After nine years and literally thousands of happy memories, we’ve decided to formally shut ShellsuitZombie down.
ShellsuitZombie deservedly belongs to all of you, earned through early morning train journeys and evenings spent proof reading articles, through boozy pub sessions and Skype discussions. We’ve distributed tens of thousand of magazines that you’ve illustrated, designed and written for, we’ve run raucous events that you’ve organised, helped out at and cleaned up after, and we’ve published hundreds of online pieces which you’ve carved with your beautiful hands and minds.
We’re completely humbled by the amount of time, energy and creative thought you’ve all brought to this crazy idea — creating things that we couldn’t have dreamed of.
We’ve also created opportunities for hundreds of creative grads, enabled conversations between future collaborators and created serendipitous moments left right and centre. We hope that — through new friends and connections — you’ve also felt it was worth the effort. We know that there are lots of now successful, confident and impressive people that have come through the zombie doors at some point.
So why end it now?
We can all sense that SSZ has been limping along for a couple of years. The problem at the centre of it is time. We’re all growing, getting busier and finding the things we’re most passionate about and pursuing them. Which is really fucking awesome. That means less time for Zombie projects. And that’s ok. But SSZ at its best requires a serious chunk of time.
While there have been some epic efforts in the last couple of years, both online and in the latest issues of the magazine, the amount of stuff we’ve all done together has dropped off.
So we thought, rather than see it drop off even more we’d make the call.
Thanks to (in no particular order):
Ellie, James, Rob, Karen, Ross, you started it all. Everyone at D&AD back in the day, who let us run silly events at your less silly events. Jo C for an epic effort at Boxpark, Steve from Stack for supporting us and talking about us, anyone we’ve interviewed or who’s written or created something for one of our issues, all the myriad folk who contributed over five hundred blog posts and features, anyone who came along to help run one of our chaotic nights. Lee Denny for giving a space at his magical festival for us to play Garage music out of a van, there must be more…
All the ‘fresh meat’ generation of zombies — it’s great to see what everyone is up to and has gone on to do. And special thanks to Matt Becki Sam and Alex for heroic efforts through the years. We really did some shit together.
Long live ShellsuitZombie.