Quest is a highly designed sci-fi and fantasy magazine built for web fiction

Every story gets its own typeface, artwork and visual world, with gaming-inspired navigation, sound and video bringing each piece to life online.

One of the best things about alternative literature is that it really originated online, and with it, ushered in a new world of blog writing, GeoCities prose and intertextual genre writing that would’ve previously been rare finds in niche magazines. Those magazines are now largely online, just take a look at Tractor Beam, a “soilpunk” magazine, Elastic, made for art and literature surrounding the new psychedelic. And today, we are looking at Quest, for boundary-pushing sci-fi and fantasy writing – created by founders Ross Gendels, associate creative director at Base Design in New York and Zane Miller, a freelance creative director and writer. To say Quest has a strong visual idea for itself would be an understatement; this isn’t just made by people passionate about reading genre fiction, but about accommodating it with a platform that feels like an extension of its prose.

Issue 2 launched in August 2026 with nine fiction stories, an essay, a dispatch, 11 artists and 11 typefaces used across the site. Quest received 1,154 submissions – double its first issue – and is funded entirely by readers and subscribers who believe writers and artists should be paid properly for their work. It’s also a space for readers to explore and for contributors to experiment. Using sci-fi and fantasy as a filter to examine society, culture and politics, every piece of writing is paired with commissioned artwork and set in its own typeface, both chosen to extend the world of that specific text. Oh, and it’s totally free (and anyone can subscribe on Patreon or join the Discord without a paid membership).

To read the full article on itsnicethat.com, click here