While listening to the Monocle Weekly, Robert Bound, the magazine’s Cultural editor, recommended a publication hailing from Brussels, called The Word. The magazine is a cultural mag published bimonthly in English. We found their website with a little bit of googling and was quickly drawn to its clean layout and design but discovered that it was more about the content that makes this magazine great. Each installment covers a theme with the current one being the lazy issue. It includes an articles about men in their 20’s still living at home, a photo essay of people with lazy eyes, vintage photos of Sunday living, a guide on how to utilize a hotel concierge, and a humorous photo shoot of slouches in track suits.

Though the magazine is very generous in offering the entire current issue online there are some disappointments as well, mostly coming from the website’s user experience. Magazines need to stop using the flip functionality to emulate a physical experience. The Word, unfortunately is guilty of this. The site uses a cumbersome app called Issuu, where readers flip through the pages of the magazine in a tiny window. The zoom feature is annoying to use because it is required to be clicked on for every page. Fortunately there is an alternative to all this by switching to full page mode.

Bypass the flash nonsense and go to the full page mode to get a better sense of what this gem of a magazine is all about.