Monday, February 15th 2010
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.
More photos on Flickr.
Friday, February 12th 2010
It’s been a busy couple of weeks at Newspaper Club HQ. Lots of you will have been receiving your invitations to try out the beta, and we’ve been ironing out bugs in ARTHR and making sure everything is running as smoothly as could be.
The Engineering Dept. managed to squeeze in the time to make a newspaper of their own. It’s made entirely with ARTHR, our online layout tool, as a bit of a demo of what’s possible.
Atoms For Peace is a bit of a collection of articles about nuclear power. Lots of stuff that I’ve been meaning to read, but not got round to yet. I knocked it together in about 90 minutes, over a couple of sittings.
It’s got Eisenhower’s original speech:
An article from Wikipedia about the next generation of reactor designs:
Some pictures from the Library of Congress, found through Flickr Commons:
As you can see, it’s a black and white newspaper, and I printed five of them. The typography is crisp and clean:
And punchy images seem to work quite well:
Most of the articles were imported into ARTHR using the “import from web” function – you simply paste in a URL and ARTHR fetches the web page and grabs the content for you. Then I scoured around Wikipedia and Flickr for images I could use under license to break things up a bit and make the pages a bit more interesting. Such as this Uranium element, from Wikipedia:
Once everything was together, I spent a while rearranging everything and making it flow properly.
And then I went to print. I got in a couple of hours before the Tuesday printing deadline and received it in the post this morning (Friday).
If you’re interested in making something similar, or even entirely different, stick your email on the list and we’ll try and get an invite out to you shortly.
There are some more pictures over on Flickr.
Monday, December 21st 2009
Last FM recently published their celebrated end of year Top 40 as a newspaper using our PDF upload option.
They printed a paper for London and a paper for New York and included some local data visualisations based on listening in those cities.
It looks gorgeous and it feels like another way of getting online data into print.
More details here including one you can download.
We’re grateful to Last for providing us with a suitable end of year headline as we’re now shut for Christmas. We’ve had lots of enquiries over the last few weeks from people who are very excited about making their own newspapers, so it’s only fair that we update you on our launch progress.
We’re currently in a very private beta. This means we have a few select people testing the site and we’re learning and rebuilding as we go along. As you will have noticed we are printing newspapers but only a few and only really ones we feel demonstrate the flexibility of Newspaper Club. We’re not open for business just yet.
We’re planning a public beta end of Jan / start of Feb when you will be able to make a newspaper.
The best place to hear all the Newspaper Club launch news is right here.
Until next year have a very Merry Christmas from Art, Engineering and Sales & Marketing.
Wednesday, November 18th 2009
Last night we sent a newspaper to print for We Are Words + Pictures.
Produced in time for the Thought Bubble comic festival in Leeds, the newspaper is a sampler of the kind of work that We Are Words + Pictures stock at their occasional market stall.
It’s filled with illustrations, short stories, poetry, photography… anything really. The brief was that contributors had to submit something a little different to their regular output, all drawn together into a 12 page, full colour mini-anthology.
Contributions by Tom Humberstone, Dan Hancox and Matt Jones.
500 copies were printed in all, 300 of which will be available this weekend for just £1. Any remaining issues they’ll be offering for sale at their website www.wearewordsandpictures.com
Back cover by Adam Cadwell.
Monday, November 16th 2009
Last week we printed the fourth edition of Gym Class Magazine.
That’s what 200 black and white copies looks like.
I’ll let Steve tell you about the publication,
“Gym Class Magazine is a zine for the guy chosen last. What does that mean? Well, it’s a zine for the underdog, the black sheep. Remember your high school gym class? The bit where two kids were made captain and took turns choosing who they wanted on their team? Well, Gym Class Magazine is a zine for the guy chosen last.
It’s for geeks, nerds and nellys; definitely not for guys into dodgeball. Instead, we like more creative stuff… like drawing and illustration, indie magazines and comics, scary movies and sci-fi, graphic design and typography, electronic music and tall buildings.”
Great centrefold from the brilliant Andy Gilmore.
This is the first newspaper we’ve printed that you can buy. Click here to get a copy for £3, including UK postage. Worldwide postage is available. But be quick, there’s only 200.
More pics on Flickr.
Friday, October 16th 2009
Over the last three days we’ve been working on a side project. A design exercise if you like.
We’ve been thinking about the beta Data.gov.uk repository, and wanted to explore putting some of the information contained within into people’s hands in a form that is accessible, timely, and relevant.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, we thought a good way to do that was with a newspaper. So here it is, the Postcode Paper:
It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time.
It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.
It’s not just data from central government – we also scraped TFL for travel times, and ITO generated us a bespoke spider map of transport options in our area.
And there’s stuff from the NHS and the council.
We printed 50, and gave them out to a room full of civil servants, who seemed very excited its possibilities. Hopefully it’ll find its way around Whitehall over the next couple of weeks, acting as a demonstration of the kind of stuff people want to make with all this data that government has. And maybe that’ll encourage some more data to get opened up to the public.
Obviously it was thrown together quickly as a design exercise, it’s very prototypey, and there will be many mistakes. But it’s a great demo of what kind of services are possible with data-driven paper. And we’re quite excited by that.
Thanks to Gavin Bell and Dan Catt for helping out.
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
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.
Saturday, August 15th 2009
The other day this strange envelope landed on our doormat.
Actually, it’s not really that strange. It’s a preview copy of sixth installment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy written by Eoin Colfer.
Publisher Penguin decided to release a very limited number of preview copies in a newspaper format.
Which gave us another chance to show off the clunkily named Bespoke Division of Newspaper Club. Just like the one we made for the BBC, we designed this one from scratch using humans rather than ones and zeros. And it’s another example of something smart and unusual you can do with the newspaper format.
As befits a HHGTTG publication the newspaper contains all sorts of hidden messages. Like this.
And these yellow dots. When you collect all the letters with yellow dots you get… you’ll have to work that out.
All of the lines in these illustrations are at 42 degrees.
As it was a preview copy, Penguin didn’t want all the text in the newspaper. So, about half way through the story this happens.
There’s a nice poster in the middle which reminds me to tell you that the book is published on 12th October. More details here.
A lovely project. If you’d like to find out more about bespoke newspapers give Ben a call on 07966 282 286 or drop him a line at ben@riglondon.com