Vitals

Graham F. Scott

I live in Toronto and read a lot. I write, edit, and make websites for fun and profit.

Likes: magazines, progressive politics, non-profit media, contemporary art, bread, typography, css, Instapaper, sustainability, colourful 19th century robber-barons, microbreweries.

Dislikes: talking on the phone, standing on escalators.

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The books I read in 2022

I leaned toward novels this year, while belatedly picking up some older non-fiction titles that had been on my to-read list for some time.

Denyse Thomasos at the AGO

An absorbing posthumous retrospective introduced me to an artist whose vision was all the more thrilling for being completely unexpected.

Contact

Ways to find me, in descending order of usefulness:

Work

Currently

I work as a senior product content designer at Shopify, focused on developer experience and the third-party ecosystem.

Previously

I started in traditional print editorial but over time shifted into digital roles, including app development. I still keep one toe in the magazine world by volunteering as a judge for annual competitions like the National Magazine Awards, the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, and more.

From May 2012 to June 2018 I worked at Rogers Publishing in several editorial roles, including projects for Canadian Business, Maclean’s, and MoneySense.

From August 2008 to December 2011, I edited This Magazine. This was named Small Magazine of the Year by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors three years running, a five-time gold winner in the small-circulation category of the Canadian Newsstand Awards, and called “the best Canadian magazine you’ve never read” by the United Church Observer. I received an honourable mention from the Professional Writers’ Association of Canada in their 2011 Editor of the Year Awards.

Before that, I was an associate editor at Canadian Business Assistant Editor of Precedent, News Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of The Varsity, and a freelance writer with contributions to Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, U of T Magazine, and more.

Here are a few representative clippings from this time:

Code

I love tinkering with web technologies and learn best by building stuff.

  • Embed Everything: A collection of Eleventy plugins for easily embedding media in Markdown, using only URLs.
  • Huge on Facebook (Deprecated): A jQuery plugin to programmatically display the number of Facebook likes for a given batch of links.
  • Provincely: A symbol font for making lightweight, responsive, and semantic maps of Canada with HTML and CSS. Not deprecated because technically this technique still works, but there are better ways to do this today. (Based on Stately by Ben Markowitz of Intridea).

Teaching

I teach The Online Publishing Toolkit in the Magazine and Web Publishing program at Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education. The course was introduced in January 2013 and is aimed at magazine professionals who want to better understand the technologies behind current trends in digital publishing.

Design

Increasingly people want websites instead of magazine articles, and I can live with that. I specialize in built-to-order Wordpress sites.

Presentations

I enjoy public speaking and sometimes get the chance to talk about my work.

Friends

Wonderful people I know who have websites, in no particular order: