2024 marked 30 years since the start of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. To commemorate that milestone, I wrote 13 posts over 13 months, each one about a single year of the magazine. A year of learning, a year of trying, a year of making something impossible possible.

Read: Year One | Year Two | Year Three | Year Four | Year Five | Year Six | Year Seven | Year Eight | Year Nine | Year Ten | Year Eleven | Year Twelve | Year Thirteen

I'm not sure if there's a year that better exemplifies how much Punk Planet had found its stride than Year Six. The articles were legit great (PP36's "Death in Texas" is one of the best articles we ever ran), our columnists were popular, the record review sections were enormous, even little features like the DIY Files, which offered instructions on everything from laying floor tile to self-defense, had expanded into a mini-section with regular entries on DIY Audio, DIY Health, DIY Business, and DIY Sex. Punk Planet had become 150 extremely confident pages served up every-other month. And it only took six years.

There was one huge change in Year Six that completely transformed the magazine. As I mentioned in the endnotes of the essay on Year Five, at the very end of that year, we adopted a consistent headline typeface, Knockout (from what was then the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry), and standardized the look and feel of the magazine much more than we ever had before. That work was done in part for a change that would happen right away in Year Six: the departure of Josh Hooten who had played an integral role in the graphic language of the magazine since issue nine. Having standardized the design of the magazine ahead of this meant that bringing new people in to help design was much more straightforward.

That said, the design language we adopted was anything but "standard," allowing designers quite a bit of free reign over type treatment, art, and layout. But there were rules: reaching back to punk's cut-and-paste zine roots, we put an emphasis on hand-manipulated, xerox smeared type. But, you know, classy.

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