Ever since we replaced our big ol’ brick phones with shiny new iDevices last month, we’ve quietly been posting photos up on our new Instagram account every couple days at @mag_nation.

Since we’ve been having such a good time on Instagram, we figured it’d be fun to run a competition up on there.

How does it work?

Well, we’ve got three $50 vouchers up for grabs and all you need to do to enter is to take a photo of your fave magazine of the moment (the more interesting shot the better, so get creative) and annotate it with the comment, “Print’s not dead! @mag_nation #maglove”.

Winner will be chosen at our discretion and entries close in one week from now, so get snapping!

We’ve all seen ‘em… those cards that say, “To the best Mum in the world”, among other gratuitiously hyperbolic claims about superior your particular mother’s alledgely superior nurturing skills.

Well, enough of that malarkey, ’cause we’re just not buying it.

We’d like to introduce a competition which we call “BATTLE OF THE MUMS”. Simply put, tell us why your Mum is awesome. The Mum that we declare better than all others wins a magazine subscription (up to a value of $80) and you’ll win a $50 gift voucher for yourself.

How to enter? Just comment on this post and you’re in the running.

Let the games begin…

Every year around Easter, scores of design enthusiasts and speakers from across the design spectrum converge on Melbourne for the AgIdeas International Design Forum.

It’s one of our favourite events on the design calendar and speaker-wise, this year, they’ve got people like the chef Guy Grossi, ad man Adam Hunt (he had 80% of his brain removed and his work banned from the ABC… these two incidents may or may not be related), the illustrator Oslo Davis, photographer Stephen Dupont (who, among other things, has taken some amazing photos of Afghanistan and Raskol gangs in Port Moresby), Japanese designer Ken Miki and plenty more exciting and inspirational design peeps to feast your eyes and ears upon over the course of the three days in the salubrious surrounds of Melbourne’s Convention and Exhibition Centre.

We’ll have a stand there again this year and will be bringing along a selection of our favourite books and magazines available to sell; do let us know if there’s anything particular that you’d like us to bring down.

There are still a few tickets left over at the AgIdeas site, but don’t leave it too late as this baby always sells out!

Every year at Christmas time we try and come up with a promotion aimed to deliver maximum benefit to our customers with minimum risk of driving ourselves into receivership.

Last year we offered 1 in every 100 subscriptions for free and gave the person who bought the most subscriptions their magazines for free (in the end, it turned out that the winner didn’t even know that we were running the promotion at all. D’oh!)

While our competitors offer trips to Paris or $30,000 skiing holidays as prizes, we want to set our sights on something that you might actually have a chance of winning. (And well, if we could afford $30,000 skiing holidays… rather than giving them away, we’d probably actually be writing this blog post on a laptop in front of a roaring fire with a mug of hot chocolate in a lodge somewhere in the Swiss Alps. But I digress…)

So, this year we’ve put our heads together to come up with a special offer to spread around the chance of winning and to give you a special offer every day from now, until Christmas.

We call it… THE MAG NATION CHRISTMAS TWITTER/FACEBOOK GIVEAWAY ADVENT CALENDAR! Catchy, right?

Here’s how it works:

Every day up until December 24th, at precisly 11am AEST we’ll post a discount voucher code (valid until midnight that same day) on our Twitter and Facebook pages. It could be for 30% off a subscription to Vogue Paris or $5 off a Moleskine diary or practically anything in between.

N.B. We’ll be running the first of these at 2.30pm on December 6th. Long story, but I think we were milling around the coffee machine or checking our RSS Feeds at 11am today.

The first person to use this code will get their order FREE, 100% refunded to their credit card or Pay Pal account. And as for everyone else, well, you’ll still get a pretty sweet discount that should put a smile on your yuletide dial.

Feliz Navidad!

We’re a little bit excited, ’cause it’s time for Semi-Permanent, Melbourne again. After SP Auckland last month and Sydney in March, the Semi-Permanent juggernaut makes its way down south, this Friday and Saturday at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

As usual, there’s an incredible range of speakers… among them, the animator Simon Allen from Pixar (yeah, we know, freaking PIXAR!), Leif Podhajsky (he designed the cover to Tame Impala’s album Innerspeaker in addition to heaps of psychedelic maths-y third eye expanding visuals that you can see in mags like Pilot and Monster Children), Timba Smits (the mastermind behind Wooden Toy magazine), Kelvin Ho (he’s a ‘retail architect’ but I have to confess, I know him more from perving at his house on The Selby) and so many more inspiring artists, designers, photographers and all-round superhuman creative types.

Although tickets are fast becoming scarce, we have managed to secure 5 free passes to give away. (Bless the cotton socks of those Semi-Permanent organisers, Andrew and Murray.)

Yep, amigos and amigas, you read that right.  We’ve got five passes (valued at $310 each) to give away! If you want to go in the running to win, all you need to do is post on our Facebook wall and make us laugh. The five people who make us laugh the hardest… win! Easy as that. If urine is dribbled, we may even give you two passes.

In honour of the creative spirit of Semi-Permanent, we are making this a little bit free-form. Entries will not be restricted to words alone… you can draw a picture, record a video (why does nobody ever post wall videos using those great iSight cams that every computer has nowadays anyway?), heck, you could even get your Dad to enter on your behalf with some of his famous ‘wordplay’.

(Common sense reigns, we reserve the right to amend, modify or make up rules at our discretion. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that five passes will be given away!)