Friday, January 29th 2010
James Bridle was the first person to print something with the beta version of Newspaper Club. And now, a couple of days later, his newspaper is on sale. It’s a clever and beautiful thing and you should consider getting one of the limited edition of 100. It’s very special.
It’s all very exciting, feels like we’re properly under way now.
Wednesday, January 27th 2010
The Engineering Dept. have just got back from a nice lunch (bacon club sandwich; very nice thanks), because we reached a milestone this morning – the first invitations to the beta of Newspaper Club were sent out.
From today, we’ll be rolling out invitations to people who are signed up on the front of our site. We’re doing it slowly at first, making sure the site stays solid and ARTHR has no hiccups, but if you stick your name down hopefully we’ll get to you soon.
Our first customer was James Bridle, with a reprint of something we printed before Christmas for him. Immanent in the Manifold City: A Newspaper for Time-Travellers. James will be selling copies of it just as soon as we can get it him.
It’s lovely, and we’re super excited to see what else people get up to with Newspaper Club.
We know it’s not perfect – we’re sure there are lots of things that need improving, but that’s why this is a beta release. If you’ve got suggestions for things that we could do better, or if you’ve spotted a bug, let us know by emailing support@newspaperclub.co.uk.
Monday, January 18th 2010
We are pleased to tell you that we’ve been nominated in the graphics category of the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year.
The annual exhibition and awards held at the Design Museum showcase projects from seven design disciplines, architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport.
The exhibition launches 17th February and the winner will be revealed at the awards dinner on 16th March.
(Don’t worry. We’ll launch before the exhibition launches. Promise.)
Sunday, January 17th 2010
As you are all aware we haven’t launched yet. We will very soon. But we haven’t yet.
You will also be aware that there are three aspects to Newspaper Club one of which involves you can sending us artwork files and we print you a newspaper. This is glamourously called the PDF Upload Option.
We’ve been printing a few of these already and we’d be happy to start printing some more. If you’re interested in doing that you’ll need to have some sort of design software and you’ll need the spec shown below.
If the spec below reads like gibberish, wait until we launch fully and ARTHR will take care of all this for you.
For more info email ben@newspaperclub.co.uk
Newspaper Club spec (and a few things to remember)
1. Colour page size: 289 mm wide x 380 mm high, with a 15mm border all around. The border is crucial.
Black and white page size: 317mm wide x 457mm high, with a border of 15mm all round.
2. Use CMYK colours (not RGB). Try to keep pictures at 300dpi. (You can probably get away with 150dpi in most cases, but use 300dpi if you have it and if you’re doing full page images.)
3. We recommend using these colours. They work well on newsprint: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scraplab/4253425051 No spot colours are available.
4. Make your images more contrasty by about 10-20%. As one of our Beta testers said, “In short If you’re printing photos, boost the contrast, tweak your levels a bit to give your top end more white, but don’t sweat it too much.”
http://geobloggers.com/2010/01/07/things-i-learnt-while-making-a-newspaper-with-newspaperclub/
5. All pages must have folios (ie be numbered) apart from the cover.
6. When reversing the text out of a colour we recommend you use a sans serif font with a minimum size of 12 point.
7. If you like Newspaper Club please can you help us to grow it by including the Newspaper Club logo and this very short blurb in your paper somewhere. Thanks a lot.
The blurb is this – Newspaper Club is a service that helps people and communities make their own newspapers. www.newspaperclub.co.uk
- and the logo is here http://www.newspaperclub.co.uk/images/logos/newspaperclub_logo.eps as an eps and here http://www.newspaperclub.co.uk/images/logos/newspaperclub_logo.jpg as a jpeg.
8. Our prices are here: http://blog.newspaperclub.co.uk/2010/01/06/prices/ and there are a few examples of papers here: http://blog.newspaperclub.co.uk/category/case-studies/
Monday, January 11th 2010
John has asked a good question down there in the comments.
“Are black and white print runs limited to 300 or do they revert to colour prices above 300?”
Short answer: They revert to colour prices above 500.
Wednesday, January 6th 2010
Right, after lots of thinking, pondering, wondering, adjusting, spreadsheeting, negotiating and absolutely no consumer research we think we’ve got our price list sorted out.
These prices include VAT and delivery to any UK mainland address, except the Scottish Highlands. (To be honest I’m not quite sure what that bit about the Scottish Highlands means. Do we not deliver there at all? Or does it cost more? Neither seems very satisfactory. I’ll check.)
You get a 12-page tabloid size newspaper. Quantities from 5 to 300 are in black and white. Quantities from 500 up are colour. For ease of comparison we’ve also included what you’ll be paying per copy.
So here are the costs for black and white:
5 copies £35 (£7 per copy)
20 copies £70 (£3.50 per copy)
50 copies £90 (£1.80 per copy)
100 copies £120 (£1.20 per copy)
300 copies £330 (£1.10 per copy)
And here are the costs for colour:
500 copies £500 (£1 per copy)
1,000 copies £900 (£0.90 per copy)
2,000 copies £1,200 (£0.60 per copy)
5,000 copies £1,500 (£0.30 per copy)
(More than that, get in touch and we’ll work something out)
As you can see, the more you do, the cheaper, per copy, it gets. These prices apply when you upload a pdf and we organise printing for you, or when you use ARTHR (our online layout tool that’ll help you design your paper.)
We think these prices make our services affordable for everyone who we might be interested. We hope so.
In other news, we’ve almost got all the legal stuff sorted out. We’re doing the last bit of alpha testing. We should be able to open the beta in the next few weeks.
UPDATE: International Shipping
Well, so far, prices seem to be OK with people but lots of you are asking about International Shipping. Erk. There’s no easy solution to this I’m afraid. Newspapers are heavy, physical things and shipping them around the world is going to cost money and carbon. Our eventual aim is to find enough printers around the globe that we won’t have to ship internationally, there’ll be a printer near you somewhere. In the medium-term we will be up for printing in the UK and shipping to you – but we can’t yet tell you how much it’ll be. Probably, on day one of the beta, it’ll be UK only. Sorry. We’ll get to the Rest Of The World as soon as possible. Huge thanks for your interest though.