A little while ago designer Craig Oldham made a booklet called 12 IN 12 as an accompaniment to a talk he gave to the students of University College Falmouth. Rather than blather on about his own work he decidedto list 12 things he learned in his first 12 months as a designer. (Speaking as a designer, it’s very good.)

He’s about to give an updated version of the lecture during D&AD’s New Blood event which showcases and offers advice for recent design and advertising graduates. So he decided to reprint 12 IN 12 via Newspaper Club. Here it is, splendid looking thing.

You’ll notice it’s printed on yellow stock. In case you didn’t spot that, here are a few more pictures.

Here at Newspaper Club we’re constantly shipping new features and experimenting with ways to make the service better. Coloured newsprint is something we’re experimenting with and a feature we may ship in the future. Please note we can’t offer this at the moment. Sorry about that. Maybe soon. But not now.

I’ll repeat that. Please note we can’t offer this at the moment.

Craig’s talk should be good though and New Blood is a super event and a great way to see all the graduate talent. You should pop along. New Blood is at the Old Truman Brewery, open to the public from Friday 25 June to Monday 28 June 2010. 12 IN 12 will be available for a small charge and all the money will go to the D&AD’s education fund.

The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow, you should pop down to Portsmouth. It sounds like a great day.

As part of Love Your Bike Portsmouth a goodie pack has been produced which includes a cyclist bag, bike charm necklace, spoke cards and a newspaper. This 1st edition newspaper features 50 cyclists from around the city telling their stories of their bikes and why they love them.

Love Your Bike Portsmouth aims to encourage participants to fully embrace the possibilities of connecting with their bikes and explore the many ways that they can improve it’s appearance and design. Bike culture is an important part of cycling and regaining the streets. With this in mind, the event also aims to get more and more people using their bikes around the city. It’s a celebration of all the innovators who design and create wonders on two wheels. If you love your bike then you will use it more often. The event will feature workshops, bike demo’s, bike polo, marketstalls, bike artwork, bike safety and a showcase bike arena.

Ben Wilson, Death Spray Custom, Tokyo Fixed Gear, Raw Bamboo Bikes and Gocycle are amongst some of the participants and I Love Dust have designed the branding and newspaper.

Follow the event at loveyourbikeportsmouth.co.uk

(A footnote from the Art Dept. Claire tells me that I Love Dust used our InDesign template to help them design this newspaper.)

One of the many surprises at Newspaper Club is seeing what people do with our platform.

For example a few people have got in touch about making a newspaper for their wedding, which is a brilliant idea. Here are a few pictures from the newspaper Iain and Sophie made and sent out to all their guests.

We’ve set up a Newspaper Club Flickr account and we’ve filled it with some wonderful pictures of newspapers we’ve printed taken by the superb Russell Duncan.

We’ve also set up a Flickr Pool where you can add any photos you may have of Newspaper Club papers.

We probably don’t talk enough on this blog about some of the gorgeous papers you’ve created. That’s all about to change as over the next few posts I’ll showcase some of them.

Andy Smith is an Illustrator and he’s chosen Newspaper Club to made a showcase of his work.

He’s printed a limited edition run of 500 newspapers featuring 12 illustrations, one shown on each page. Gorgeous.

You can find out more about Andy here.

Should you wish to print 500 colour newspapers it will cost you £500 inc VAT and delivery.

We thought it would be a good idea to print a newspaper while we were there and seeing as our panel was at the end of the week we thought we would include content generated during the conference.

Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing contained articles kindly written for us by Matt Jones, Bobbie Johnson, Clay Shirky, Warren Ellis, Dan Hill and James Bridle.

Chris Heathcote made a Buzz Word Bingo for our panel, David McCandless sent us a beautiful infographic, we included some Noticings from the week and we added a Walking Paper for Austin.

But my favourite bit was the centre spread. Foursquare and SimpleGeo very kindly gave us some anonymous checkin data from which Michal from Stamen made this gorgeous map of foursquare checkins during the conference. If you checked in on Monday, this was in the centre spread on Tuesday afternoon.

To make the newspaper we found this little nook inside the conference centre and set up a mini BRIG studio for two days.

The panel seemed to go really well and people seemed to like the newspaper which we handed out at the end.

Because our panel had Spime in the title, Bruce Sterling himself turned up. Luckily Twitter seemed to think he liked it.

One of the things we spoke about was analogue friction. Problems you encounter when making stuff in the real world as opposed to just on the web. We experienced this first hand as we neared the deadline for our newspaper just as Ev Williams started his keynote.

First they nicked Michal’s chair.

Then Engineering started to feel the pressure.

Then we tried to upload the files just as all the @ev’s brought the conference wifi to a halt. Eventually we had to go outside and upload via Michal’s MiFi.

We made it just in time.

We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped with the paper and thanks to everyone who came along to the panel.

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/