“The newspaper describes The Deptford Project’s past, present and future. TDP is, amongst other things, a train carriage in the middle of Deptford high street, London, made into a cafe — which is worthy of a newspaper on its own (and it had been featured in many) but also a range of events and markets held on the site.”
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.
Last week, our friends at Rattle made a newspaper as part of the research output from one of their projects, My Life As An Object.
We think it works really well as a way to get people reading stuff, partly due to the form factor (people are used to newspapers, rather than A4 bound reports or Powerpoint print outs) and partly to the sense of timeliness that’s imbued in the paper itself. This is now, or nowish, rather than something destined to go on a shelf and gather dust. Newspapers decay quite fast and that is good, because the value of information does too.
And they’re not wrong. The permanent, perpetually perfect nature of the screen lacks the visual clues that indicates the age of the information within. I stumbled upon my copy of Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet whilst clearing out my drawers over the weekend – it’s gone slightly yellow, slightly crisp, but it looks like something that’s nearly two years old should.
A couple of months ago, I found myself sitting next to lady in the pub who works as an archivist for a large library. I asked her what the best way to preserve newspapers is. It turns out they need to be kept flat (the fold will fall apart first), and out of the sunshine. If you can seal them from air with a laminate sleeve, that’s good too.
Maybe we should sell laminate sleeves, for people who want to preserve their papers for years to come. But, for the rest of us the patina will slowly develop on our papers, and eventually, one day, they’ll fall apart. And I quite like that.
Claire Sambrook teaches at The University of Portsmouth and is helping organise the Love Your Bike event in Portsmouth tomorrow. They’ve made a newspaper for the event and we asked her to write a little bit about it for the blog.
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.
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 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.
Last week we were in Austin, Texas to speak at SXSW Interactive. We also went to hear other talks, to meet up with friends and to investigate taking Newspaper Club to America.
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.
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.
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.
Engineering were whisked away this weekend on a romantic trip to Margate, on the Kent coast. Margate is undergoing a bit of a reinvention as an arts centre. Just around the corner from the building site of the Turner Contemporary, we stumbled across this in a cafe, just lying on the table where we sat down:
It’s a great little newspaper, promoting Margate’s happening during the winter season.
The design is gorgeous, and they’ve used the newspaper format much in the same way that Newspaper Club does. Not parodying it, but respecting it and the details that make a newspaper feel… right.
The centre spread is a poster, ready to be pulled out and stuck up in a window:
It’s not one of ours, but it shows why newspapers are a great format for events. Well done Margate.
These are the posts from the Newspaper Club Blog filed under case studies.
We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong. And occasionally smug about where it's going right.
You can stick your name on the beta invite list here.
