David M. Lehn '99

One of the student publications founded this year never showed up on your doormat. And that's just the way David Lehn '99 wants it.

Icon Magazine, founded by a group of undergraduates that includes Lehn, is a Web-based publication that aims to be a "cultural criticism" and targets a wide audience.

"I felt that publications on campus were either news, like The Crimson or the Independent, or very targeted [like the] Harvard Political Review," says Lehn, an executive editor.

"We wanted it to be more of a cultural criticism," he continues, mentioning that a popular mantra of the magazine's executive board is "Be artsy, but don't be fartsy."

Style does indeed play a big part in Icon, which includes poetry, fiction and creative photo essays and artwork along with opinion pieces on a variety of subjects.

"I guess if you had to sum up our mission, it would be storytelling," Lehn says.

But Icon aims to be more than an on-line version of the Harvard Advocate. Lehn wrote an article for the first issue about the martyrdom of Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming student who was killed in a brutal hate crime last October.

"I think that fits in with our spirit as much as a poem does," he says of the news analysis, "so there's lots of different ways we can come at this."

The magazine is completely designed for the Web, integrating the writing with cutting-edge multimedia.

"This is trying to be something that's unique to the Web by using everything that the Web has," he says. "That makes it sort of fun."

But despite the unique concepts, Icon has had trouble finding an audience. Lehn chalks it up to a lack of publicity and the difficulty of reading lengthy articles on a computer screen.

"I think that a lot of people at this point go to the magazine and look at it and say 'wow, this is impressive,' but they don't read it," he says. But editors have a publicity push is planned for next year and hope to publish bi-monthly instead of the current quarterly schedule.

Lehn graduates Thursday, leaving Icon in the hands of Editor-in-Chief Parul Singh '00 and Managing Editor Darryl C. Li '01. He deferred law school enrollment for a year to dabble in both writing and web design.

But Lehn, who will be working on the Web site for the Atlantic Monthly this summer, is not ruling out a future in Web-based media.

"I could write and edit and design and sort of have control over what was happen," he says of his time at Icon. "I think there's more opportunity in new media to do that."

As for the future of the magazine, Lehn says that anything is possible.

"I don't really know where it's going to go," he says, "but it's pretty neat right now."