Paper Planes re-launched as a digital magazine in November 2018 

The attempt by the team has been an exceptional one—to make design and architecture part of everyday speak. “Design often seems like a gate-kept concept. As non-designers ourselves, we’ve always believed that design is for everyone,” says Monteiro. “When we launched the magazine in November 2018, we realised very quickly, that while we were reaching readers, and these readers really loved our content, we needed to allocate resources and funds strategically. We didn’t want to be in this race of publishing hundreds of articles a day,” Monteiro says.

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Quite early on, Paper Planes began documenting design elements and architectural details under “Local Attractions”. “These are personal accounts of people’s interactions with design,” she shares. From the conservancy lanes in Bengaluru to the stone-carved Chausath Yogini Temple in Hirapur, Odisha, the balcaos of Goa, and swadeshi sculptures on a building in Fort, the stories travel through the wide and varied built heritage that India’s cities, small towns and villages have on offer. “With this section, we are trying to build a repository and create something that’s of use—these are not just nice stories, but useful pieces of information, especially for someone travelling between Indian cities, and looking for something new.” Apart from this, the digital magazine also publishes comics by visual artists under Thinking Aloud, which tell stories of everyday lives. “We get artists to think about issues like postpartum body-shaming, or friendship breakups.” 
  
The pandemic became a vital part of their journey. They were barely a year-and-a-half into publication, when COVID-19 struck. Instead of churning content at random, the team used the time to “reassess what we wanted to do”. One of the things they did was to revamp the website. “It took a long time to go live... We also spent time working on our ‘local attractions’ section, and commissioning the right kind of stories.” This consolidation of ideas and re-strategising, she feels, made the Webbys a reality. That the website is not on pay-wall, meant that they had to also look for other sources of funding. “We set up The Paper Planes Agency in 2021, which does editorial work for brands and organisations, helps make print and digital magazines, and handles various aspects of communication, be it writing or design. “The agency has helped us sustain the magazine.”

A Webby win, they feel, will open up a lot of doors, whether that’s creative collaborations or partnerships.

The team hopes to soon re-start Oddly Enough, a series of offline events, which they were forced to hold off during the pandemic. “With Oddly Enough, we were talking about ideas like the climate crisis, the future of food, and things that do involve design very closely, but the people on those panels, whom we invited to be part of the sessions, weren’t necessarily designers themselves. The idea being that this is an interdisciplinary pollination of ideas, and design doesn’t happen in isolation.”

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