BUM is a tangible magazine — emphasis on tangible — focusing on culture, design, and architecture and printed in limited quantities using 1980s risograph technology. Each edition is unique and individually numbered, produced with soy-based inks on a duplicator that gives every page a slightly different texture and saturation. It is the kind of publication that digital media cannot replicate, because the imperfections are the point.
The magazine provides a platform for emerging critics and designers through a range of articles, projects, and artworks. The risograph process — which sits somewhere between screen printing and photocopying, with the charm of both and the precision of neither — gives BUM a visual character that is immediately recognisable and impossible to fake. The colours are vivid but unpredictable. The registration is slightly off. The whole thing feels like it was made by human hands, because it was.
In a design world that fetishises perfection, BUM celebrates the beautiful accidents that happen when you trust a forty-year-old machine with your ideas. Each copy is a one-off. Each page is a small surprise. And the limited print run means that when it is gone, it is gone — which gives every issue the urgency of something that was made to be held, read, and kept.