Notes from Below Ground

The Root System of Quiet Media

Drawings of plants and their root systems, courtesy of Wageningen University

I came across this beautiful series of drawings of plants and their roots (on Sublime, where else these days). Each drawing shows what’s visible at the surface alongside the comprehensive root system beneath it. Above ground the plant is contained, modest even. In some cases recognisable - even if I couldn’t name it, it’s something I’ve seen before. Beneath the soil the roots are sprawling, almost excessive in comparison to the plant they support. Does that little tulip really need that much going on underneath?

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In the next few weeks I’m launching Quiet Media, my first ever print project. I went to my printer today to pick up the boxes of final bound copies - everything from cutting to assembling to binding she has done by hand. This week we’ll be assembling the embossed cover that arrived from Portland. It’s going to be a bit of a job, but we’re in the home stretch now.

While we’re very close to the surface, that plant isn’t visible just yet.

What I do have, in sprawling abundance, is the root system. More than ten months of inspiration, learning, conversations and small decisions that sit beneath the surface of making this thing.

Let’s start with the long list of the root system.

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The Quiet Media Root System - a (non exhaustive) list

• the signals that inspired Quiet Media in 2025 - I’ve called this my hunter gatherer phase

• the conversations that made the project feel urgent

• the different shapes the project took - from substack to print quite quickly

• the ever evolving ethos: first about brands, then opening it up

• the contributors who said yes, and changed the shape of the project

• the would-be contributors, had they replied

• ideas that felt right, then didn’t anymore

• the frame of the idea that constantly changed

• the conversations with friends and collaborators that made me think bigger about what this is and can be

• working with contributors to get the best out of them and their thinking

• curating the pieces in a logical order

• creating sections for the zine, then removing them

• registering a trademark

• registering an ISSN number

• working with the right people to make the thing

• getting my head around production: choosing paper, ordering samples

• exploring cover options with my designers, imagining the physical shape of it

• embossing in Portland, almost not embossing in Portland, then thankfully embossing in Portland

• moving the launch beyond when I had initially imagined it (3x..)

• the persistence of staying with it over all this time

I won’t unpack all of these here. For now, I want to pull on three roots - one from the beginning, one from somewhere in the middle, and one closer to the end of the process - that might be useful if you’re thinking about starting a zine or a related project and (like me) figuring it out as you go.

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Root 1: The Hunter-Gatherer phase

Part of my day job is breaking down complex things into digestible, bite-sized pieces. So naturally I did the same for myself at the start of it all. I branded the first phase of Quiet Media the hunter-gatherer phase.

This was about exploration: asking big questions, gathering inspiration and references. I read a lot on the media landscape and on attention theory. I turned to the scholars: I went back to my notes from Understanding Media, the media literacy course I took with Matt Klein and Andrew McLuhan at the end of 2024. I also watched the hot-takes: whatever the ‘status symbol’ of the week was. I spoke to contributors, would-be contributors, with each conversation revealing more threads to pull. I saved things in folders, in notes, in Notion, in Miro! I was all over the place honestly. I will be much more organised for Edition Two…

A very important part of the hunter-gatherer phase, I learned, is knowing when to stop.

A capture from my Miro board

Root 2: The Ever Evolving Ethos

From there, I had a lot of material. I’d gathered so many great references of brands who are working in this way, or at least starting to. I imagined talking to Rimowa, about how they balance heritage with innovation. Including Polaroid as their incredible campaign came out last year. Or Nuuly, after I learned about the thoughtfulness of their community play.

But fairly quickly that frame started to open up.. I realised the origins of this shift weren’t with brands at all. Brands, for the most part, are responding to something that’s already happening in culture. They’re riding a wave that’s been building for a while.

So the ethos widened. Quiet Media became less about brands and more about people. About our attention in our current media landscape - how it’s shaped, how we spend it, where it goes. A way of offering a glimpse behind the curtain, both of the systems that trade attention and the people trying, failing, and trying again to find balance within them.

Importantly, I wanted it to remain optimistic and future-forward - not nostalgic or anti-tech. This is a zine about innovation after all.

Some of the early thoughts / brain dumps. “Launching pre xmas”, lol.

Root 3: Framing the Idea

After about nine months of work, it was time to define it. I had a working description that I’d shared with contributors early on, but the project kept shifting - taking on new names and descriptors - right up until all the contributions were in. By then my designer was laying everything out in InDesign, and my next task was to create a “concept document” to send to independent magazine shops and other stores that might want to stock a few copies.

The role of this document was simple in theory: introduce the project to a complete stranger. What it is, why it feels relevant right now, the design philosophy, the team behind it, and a few practical details. This is stuff… I obviously know, right? The slide on ‘Welcome to Quiet Media’ took me three days. It felt too final to land on anything. I kept rewriting the same paragraph, frustrated by how inadequate it felt each time. How can I possibly describe a project like this, with all its motivations, contradictions and nuances, in a few short lines without flattening it? It felt like an impossible task, and I’m still not convinced I got it right. In any case, the deck went out.

The definition that took me three days to write 🤡

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Quiet Media will soon exist as a physical object that can be held, bought, photographed and I couldn’t be more excited or proud. But it also exists, in much greater abundance, as the sprawling root system that had to grow beneath it first.

Thank you for your attention.

Charlotte