The beautiful magazines setting out to prove print isn't dead

The magazine is dead, long live the magazine. It's not so much a resurrection of the magazine in the digital age as an explosion. A visit to any of the larger bookshops – Foyle's in London, or independent shops such as Colours May Vary in Leeds, Material in east London – will reveal an array of beautifully constructed print objects. Magazines such as Article, Kinfolk and the Green Soccer Journal have production, design and editorial philosophies that re-imagine our experience of magazines. Most don't carry advertising, the print runs are too small. Their take on traditional genres is oblique and angular, but always visually seductive – the Gourmand's blender of food, art and ideas, for instance.

You might describe them as coffee-table books, except they're not aspirational signs of taste. They're beautiful objects, whose arrangement of content, photography and paper stocks convey a different view of the world. The design and textures are an invitation to be touched, flicked, handled. Most of all, in keeping with our age of Instagram, Pinterest and social network photo sharing, the content is visually driven.

Very much like upstart new magazines in previous decades (Sniffin' Glue, the Modern Review, the Idler), these new magazines have emerged partly as personal passion, partly as calling cards for young designers and would-be journalists, keeping production costs low. And because many are created by recent graduates they're less hidebound by traditional magazine structure. But these magazines are also a result of the possibilities offered by the new technology that was supposed to kill print culture – they sell and distribute online, they crowdfund, they invent their own business models on the hoof. Works That Work, a design magazine for non-designers, created a social distribution model where readers got paid for delivering magazines to bookstores. As editor Peter Bil'ak explains in issue two, readers moved this idea on, distributing directly to friends, bypassing the middlemen. So, when readers order 10 or more copies, they get them for half price, the discount available for conventional distributors.

Many say it's a feature of the revival of the handmade and craft culture – a reaction to increasingly immaterial digital lives. But it's more than this. There's a whole cultural infrastructure around these emerging niche magazines – Jeremy Leslie's popular Magculture blog; Steven Watson's Stack magazines, where subscribers get a different quality magazine each month; and the Stack, a weekly podcast on print culture from Tyler Brûlé at Monocle.

The timeline of these magazines is different, bi-annuals, quarterlies, and for the reader, their mental shelf life is longer. Not driven by celebrity or publicists' schedules, the curated storytelling, often around a single theme, is closer to the storytelling of novels – they're narrative journeys of ideas, pictures and activities. Unlike traditional magazines, they are rarely predictable. To echo the theme of the new issue of Outpost magazine, they offer the pleasures and possibilities of getting lost.