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Steve Hawk’s story started with a simple fact: he loved to surf. For him, riding waves taps into an energy source that plays a “fundamental role in the way the universe works.”
He also loved to write and sought to marry these two passions as the editor of Surfer magazine (1990-1998). There, as well as in the pages of Harper’s, The New York Times and Outside magazine, Hawk lifted the veil and wrote about surfing with a literary panache.
Today, he’s the executive editor of Sierra Magazine and also serves as a board member of the Tony Hawk Foundation, a charity founded by his younger brother that focuses on improving the lives of youth in low-income communities.
On Flipboard, Hawk is able to dive into his passions and discover many more. For someone who’s committed to and curious about the natural world, Hawk can distill a sea of inspiration into a single format—and encourage others to do the same.
My name is Steve Hawk and my passion is telling stories through magazines. When you enrich a well-written piece with photos, videos and graphics, it touches readers in ways they might not even consciously comprehend. Done right, the whole truly is greater than the sum of the parts. When I curate on Flipboard, those are the kind of features I gravitate toward. They’re hard to find.
My mission is to inform, tickle and, occasionally, move people through creative non-fiction. I’ve been in the magazine and online journalism world since the 1990s, first with Surfer, then Surfline.com, and now with Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club. So my interests run from the adventurous to the serious to the frivolous. Also, I will watch (and make my friends watch) pretty much any video of John John Florence ripping.
I enjoy scouring the far ends of the Internet and sharing with friends and followers nuggets they might not otherwise see: unread interviews, unseen video clips, unheard podcasts—but only if they’re worth reading, watching or hearing.
Flipboard is also great for breaking news, because there’s still a newspaper reporter inside me who gets a stupid thrill out of being first with a big scoop.
I’m lucky in my career to have spent time under the wings of two extraordinarily talented writers: Barry Farrell and David Milch. Barry taught me how to ask the right questions. David taught me how to tell a story.
The first article I ever flipped was an interview I did for Sierra with Roger Richmond, a man whose hometown was erased by a mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia. It’s one of the sweetest and saddest stories I’ve ever helped to tell.
If I had to describe Flipboard in one word, it would be “curation.”
The piece of content I’ve enjoyed recently is a harrowing SoundCloud interview with former pro surfer Rob Bain, in which he talks about the time he broke his neck and got scalped at his home break in Australia. He almost drowned while his wife watched from shore.
Spotlight’s On! Look Your Best Before Getting Discoveredhttps://ar-ar.about.flipboard.com/magmaker/spotlights-on-look-your-best-before-getting-discovered
With the introduction of over 30,000 topics to follow on the new Flipboard, your magazines will get more exposure than ever before—they’re helping to power those topics—so that’s why it’s important to look your best.
We’ve updated the profile to help you shine. Besides an overall redesign, you can now see your entire catalog and more easily start new magazines. Be sure to complete your profile with an avatar and description, too.
In celebration of your unique perspectives and personalities, we’re also launching a new video series called My Magazine, which documents the stories of amazing MagMakers.
Share your story with us using the #MyMagazine hashtag for future features in this blog and elsewhere.
~jdlv is curating “Flipboard For You”
Spotlight: Fashion Publicist Owen Geronimohttps://ar-ar.about.flipboard.com/magmaker/spotlight-fashion-publicist-owen-geronimo
My name is Owen Geronimo and my medium is art, fashion and technology.
My love of creativity and anti-establishment philosophy has led me into interesting projects in the worlds of art, fashion and business. I founded a nonprofit in San Francisco for fashion, technology and design called San Francisco Fashion And Merchants Alliance. Now, I work with aspiring startups, entrepreneurs, designers and students on the future of fashion, retail and wearable technology.
I use Flipboard for fashion and retail news, technology trends, and as one of my favorite media channels. I work with new media formats and platforms, and Flipboard is comfortable and convenient to use.
The first article I flipped was “From High Fashion to Video Games: Giles Deacon for Luigi’s Mansion II” via HYPEBEAST for my magazine “News Fash.”
I started using Flipboard to catalogue and publish industry news. I love Giles Deacon and Hypebeast! I’m also a big manga fan and I’ve been fascinated by Giles Deacon’s Pac-Man headdresses.
The best article I read all week is “Edward Snowden’s Privacy Tips: ‘Get Rid of Dropbox,’ Avoid Facebook and Google” from TechCrunch.
Some of my favorite influences are Nick Knight and Bruce Weber for photography, Tom Ford for menswear, Alexander McQueen for womenswear, Andy Warhol for art and Carine Roitfeld for media.
