In 2012, two and a half years after we launched Sight Unseen, we released our first printed edition, a journal with the punny-yet-amazing title Paper View. Designed by Alex Lin and Benjamin Critton, it was 47 pages of newly commissioned, exclusive content — stories about the multi-disciplinary creatives we loved at the time, from Chen Chen and Kai Williams to Anntian to a studio visit with Peter Shire (before everyone else was doing studio visits with Peter Shire). We used story categories pulled from our website, but organized those stories into larger themes we noticed recurring throughout our interactions with creatives: "When we think back on two and half years of documenting the studios and homes of creatives for our website, Sight Unseen," we wrote in the introduction, "it’s the things those people have in common that stand out — the eccentric collections they all kept as children, or the scrapbooks full of reference images they all keep now. And who among them hasn’t been inspired by the work of Ettore Sottsass? For us, it’s always been about discovering the universal truths behind what it’s like to be a maker, regardless of medium or discipline."
Paper View is long out of print, but you can read the entire thing belo...