Magnitude and Direction: Reflecting on The Vancouver Vector
About a decade ago, if you’d walked into almost any business from North Portland to Battleground, you would have found a stack of The Vancouver Vector by the door. It was a 28-page, local monthly newspaper aimed at celebrating our community, culture, and our place in the “paradigm shift.” The paper was a project born out of frustration and the need to create. Though it only lasted a year, The Vector remains a cherished part of my journey as a creative—still the hardest and most rewarding project I’ve ever taken on.
Let me first explain the spirit of the project. The 2008 financial collapse spurred the global Occupy protests, which for me personally was an awakening. It’s when I learned that the “news” was cherry-picked and editorialized, designed to influence public opinion. I realized that a story about Americans' frustration with corporate greed was never going to make the news. After all, the news media are just corporations, driven by eternal fiscal growth, and their advertisers are corporations too. Occupy ultimately failed to spark a revolution, but it brought awareness to the deep corporate influence on our minds, bodies, and lives.
Our response was to go hyper-local, focusing on small businesses, creatives, and figuring out how global events impacted us on a local level. We were obsessed with blending old-world wisdom with modern technology, writing articles on 3D printing, Bitcoin, and crockpot recipes. Each month, we’d run down the major events from around the world, with a special focus on protests, wars, and political turmoil.
I still have a pretty good-sized stack of old issues. I pulled out a couple the other day and quietly read through them. As soon as I opened one, the masthead brought back memories of the friends who helped me put it all together. From time to time, I run into one of them. The meetings are usually brief, and we never mention the paper. It all went to shit in the end, and it’s still hard to tell if it was more fun or more hell. But the further away I get from it, the more I realize how beautiful that moment was. I also recognize it was doomed from the start.
Though I had been a designer and entrepreneur for years, I had zero experience in publishing. It turns out, running a paper is incredibly difficult. Managing a team, selling ads, creating the ads, designing and laying out every page, writing half a dozen articles, illustrating the comics, typesetting, dealing with the printer, and distributing 10,000 copies in a weekend from the back of my 2008 Pontiac Vibe—it was impossible. Unsustainable, at best. The crazy part is, we didn’t even know if people were reading it. We didn’t get any feedback the entire time, and we were writing about everything from Bukkake to Guantanamo Bay. Not one letter to the editor.
Basically, we were all working our asses off, making no money, and sending it all out into the void. All of our advertisers were graphic design clients of mine—I don’t think we ever sold an ad outside that group. Nobody seemed to want to sell ads, not even the sales guy we hired at a ridiculous commission. It was a recipe for a quick end. Perhaps it was never meant to last. Maybe it was just a 12-issue art project.
Sometimes I fantasize about what it would have been like if we had kept going—if we had made it through the awkward take-off and reached cruising altitude. Our town has changed; the population has grown, buildings have gone up, and new businesses have moved in. Would we have been able to grow with integrity? Would we have become another soulless media company slinging the opinions of the powerful? It’s hard to tell, but in a way, I’m glad I did it. I’m proud of the work—and glad it’s over.