See Owen’s mags on street style, fashion and technology below:
My name is Chinie and my medium is writing. Recently, on my blog Fab After Forty and anywhere else I can get away with it, my writing has been illustrated by doodles. I only discovered I could draw two years ago, but since then, I think I may just have made up for all that lost time. During the day I work as a Creative Director at Teleforce Asia, a direct marketing firm.
My love of learning is my life’s driving force. It really thrills my nerdy little heart that the wealth of information available on the Internet allows me to learn at least 10 new things a day. My goal every day is simple: to become a little smarter, wiser and more empathetic—therefore kinder—than I was the day before.
Because of this, I like to joke around that by the time I die, it’ll be because I’m too awesome to exist.
I also use Flipboard to jumpstart my creativity when I’m feeling low on mojo. My job as a Creative Director doesn’t really allow for mental block, so I need to actively find ways to get out of a funk.
Browsing through other people’s magazines and headlines and ideas on Flipboard always manages to spark an idea or two…or five.
In one word, Flipboard is a “springboard”—to new ideas, to limitless information and inspiration.
The first article I flipped was a feature I found in Flipboard Picks about the most amazing swimming pools in the world. It really wasn’t something I wanted to blog about, but it was just so beautiful to look at, I had to do something with it. And voilà! The Fab Lab was born.
Flipboard’s also great for curating and saving articles I want to keep (mostly recipes I want to try when I’m not on a diet—lol), show my friends and family, or blog about later when I have a little more time. My magazine—the Fab Lab—is meant to be a companion to my blog—Fab After Forty—and features (as the name suggests) all sorts of fabulous Flipboard finds.
The best article I read all week was “The Secret Benefits of a Curious Mind” by Adoree Durayappah on The Huffington Post. Aside from being a big nerd in general, I was an educator for eight years (I like to think I still am one) so anything about learning and how the brain works always fascinates me.
My biggest influences are the everyday heroes I read about or come in contact with on any given day. The teacher who gives her life to protect her students from a deranged gunman. The honest taxi driver who returns a bag of money he finds in his cab. A cousin who faces all sorts of crazy challenges working as a missionary in Africa. My sister, who juggles a chaotic life—with a full-time job and four little kids!—with humor and grace. I admire a number of well-known successful people, but I am more impressed by those who show us that you don’t need to be famous to be great.
For “ingredients for an awesome life,” check out Chinie’s Fab Lab:
My name is Peter Petrovski and my medium is digital.
My love of storytelling stems from my fascination with the intersection of technology, culture and information. I’m passionate about understanding motivations behind human behaviour, identifying problems, brainstorming ideas and crafting solutions that improve people’s lives.
I use Flipboard to curate information, ideas and products. And to be surprised by the serendipitous discovery of fresh content.
The first article I flipped was a TechCrunch article on how Google was planning to send invites out for its Glass Explorer program. I flipped it into my Reading List magazine, and it really typifies the type of content I like to read and curate: innovation—not just from a technological point, but cultural and business innovation.
Flipboard is also great for discovering magazines curated around specific news topics and interests. I followed Carmen B’s The Ferguson Shooting magazine to get my head around the circumstances and context behind what was happening in Missouri. Dan Harris’ 10% Happier is one of my favourite sources to discover new ways to find mindfulness.
The best article I read all week was Vogue’s piece on Jony Ive and the design of the Apple Watch was a rare opportunity to find out more about the man.
Something I’ve found on Flipboard that’s made my life better is the photographic art of “knolling,” which is arranging objects neatly at 90 degree angles. I came across the Tumblr site Things Organized Neatly via Flipboard and kept finding out more about it.
My biggest influences are people and the unknown. I find it interesting to find points of failure or pain in things that people do every day, and then finding out why. The unknown is a powerful source of inspiration because it brings the mind back to the childhood wonder that anything is possible. It’s exhilarating to think that we are imagining the future. As Carl Sagan said, “Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Check out Peter’s magazines for style tips, ways to better yourself, and interesting longreads:
My name is Gabriel Craft and my medium is the blogger’s dashboard. In between teaching English as a foreign language here in Japan, I create and and curate content related to design, personal growth, mindfulness, practical Zen Buddhism, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Oh, and a whole mess of tiny houses. I also enjoy the plastic arts through photography, digital art and tactile paper and fude pen.
I use Flipboard to curate original content into a format that is easy and fun for me to review and revisit. I love that I can easily create a magazine that I would like to read again and again, and it’s been a great encouragement to know that many people may benefit from my arrangements.
