Tuesday, March 9th 2010
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.
Thursday, March 4th 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, December 20th 2009
Depending upon which device you are reading this, over there on the right we claim that this blog will be where “we’re alarmingly honest about where it’s all going wrong. And occasionally smug about where it’s going right.” At the moment our PR strategy appears to be “going right”.
We were featured in December’s Creative Review in a piece about the best magazines and newspapers of the year. Jeremy Leslie from MagCluture described us as “a pointer to the future of publishing content”.
Paul Brazier, the D&AD President (that’s a big deal for the design team) picked us as his Design of the Year in Design Week’s review of 2009. In particular he highlighted the corporate newspaper we did for Penguin.
Gordon Brown mentioned us that speech he gave which set all the data free. He referenced the Postcode Paper when describing the great things free data could achieve.
“All of this will be available for free commercial re-use, enabling people for the first time to take the material and easily turn it into applications, like fix my street or the Postcode Paper.”
That created all sort of interest including this mention inside the Financial Times. Which in turn impressed my father-in-law.
Not bad for a small start up.
Thursday, October 1st 2009
This morning Wired held an event at the Royal Institution in London. You know, where they do the Christmas Lectures.
As people were leaving they were given a copy of The Wired Intelligence Briefing which was printed via Newspaper Club.
The paper contained the greatest hits of Wired UK’s first 6 months and well as some forthcoming and exclusive content.
It’s constantly intriguing to us to see what people do with the format. Here’s a magazine reformed as a newspaper. The designers were particularly pleased to send something to print on Tuesday night and receive delivery on Wednesday, that doesn’t happen with magazines.
It’s also becoming clear that there are 3 distinct avenues for Newspaper Club. We have discussed this before, but it’s worth repeating.
a) You create and print your own newspaper. This will launch in Januaryish.
b) You can send us artwork files and we can print you a newspaper. Liked Wired just did, or like Book Club Boutique did.
c) You can commission us to design and print a bespoke newspaper for you. Like the BBC and Penguin did.
Lovely.
Friday, September 25th 2009
Yesterday we were locked down inside a meeting room in a secret location in central London.
Like most meeting accommodation, the facilities were mixed. Lacking in biscuits but offering a selection of boiled sweets. We weren’t offered a cup of tea but there was a Starbucks very nearby. Pens and paper were liberally available for ideation.
And best of all it was cheap. Free in fact.
Actually, it was Russell’s house. These details are important when you’re a start up.
The point of this session was to discuss (and hopefully) resolve the ‘What happens when you press ORDER’ question. I’m happy to announce we cracked that. We can’t tell you what happens just yet for confidentiality reasons, but the gist of it is that you’ll get an order number.
We must apologise for bothering you with all this trivial chat about orders and fulfillment, it must be terribly boring for you. It is for us. So, on to more exciting news!
Today we are pleased to announce our initial launch product line up! (Subject to change.)
We want to launch with a variety of products that allows different people to use newspaper club to do different things, but at the same time we want to keeps simple and make it as easy as possible for people to make their own newspapers, hence us offering a 12 page newspaper over certain quantities.
For launch the very low numbers are only available in black and white; 12 pages and 5 copies, 20 copies, 100 copies or 500 copies.
And these are available in full colour; 12 pages and 500 copies, 1000 copies, 2000 copies or 5000 copies.
You could in theory influence this line up by commenting below.
Anyway, we’ve had a good productive week, but now it’s the weekend so we need to unwind.
Friday, September 25th 2009
Recently we have discovered a way to print very small quantities of newspapers in black and white. As we continue to explore how people will use Newspaper Club and what you can do with the format we made Things Our Friends Have Shot On Flickr.
The pictures look incredible in this large format, which is Berliner size, the same size as The Guardian.
Thanks to Matt Biddulph, Beekr and Batsax who let us use their wonderful images. More pictures of the paper on Flickr.
In other, less pictorial news, stay tuned for an exciting launch product line up announcement.
Friday, September 11th 2009
For summer holiday reading this year I grabbed five articles from my delicious feed and popped them into an 8 page newspaper. I then packed the newspaper with my panama and found it made the perfect accompaniment to a G&T by the pool.
There are several interesting points here. Firstly, we are experimenting with newsprint and part of that involves thinking about what an individual (or a very small group of people) could do with a newspaper. As Matt Locke pointed out in January, newsprint is hard to be beat for reading in certain situations. On a packed train, or by the pool for instance. I didn’t want to take my laptop to the pool (we weren’t on holiday in LA) and the articles were too long to read on an iPhone.
Newsprint holds up surprisingly well after it gets wet and it’s durable enough to be folded and stuffed inside a bag at the end of the day. I took two copies with me just in case one got ruined, but in the end I only needed to use one.
Secondly, I also wanted to experiment with templates. This newspaper wasn’t made with our automatic online newspaper layouter tool, but the designs I used could be incorporated into the system.
One of the design challenges is to create something flexible enough so that it can handle different sized article lengths and headline lengths and then automatically resize and still look good. The column width on the right hand article is obviously way to wide, but I’m really pleased with the spacing and the layout of the article on the left, which auto scales and balances and still looks good and readable.
But the really big news here is about quantity. Newspaper printers are naturally geared up to print hundreds of thousands of copies very quickly. So when you ask them for a few hundred they look at you a bit funny. Recently we have found a digital newspaper printer who will print as little as five copies. Yes, just 5 copies.
This is a huge breakthrough and opens up many more possibilities for Newspaper Club, which we will explore and then diligently blog about here.