Click the cover for the Pica Pica Digital Edition!

After months of blood, sweat, tears, needles, thread, pens and pencils – Pica Pica Magazine is finally online for all to see! Our print magazine has an extremely limited run on beautiful 100% recycled paper and a very special screenprinted cover designed by Steph Says Hello, but unfortunately you’ll have to put up with it in pixel form for now. But it’s just as good, we promise. From in depth interviews to quick and easy makes to our favourite independent designers of the moment and everything in between, we hope you love reading Pica Pica as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

Just click the cover above or the thumbnail in the sidebar to see issue #1 in all its glory!

Image courtesy of Tatty Devine

In issue one of Pica Pica we investigate the murky world of intellectual property theft and copy cat designers. It’s taken a while, but thanks to cases such as Hidden Eloise vs. Paperchase, the mainstream media have begun to pay attention to the problem. Ahead of the pack, open blog You thought we wouldn’t notice… has been calling out the copycats for a few years now so we spoke to them to find out a bit more about the site and the inspiration behind it.

What inspired you to first set up the blog?

I come from a street-art background and I was seeing so much of my own work & that of my peers used without our permission. Most of the time it is just not worth a legal battle but I thought it would be nice if we could at least let people know that this was happening.

Was it always an open blog? And why did you choose to do it this way?

Yeah from the start I wanted anyone to contribute. I knew I couldn’t supply enough content from what I see, and it also meant that it would include much more subjects than I was knowledgeable in, such as music or web.

(more…)

Here’s a lovely video put together by our production director Elena Biagi, it features excerpts of the hard work (and sometimes silliness) we’ve all had to put in over the last 3 months to build our brand and a first issue.. phew! Our faces are in their too, just in case you were wondering what we looked like!

In the next few weeks, we will be launching the digital edition of issue #1 for everyone to have a looksie at.. all of our wonderful contributors will be sent their very own beautifully printed copies in the next month our so, providing the queues at the Walworth Road Post Office aren’t too mental.

After innumerable hours of researching, writing, illustrating, managing, designing and proofreading we can announce that the printed version of Pica Pica magazine is nearly finished! In a few days we’ll bake a cake to celebrate…

Hope you all have an enjoyable weekend!

*Love*

Steph Says Hello vs Pica Pica – click to see it bigger!

Here’s a sneaky peek at the first issue of Pica Pica! In order to celebrate, we set illustrators and graphic designers the challenge of coming up with something crafty and unique for our cover. 15 great submissions later, we chose Steph’s as we felt it illustrated the diversity of the UK craft scene and represented our aesthetic values perfectly. Check out the online gallery to see all submissions (with more details of the competition and runners up too). We’ll be screen-printing Steph’s design on to our first cover in the coming weeks and we’ll be blogging all about the process right here, so stay tuned!