Interview :: Jack Freestone from Dandy Magazine

June 25th 2012

Dandy Magazine launched online in May. It’s a piece of queer cultural press that showcases the creative talents of Sydney’s young queer and queer friendly community. Available online, the Dandy site has been artfully designed to replicate a printed mag. The pages offer up insights into politics, culture, fashion and even astrology – if you want to know your gay fortune, Dandy’s ‘homoscopes’ deliver the answers you seek. Last week Zoe Ferguson got the chance to speak with Dandy’s designated ‘talker’ Jack Freestone about the mag.


Zoe: What was the motivation behind starting Dandy? 



Jack: Dandy was started at the beginning of the year by my friends Sebastian Andreassen and Cyna Strachan; the two of them realised that they had a bunch of queer friends doing exciting things and they wanted to showcase their friend’s work. Seabas and Cyna wanted to create a mag that wasn’t so scene centric; they wanted a mag that was focused on the artistic and creative talents of the queer community. Dandy makes a point of being quite beautifully designed without including a plethora of shirtless men in sexy poses.

The design of the mag is really quite striking, was it always your intention for the aesthetic of the mag to be a defining feature?

Well Seabas and Cyna are both design students so design is naturally really important to them and that shines though in the mag. Even though the mag is online I like that it manages to immerse the reader to the same degree that a printed publication would. So yeah, it’s important that the magazine looks like a magazine. The design is cool but I think the content is solid too.

Have you guys had a lot of support from the gay community?



Yeah we have had a great deal of support from the students at Sydney Uni and UTS. We have had plenty of people approach us wanting to write articles, which is really great because the mag needs to be a collaborative effort. We have also had some support from some media personalities like Tom Tilley and Monique Shafter.

What can we expect from Dandy in the near future?

Dandy will be released quarterly, so the next edition will be available in September. We are slowly building a following and hope that one day the mag will have garnered enough interest to be printed. We have some exciting pieces lined up for the second addition we welcome more contributions!

 

What: Dandy magazine

Where: http://dandythemag.com/the-magazine

If you’re working on a project, know of any kind of queer initiative, or if you think it’s something that should be shared, drop Cyna and Sebastian a line at dandythemag@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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