Over the past two years I have fallen in love with Flipboard and Tumblr. I have happily found them complementary and help me cultivate several niche interests which I am passionate about. Subject matter that would be dismissed as odd or fringe to most of my friends or family members have found significant appreciation by the Flipboard community, which empowers me to keep working toward my passions: blogging, a healthier life and a future mortgage-free home which I plan to build myself.
I also use Flipboard for arguably too many things:
Social Media Management: Flipboard allows me to feel involved, creative and productive rather than simply consuming.
Personal Growth & Volunteerism: As a form of creative therapy after surviving the tsunami that struck Japan back in 2011, I curate two mindfulness-based health and wellness magazines. I also promote and showcase content produced by non-profit organizations which I am involved with or support through blogging and social media volunteerism.
Brainstorming & Productivity: I curate art and music “to explore later” with my daughter when we have more time together on the weekends. Currently I’m brainstorming about taking a two-month “roadschooling” excursion throughout the United States with her. Curating mags for future class lessons or project ideas has greatly increased my workflow.
Silliness: my personal and yet public GIF library making silly but darn good fan magazines for The Colbert Report, The Simpsons, Seinfeld and other fun that may lift me out of a low mood and help me laugh-it-up when feeling down.
My greatest influences are Maria Popova for her work with Brain Pickings and the Curator’s Code, and Kirby Ferguson for his work with Everything Is A Remix. I’m also grateful for the Dharma Talk podcasts given by Thich Nhat Hahn, the very simple (free) awareness app offered by Cheri Huber, and Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than. With regard to tiny houses, I offer gratitude Andrew and Gabriella Morrison from TinyHouseBuild for mentoring me.
Living in Japan, Gabriel has found a way to make small spaces all his own. Check out his magazine devoted to big ideas in tiny places:
Credit: Andrew Kelly for CROWDFUNDx
My name is Amy Vernon and my medium is words.
My love of sharing information is driven by my life-long relationship with words and grammar. I view my job in life as helping people understand—whether it’s understanding a concept, understanding a story, understanding another person, understanding technology. It’s taken me a long time, ironically, to be able to express that properly, but my connection with words and their meaning began as long ago as I can remember.
I spent 20 years as a daily newspaper journalist, helping our readers understand the world around them. Now, I try to do the same with my friends and community on social media. I’ve spent the last five-plus years working with companies large and small to properly communicate with their communities, online and off. I’m looking for my next big challenge right now, while working in a variety of areas, with a startup, with a museum, and with myself on a personal passion project. You can learn more about me at amyvernon.net.
I use Flipboard to curate information on a variety of topics close to my heart: I have a variety of magazines dedicated to feminism: two of my first mags were on women leaders and women in tech, and I contribute to a magazine created by Flipboard Club’s fearless leader, Aida Boucheron, that sprang from the #YesAllWomen hashtag.
I also use Flipboard to curate a magazine dedicated to my beautiful Siberian Husky girl, and it’s a great way to give friends and family an easy way to look through all her photos. I’m pretty sure Lumi is more popular than I am, so she needs a dedicated resource. I also love using Flipboard for its very original purpose: to help view my social feeds in a visual way. I catch so much more that’s going on with friends by viewing my Facebook and Twitter feeds through the app.
Flipboard’s also great for content discovery. I can subscribe to magazines by others who spend the time to curate the best content on a given subject. I’ve leaned on several existing Flipboard magazines for things to flip into my #WomenLead magazine. User Nazneen Rahman’s “Inspiring Women” magazine is fabulous, and it led me to her other magazines, which are really terrific. I subscribe to several science magazines so I can get my geek on, including Rahman’s “Modern Medicine” and Slate’s “The Bad Astronomer.”
My biggest influences are Albert Einstein, e.e. cummings, and Sally Ride. Einstein because of his resilience—just because you don’t start off the best at something doesn’t mean you can’t become the best. Cummings because he showed me how to build whole structures with words. Ride because she showed me how to trailblaze with grace and charm. I don’t know that I’d ever live up to even one of the three, but I could do worse than to try.
See how women like Amy are changing the face of tech:
Spotlight: Tech Columnist Rob Walkerhttps://ar-ar.about.flipboard.com/magmaker/spotlight-tech-columnist-rob-walker
My name is Rob Walker and my medium is procrastinating.
My love of art + tech collisions is partly a result of my work for Yahoo! Tech, where I am a columnist. My “beat” is the intersection of technology and culture, and there are just too many great examples of how creative people are using, or misusing, digital tools. So I started the Tech + Arts mag on Flipboard to catalog and share everything in that category that I think is cool, whether my colleagues and I write about it or not.
