Our second book was a strange one, some kind of amalgamation of a lore-dump and a cosmological manifesto. It's now available to read as an e-book.

"A lightly researched field guide for thinking about and/or making creative things" These are observations from real working life, a collective twenty years of our work as professionals in a wide range of fields — architecture, advertising, design, innovation strategy, journalism, and software engineering.

Where are we now as creative people? Where are we going? What do we vision for the future? 75 creative people anonymously share the dreams, concerns, and joys grounding their creative thinking for the year ahead.

a girl's bedroom story for the vanishing second internet, this .pdf is a collectible scrap taken from an ongoing confessional prose-poetry project. it is for the girl and her shadow. it should be read alone at 4am, or opened and discarded like an inexpensive gift.

Save your clothes and learn how to bring them back to life with this instructional zine and mending kit.

A zine published by The Creative Independent, compiling quotes, excerpts, and recommendations from working artists, all gathered from our archive. Topics covered include always looking for better ways to express yourself, finding your path, creating work in your own voice, following your curiosity, and more.

a tiny but mighty collection of fonts and templates for self published authors, artists and entrepreneurs in 2026. Specifically for Jewish authors, artists and entrepreneurs, these resources are also useful for anyone who is writing a childrens book (or a tiny non fiction book) in 2026

Fred Escher made five artists’ books across two eras: austere B&W works in the 1970s and surreal, color-saturated books in the 2010s. Both are emotionally rich, often humorous, and centered on the doubled self. His books—quiet, strange, and complete—are widely available and the strongest expression of his vision.

This is a free edition that focuses on how to navigate your 'Network Archives 001: A Directory of Inspiration'. It is a curated guide highlighting key themes, insights, and actionable ideas from a selection of the projects to help you explore the directory more deeply. This drop follows the inaugural release from the Network Archives label.

Some theories and practical approaches that might help you think about how you think about ideas.

Worlds Unfolding is a guide and inspiration hub for virtual world-making, offering curated prompts, community-contributed projects, and ideas that blend storytelling, design, and imagination. It explores how virtual spaces can foster connection, creativity, and care while critically examining their ties to the dominant paradigm.

In 2018, The Creative Independent published our first zine, featuring the emotional and practical wisdom of Philip Glass, Yumna Al-Arashi, Taja Cheek, and others on how to make a living as an artist. This is a digital edition of that work.

a tiny but mighty guide for folks who would love to succeed at Substack, because we ain't going back to retail.

Print edition of my English translation of Sefer Yesira, an ancient Hebrew mystical text that first promulgated the concept of combinatorial creativity. You can buy the print edition for $221 via the Blurb link in the release notes. I have provided a free PDF of the entire book and mp3 audio of the translated text via Metalabel.

Learn about the moon’s phases, the zodiac and astrological houses so you can understand how the transiting moon affects your personal natal chart.

A call to arms for artists to midwife a new cultural movement. This manifesto invites a shift from art as commodity to art as soul-work, uniting the artistic, political, and spiritual in service of a rebirth: a Second Renaissance.

How has technology shaped and been shaped by sexuality? This 700+ page artist book gathers anecdotes, artworks, and historical artifacts that reveal the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools.

"Legal Structures for Creative Practices" is an illustrated zine designed for creative entrepreneurs that unpacks the pros, cons, and nuances of various legal structures to help choose the one that will best suit their unique practice. View the digital zine at: AThousandForests.com

Cities should build utopia. Nations should let them. Residents should benefit from them.

Nine writers explore the future of the internet.

i’m calling this new series “art from the apocolypse” - and it’s ideal for those life momenets you need to decorate quickly but don’t have time to spellcheck. Perfect for minimalist loving therapists, mental health professionals, and past life regression practictioners who got D's in history class & have an unusually low startle index.

limbo prod me and $quib

a digital magazine filled with my favorite images & missed connections collected from newyork.craigslist.org in march 2026 ♡

A library-crawling adventure RPG set in the mythical Abbey of Theleme, EX LIBRIS is a multimedia amalgamation drawing from Umberto Eco, Francois Rabelais, Clark Ashton Smith, and Marguerite Porete

Check this link: https://youtu.be/B4vdqQjTebo?is=cKQdSoG4EkP2pYzo

A book about how to survive on the internet. It’s about the cozy web, the dark web, the dark forest, the clear net, the dark net, and a new social world emerging around us. This is the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.

