Hi! Welcome to this week’s MoW!
This week’ magazine is one of our new titles, Good Company. The subheading “Where creativity gets down to business” is especially apt for FIT, which also used this marketing slogan for the last decade. The title is published 2x per year by Grace Bonney, founder of the blog Design*Sponge and author of the bestselling book In the Company of Women. This book presents business advice and creative encouragement from 100 women with successful businesses. According to the magazine’s website, Bonney and her team were inspired to create Good Company after seeing how much good feedback they received from the book.
Bonney created the website Design*Sponge in 2004. This blog focuses on the ideas of home, creativity, and inclusivity. Like other contemporary magazines, such as Domino (2004), frankie (2004), Apartamento (2008), and Oh, Comely (2012), the aesthetic is a pastel pastiche of old furniture, white space, tiny cursive fonts, watercolors, milk glass and DIY. In fact, Bonney has worked for Domino, House & Garden, Craft, and HGTV magazines in her career.
However, Bonney has worked hard to keep the site from being the exclusive realm of white upper-middle class women. She deserves credit for this, even before we begin to talk about her farseeing use of blogging and social media, her early adoption of the minimalist aesthetic, or her decision to use her platform to support small creative businesses.
Two common threads underpin Bonney’s ventures: respect for makers and creative women. With her book, In Good Company, Bonney attempted to support both from the angle of promoting creative women in business and women in creative businesses.
The book and magazine developed out of the “Life & Business” section of Design*Sponge. Besides being a lusciously photographed and illustrated magazine, Bonney releases regular almost-weekly podcasts. With both, the writers try to foster supportive conversations about creative life.
Each feature in issue #2, our first issue, centers around the theme of overcoming fears. By interviewing working creatives, Bonney hopes to encourage other women to see their fears as part of their process and get their work out to the world anyway.
Come take a look!
We have another book by Grace Bonney: Design*Sponge At Home.