I Miss the Days of Car Magazines
Maybe it's nostalgia, but I miss the days when getting your work featured in a magazine felt like reaching the top of the mountain.
Before social media, before YouTube, before anyone could post a photo and instantly share it with the world, magazines were the gatekeepers of the automotive industry. If your build made it into print, it meant something. Someone thought your work was worthy enough to dedicate physical pages and ink to it.
I still remember walking into a store and seeing projects I had worked on featured in a magazine. There was a sense of pride that's hard to explain. You'd pick it up, flip through the pages, and there it was—something that had started as an idea in your shop now permanently preserved in print.
The internet changed everything.
Today, we can share our projects with thousands of people instantly. The reach is incredible, and platforms like YouTube have allowed me to build The Fab Forums and connect with people all over the world. I wouldn't trade that opportunity for anything.
But there's something different about print.
A magazine couldn't be swiped past in two seconds. It wasn't competing with endless notifications and algorithms. It sat on coffee tables, workbenches, and shop desks. People read it cover to cover. They dog-eared pages. They saved issues for years.
In many ways, print made a project feel permanent.
A YouTube video might get thousands of views, but a magazine feature felt like a milestone. It felt like your work had become part of automotive history, even if only in a small way.
Maybe that's why I still appreciate seeing builds published today. It's not necessarily about the exposure. It's about the feeling. The idea that years from now someone can pull an old magazine off a shelf, flip through the pages, and discover a project that inspired them.
The internet gives us reach.
Print gave us permanence.
And while I'm grateful for everything the digital world has made possible, there will always be a part of me that misses seeing fresh automotive magazines stacked on the rack and dreaming that maybe one day something I built would make it into those pages.