We’ve been told patriarchy is inevitable. It’s not. In redefining power, this book imagines the next world and invites you to help build it. Pre-order for Spring 2026

Artist Joshua Citarella and writer Yancey Strickler spoke weekly about their creative practices for the "New Creative Era" podcast. This book edits those discussions into a collection offering a new perspective on the creative life. Available July 1.

Shantell Sans mixes variable axes for Weight, Italic, Informality, and Bounce to deliver a wide array of font styles, from friendly, readable, everyday typographic workhorses to striking, high-energy, experimental styles meant especially for animation. This is the story behind its inspiration and creation.

Our debut issue traces LAST HUMAN’s roots, from eerie prototypes at Lincoln Center to glitch-laden mobile rituals. Dive into neurothrillers, post-cinema, and AI resistance as we explore a decaying web of synthetic identity, broken interfaces, and the horror of a world where reality no longer loads.

Homage to Apollo 8 & 13 Astronaut Jim Lovell RIP

The Emergency Was Curiosity is a book report gone wild; an exhibition and event series; a pandemic diary; an ongoing response to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. The project invites you to cultivate your attention, to explore your own weird, category-resistant projects, and to treat your curiosity as a matter of urgency—an emergency, even.

Quiet Media is a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. Through the perspective of 15 contributors, the inaugural issue explores what changes when we stop optimizing for speed and volume, and start designing for depth and meaning instead.

Last winter, I held three dinners about Miranda July’s All Fours. These are the conversation prompts. Feel free to print them for your dinner, about All Fours, or any books for that matter.

Economic precarity is up. Market demands are too. People are drowning in digital overload. Political threats loom. The second Anonymous Creative Futures survey shares what 300+ anon artists and creators feel about this moment, their words 100%.

Four week intensive course delving into the core ideas and questions explored in the foundational stages of DNR. We will examine artworks, texts, and internet media covering topics: internet-informed identity, political futures, & post-internet art. Facilitated by artist Theresa Tomi Faison via Discord, SUNDAYS: 3/1, 3/8, 3/15, 3/22, 1-3:00pm EST

FANDOM is a communal publication which features critical and experimental short-form responses to the theme of fandom from a variety of upcoming writers and artists.

The stacks are open! Browse books, zines, and ephemera at the Cybernetics Library, an interdisciplinary research library that extends and re-contextualizes the expansive history of cybernetic thought and practice.

Whether you're at a crossroads or lost in the wilds of too many possibilities, this spell conjures a compass from the patterns of your own attention.

Cover: Scott McElwee (Remake). Features: Artegios Distribución, Fortuyn: On-Hollands, Melania, Meta’s ad restrictions, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, no-fly year. Festivals: IFFR 2026, Kolkata People’s Film Festival 2026. Columns: What‘s in My Bag (Katy Scoggin), What‘s on My Desk (Daniel Garber), Legal FAQ: Production Insurance, Screen Time.

QUANTUM FLUKE presents questions, not answers. A choose-your-own-adventure poetry zine, this downloadable is meant to be experienced in an order unique to each reader. Poems conclude with a question that will lead you down one of many sequences.

A conceptual card game and thought experiment created by artist Jazsalyn to shift accepted reality through Black Metatheories.

BOOK of HOURS is a free 236-page PDF intended to be viewed in 2-page format on a handheld digital device. Taking the idea of the medieval prayer book into the virtual age, it provides light but also underscores our vast separation from the natural and spiritual worlds.

What if AI didn’t run on Silicon Valley logic? Making Sense of Slow AI, compiles 40 pages of eclectic stories on Small, Esoteric, and Ancestral AI – inviting you to think small, make it magical, and plan for the past.

Sticker prints for the Cybernetics Image Library.

Something is wrong with the internet and we all feel it. Join us & SOFTER for a three-day collective manifesto and workshop to name that feeling together, mapping our digital lives, drafting the principles we refuse to live without online, and building webpages from scratch. Bring your love, your rage, and your hope.

Featuring visual art and written contributions from 40+ artists, this book on CoreCore, an underground avant-garde movement, pre-emptively inserts itself into the cannibalistic citation loop of academia.

A dispatch from the creative frontier by the Blackbird Foundation. Observations and artefacts from the creative projects we funded in 2025 including artworks, essays, photography and more.