The notebook of the New Product Development team at IPC Media. What we’re thinking, what we’re looking at, who we’re talking to…
This years Design conference brought together the many designers of IPC, for a day of presentations and workshops. Carla Franks was the guest speaker , and she gave us a presentation on ‘Inspiration’. Carla was able to talk us through her work on Oprah magazine, providing the IPC designers with an insight into the highs and lows of its launch. Read the rest of this entry »
As a web designer who is always worrying about page widths and formatting of posts, I found this video clip fascinating. The proliferation of devices on which our page layouts can now be viewed is bewildering. So the ability to reformat your pages to any screen size is really important. I think the fold arguement really now is dead. I’m really taken with the nation of ’stepping out of the browser’, as the web explodes across a whole range of devices.
New York Times R&D Group: Newspaper 2.0 from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
This idea occurred to me in a recent meeting, as Andy was telling us about a post he had contributed to on magculture. I explained that last year I had read an article in the Guardian about how fluorescent jackets to make people stand out now infact renders them invisible. This led me to the conclusion that in the modern world fluorescent colours no longer stand out they recede, and I wondered what impact this had on the news stand?
Loaded bagged IPC’s December Cover of the Month, and immediately ran into the usual run of complaints, culminating in the decision not to put the cover on display in the Blue Sky Cafe, as it was recognised that this sort of material still genuinely offends many people. Which in this day and age, I am absolutely delighted by, as the ability of magazines to enrage and infuriate was the reason why I got into this line of work in the first place. Thank god they still work!
Commenting on ‘men’s’ magazines has tripped up smarter people than me, but in its market, this cover is good work, so it’s right that I make the attempt.
I’ve been checking out image-based aggregation websites - http://tastespotting.com/ (recommended by one of my lovely research participants – thank you)
And http://streetstyl.es/ -
I love the concept of both sites – simple propositions (recipes and street fashion respectively) simply laid out in a highly visual style.
Looking at these sites I thought it’d be a great format for saving images from the web for a kind of image bookmarking tool. Ever lost track of great images you found online? In 2 seconds of Googling and I found 2 services to let you bookmark & tag images, as well as browse your saved images as thumbnails - http://weheartit.com and http://vi.sualize.us
In my travels around the web, I came across this little video. I’m afraid showstudio don’t provide an embed file, so you will have to visit their blog post. Strangely, I personally think it makes more sense as a little film than as a cover. Which even though it’s a fold out cover, feels a bit vague. I suspect the music jollies the film version along for me.
But I think static cover images becoming moving web images shows how different mediums allow you to deliver against the same brief but with different solutions. The medium is the massage, after all. Ta.
as Stan Lee would say….
with thanks to the SEO Rapper
I see Barack Obama has adopted the font Gotham for his ‘Change’ poster, banner, flags etc campaign. As many of you know, Gotham is sweeping the magazine world as the font to use, so much so that it’s being dubbed ‘the new helvetica’.
Speaking on the recent helvetica film, about the font, typographers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones said that “GQ [the magazine that originally commissioned it] had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it, It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.” That description pretty much sums up both the font and Obama. This got me thinking. If Obama is Gotham, what font is McCain? Arial, Cooper, Antique Olive…?
But let’s not stop there, what about our own Gordon Brown? David Cameron? …er George Osborne? Your suggestions please…
I’ll get the ball rolling… George W Bush – Comic Sans
Let’s cut to the chase: it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this business we’re in, like just about any other you care to mention, is going through some harsh times right now and facing some tough choices ahead.
It’s also blindingly obvious that one of the major ways that we, as journalists, can continue to play a meaningful role is to take every oppoprtunity to master all the tricks in the book when it comes to reaching our audience wherever they may be and whenever they may be there. Which is a round-about way of saying we need to get online, offline, mobile, outside, inside, upside, downside… whatever it takes to make sure that we are able to communicate as very best we can. Read the rest of this entry »