After publishing 50 web magazines, 4 pdf magazines, and surfing probably hundreds of portfolios, I’m still wondering why people get afraid of putting their work online.

I definitely understand that you want to protect your work and copyrights. And you should. But I don’t understand that you won’t allow other people to bookmark, blog, or share  your work with others. It’s because of blogs and bookmarking services that we can explore and discover so many great artists!

So even though I’m not a big expert, let me give you some advice on how you can exploit the web as a great (free) marketing tool, but still have your stuff protected from unauthorized usage. First thing, if you don’t have the opportunity to host your own website, don’t worry, there are a lot of other, free ways to share your work. Of course, your own website gives you full control on how your work is displayed, but a lot of communities are also trying hard to watch over your work.

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Ever wondered why I chose a magazine, an not a blog, as format for GizMag? To be honest, me too.

But there is a very simple and short explanation. A few years ago, I did a thesis on DVD-magazines. Back then, I described a magazine as bundled articles reflecting a certain opinion, or a publication that gives you background information on a definite topic. A magazine is also published periodically. And to me, a blog is more like a daily rambling of thoughts. So there you go. To list some weekly neat stuff, I thought it would be cooler to put this in a magazine.

And also. I ♥ magazines. :)

- In these series of GizMag Explained I will try to answer some questions I got in the past about the magazine.

Today, GizMag turns 1 year!

Yep that’s right, I started with the web magazine exactly one year ago. I honestly can’t believe it myself. What started out as a rather spontaneous idea, became a full-time hobby. :)

I’m not really a designer myself (well… maybe I am, maybe I’m not…), but you could say that I’m the biggest fan. :P I consider myself part of the MTV generation (MTV actually started 2 months after I was born). So I have a great passion for images and popular culture. With this passion I try to find quality designs in different fields (such as graphics, video, fashion, photography, …), which can give you some inspiration on a daily basis, and let’s you discover some fresh, new talent.

I hope you all enjoy the magazine as much as me making it, and that it can go on for at least another year. I might have some ideas to expand it in the future. But for now, let’s keep it going, there is still a lot of great talent to be discovered!

To give you some figures on the magazine:

• There are 47 issues online (so yes, I skipped a few weeks).
• That means there are 329 links to be discovered.
• At this moment there are 3 PDF magazines available to download, with a 4th coming really soon (sorry, still working on it).
• All together, the PDF magazines have been downloaded more than 12.000 times. So that’s around 4.000 downloads for each PDF.
• At this point I have more than 25.000 visitors coming from 141 countries (yep, that covers every continent).