Newspaper Club

Beautiful picture borrowed from Phil. Thanks Phil.

From Friday Newspaper Club will be at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. We’ll be speaking on a panel called Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design with James, Chris and Michal. Come along if you’re around. If you can’t make that I’m sure there will be plenty of other opportunities to say hello.

We’ll also be making something special, but more about that later.

Wow. Tonight the category winners of the Design Museum Designs Of The Year awards were announced. We’re surprised and delighted to announce that we won the award in our category, Graphics.

This seems like a good opportunity to stop and thank a few people who have helped us so far. Obviously we’ll forget someone really important, so apologies for that up front.

Starting a business is hard, unglamorous work. We would have achieved nothing without the support of colleagues, friends, advisors and other people who don’t fit neatly into those categories.

So a big thanks from all of us at Newspaper Club to the following:

4ip – in particular Dan, Mel, Chris and Tom.

All our customers, especially the very early ones – BBC, Penguin, Wired and The Rebel Alliance.

and now in alphabetical order

Aaron Straup Cope
Alex Parrott
Anne Ward
Anna Pickard
Bobbie Johnson
Chris Heathcote
Clay Shirky
Dan Hill
Gavin Bell
James Boardwell
James Bridle
Jeremy Leslie
Kim Plowright
Lucy Johnston
Matt Biddulph
Matt Locke
Matt Sheret
Mike Migurski
Phil Gyford
Rev Dan Catt
Rexbox
Richard Moross
Ryan Hurley
Simon Esterson
Steve, James and Mobina
Toby Barnes
Tim Bradshaw
Warren Ellis

Thank you.

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.)

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/