COLORS: Keeping Print Media Alive by Going Online

COLORS has always used pictures as a medium from which to share stories. The print magazine, which also recently launched an updated online version,  has  always explored the premise that all cultures have equal value and that our differences and diversity are a positive thing.  Surprisingly though, COLORS founded by Tibor Kalmon in 1991 in Italy, only recently started using new media tools to reach its audience and interact with them in new and innovative ways in a new site called COLORSlab.

example of how the older issues looked on the site

COLORS has been online since the late 90’s but it’s only in the last few weeks that the magazine’s online existence has evolved from what has functioned more as an archive of each magazine issue into a collaborative and community-building network from which to share images and ideas about various topics.

The first issue to go online was Number 39, the Monoculture issue.  Fast forward to today and issue Number 76, which focuses on teenagers, and you will find an active online community revolving around the topic, a far cry from the original website model which served as a static archive of each issue.

Anne Grassi from COLORS explains that “the new colors laboratory is meant to give everyone the possibility to contribute to the magazine and to us the possibility to extend our resources and network of collaborators. We hoped that calling out for contribution through the web would have reached out for a complete different sort of creatives: not only professional, but student, amateurs….”.

To create the type of collaborative workspace they envisioned for the future of COLORS finding the right platform would play an important role in the capabilities for the population on either side of the website to interact.  Ann believes that the Drupal platform was ideal for their purposes as it allows them the possibility to add on the features as they are needed.

Today new media tools are becoming an integral part of how people think about their projects and how to present them online. These tools  open up creative and technological doors that didn’t exist years earlier when magazines such as COLORS were first beginning to build their own websites. Anne Grassi discussed the importance of technology and new media at COLORS in that,  “the technology we are using shapes our work in many ways. The ways of communicating with contributors in the first place gets way faster and has more facets: they send their material to the website, we talk to them already knowing what their story could be.”   She also refers to most recent issue, the Teenagers issue to explain  how the use of Augmented Reality demonstrates a new way of using the Media Magazine.  Grassi believes that it succeeds in bringing the reader to the web, where he or she is able to find  additional and dynamic content that enriches the print version of the magazine.

I was curious what the priorities were at COLORS that helped to shape how the new media tools would be utilized.  Interestingly, Anne explained that their priorities came through the use of the media itself, “If the priority is to hit the zeitgeist you have to expand a printed magazine without loosing its main qualities like timeless photography.”

examples of different issues on COLORSlab

“Life is generative, so is the production of a magazine.”  Anne believes in the fluidity of changing goals from each issue to the next, a natural course considering that each new issue has new contributors, new minds, and new ideas.  She points out that by having different people contribute to each issue of the magazine, the tone of the magazine varies from issue to issue.  Also the new way in which contributors can present their ideas continuously changes what the magazine becomes.  This new collaborative workspace allows amateur photographers, many without extensive experience but yet have an “eye for the essential” to share the  COLORS’ online space and show their work.

The Colorslab changes slightly with each issue, but it continues to act as an archive for the high level of material submitted to it for each selected topic that becomes an issue. For example, Anne says that they had more than one hundred stories and contributors for the Teenager issue.  Out of all these stories only the best have been shown in print, yet all of them are hosted online and made visible to the world.                             

So now anyone, anywhere can go online and not only spend hours getting lost in all the images and content that. As a result, the become a part of the magazine. Anne puts it best herself when she says that “Colors is a magazine about the rest of the world and Colorslab allows us to turn it into a magazine by the rest of the world.”

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