I use Flipboard to be surprised, add some serendipity to my newsflow, and, of course, to waste time as productively as possible!
I first downloaded the app for my iPad maybe two years ago, and I didn’t use it for a long while. Then a friend mentioned how much he enjoyed Flipboard and I decided to re-investigate. I set up a mix of technology and design sources, and for me the key was that these were sources I wanted to keep an eye on, but didn’t always have time for.
I’ve also now figured out how much fun it is to dip in and out of others’ magazines that are just completely different from my usual media sources (magazines collecting GIFs, for instance). I also find the interface quite nice, so it always feels more like goofing off than working. That’s good.
And THEN it finally occurred to me that I could start my own magazine. That was a total experiment: just to see what would happen if I tried to collect the tech/art mashups that interest me, including stuff I write about, but more to the point all the other stuff that I don’t have time to write about but that deserves attention. I have been amazed at the response.
My biggest influence is really anybody who is doing interesting things that blur or change the lines between traditional categories, and that’s sort of the whole point of the Tech + Arts magazine: Artists playing with technology, hackers intentionally misusing tools to revelatory things—that’s part of my beat as a journalist, but it’s also just something I find inspiring and useful. So this has become another venue for me to highlight the stuff that I find provocative and useful or just flat-out fun. If that helps spread the word about cool stuff, then mission accomplished!
Today technology and art are inseparable. See how their confluence is changing the world in Tech + Arts:
My name is Carl Alviani and my medium is stories: visual, spoken and written.
My love of complex systems has taken me through a pretty diverse sequence of careers—I studied engineering, but ended up becoming a science teacher in the Peace Corps, then an industrial designer, and eventually a writer, focusing on design and infrastructure. The hidden structures that change how we think and act are an endless source of fascination, which helps explain why I work at a creative agency (Ziba, in Portland).
I use Flipboard to publish articles we write about design and the service economy, find out what other designers are up to, and highlight interesting new approaches to the service industry. Flipboard does a nice job of incorporating content from different sources into a single format that looks great on mobile platforms.
Flipboard is also great for audio and video. We’ve started creating short movies and podcasts, exploring how different design fields are changing, and Flipboard gives our readers a simple, elegant way of experiencing them.
My biggest influences are mostly writers, journalists and documentarians. I love writing that looks at the absurdity of modern consumer culture: Rob Walker and George Saunders are two favorites at the moment. Joan Didion is still the champion of telling human stories that are both honest and sympathetic, and Gary Hustwit’s documentaries have done an amazing job of showing how design impacts everyday life.
How can design help the service industry? Find out here:
Read in app or on the web.
My name is Sean Hagwell and my medium is photography. And sometimes directing.
My love of photography started when I found my parents’ cameras at the age of 8. But it wasn’t until my mid-20s that I realized it was at the core of who I was. Nothing in my life came so naturally.
If I’m being honest, I became a photographer out of a mix of personal enjoyment and really not knowing any better. I never went to art school or had any formal training, which made learning the basics that much harder. Fortunately I was too young and foolish to know that I should have been scared out of my mind. Instead, my entire focus was—and still is—to constantly create and become exponentially better with each project. I just want to make cool content and share how I did it.
I use Flipboard to stay informed about the world outside of my own, get out of my own headspace to discover new inspirations, and learn what is and what isn’t connecting with people. If I’m not on set, I’m busy learning and deconstructing the work of others, whether that be in photography, architecture or food. I learned very early on that there is value to be found in every aspect of art, regardless of whether it falls into my particular industry. I’m a proponent of the philosophy that “talent imitates, genius steals.”
Flipboard is also great to share my work. It allows me to put everything from official releases to behind-the-scenes content in one beautifully designed layout. Combine that with the natural intuitive feel of flipping pages and it’s a done deal.
My biggest influence is, first and foremost, my wife. She’s the perfect balance to my madness and without her support I would, quite literally, not be doing what I’m doing for a living. When it comes to mentors in the industry, it’s Annie Leibovitz. Her work has spanned decades and continues to define portrait photography. Another would be Seattle-based photographer Chase Jarvis, who took the time to give honest advice to a no-name kid from Illinois all those years ago.
The best advice I’ve ever received was from my grandfather: “When you land on whatever island you’ve set sail for, whether as a photographer, director, friend, husband or father…the moment you reach that shore, burn the boat.”
See some of Sean’s best shots below:
Read in app or on the web.