templated way to lay out projects in a sequence. I worried that the material would come across as extraordinarily dense and impenetrable. What we wanted was something that people can look at and go, OK, I can handle this. It gives them the confidence that they can understand it all. All of us worked really hard to make sure the instructions were really as simple as they can be.
Dale: Editors had two challenges. One was working with some authors who are not naturally writers. Second, often they’re not very good at describing their own work in a way that other people can follow the instructions, without knowing the same background information. They had to think how someone else would be able to do what they do.
Keith: This is what led to the Make Labs engineering interns building and testing projects to see if this stuff would really work. Especially mechanical contraptions like the Stirling engine confused. And that’s the editorial back-and-forth with the author. We started improving the projects also for photography.
David: And we built a guide for authors for taking their own photographs. We tried to make that into its own how-to to make it really easy for them.
Dale: There’s such authenticity to a photo that a maker takes of their project, often it’s in their workshop or their garage. I always preferred that to our own studio shoots.
Paul: Another part of David’s design was the photo of the materials at the very beginning, a sort of establishing shot of all the materials. You see how it makes the project so tangible and less intimidating. You’re setting the stage: This is what you start with.
Dale: Mark, I really enjoyed meeting the makers as people. They didn’t fit into the traditional categories of artists or even technologists and or scientists and others. It was fun to find out, often this is a side project or something that they just did. You never asked a maker, why’d you do that? It was more like, we’re happy that they did it.
David: There was such a folk art kind of component to a lot of these things — the makers and how unique they were.
Dale: These encounters with people led me to thinking about Maker Faire as an event — to bring all these makers together for the public to meet them and talk to them about their projects.
Shawn: I still remember the first time I saw an ad that used the word maker after we started the magazine. Dale pretty much created this word and this movement and now I get every week, an ad or an email about makers. I think we created a word and a movement, as you say.
Dale: The word maker served a purpose of connecting people that had different interests and different things they like to do but they were all makers. Maker Faire was just an umbrella for all kinds of different people who make things and they can all talk about their projects and regardless, they can say “I’m a maker.”
Shawn: The word maker, like you said, you put it in the first issue and now 20 years later, everyone just uses it as a noun in a way that really no one did 20 years ago. I find that fascinating and really something for all of us to be proud of.
This article appeared in Make: Volume 92.
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