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…
Six months after reports started circulating on the web, October 6 saw the publication of Tina Brown’s latest venture, The Daily Beast.
Brown is, of course, the legendary editor who modernised and turned around the fortunes of The Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before her highly-regarded but financially unsuccessful self-started glossy monthly Talk Magazine bit the dust. (more…)
Sorry font nerds I’ve been a bit too busy to hunt out any new fonts. However this has just popped into my inbox and it’s free! (well some of the weights). Check it out it’s called Museo and looks pretty modern and groovy…
Jean-Paul Edwards from the agency Manning Gottlieb OMD spoke across a broad range of topics, giving a great overview of where he felt technology was taking the media market. The stand-out point I took from his speech was a metaphor he used about the fragmentation of the ‘media landscape’. He spoke of a ‘media landscape’ or ‘media ecosystem’ which was like an African savanna which has now, because it is digital, become a rain forest. This means that the big beasts of the savanna are the BBC (the big old elephant) and News Corp (the lion)… I don’t want to labour this metaphor… you get the point. Still a digital rain forest is full of lots of little animals multiplying in the trees. (more…)
Just had a discussion with my manager about the anxiety of modern fathers over the fact that the creative skills children are developing these days are to do with the intangible virtual interactions, whereas my youth was about making stuff, physical interactions. There is a lot of anxiety about this gap, especially for the generation who broke things in dad’s shed, or garage. That’s actually everybody except the current batch. It seems very different to sitting on the floor with a Playstation. But I often wonder what being creative now requires, and does working in a purely electronic way, sitting at a desk peering at a monitor, hinder my creativity? Should I be sketching more? (more…)
drawing of cherries
How do you tell when you’ve become set in your creative direction? By this I mean the processes, skills, disciplines and behaviour that you employ to be creative. For example wireframe > look and feel > prototype > delivery. These may be some of the creative processes a web designer may use to see a web development project through from beginning to end. (more…)
There’s a top tussle going on today between Apple and the publishers of the music they offer for sale on iTunes.
Here’s what Eliiot Van Buskirk wrote on Wired about it:
“Apple have threatened to close down the iTunes music store if an obscure three-person board appointed by the Librarian of Congress increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters by six cents per song.
“The Copyright Royalty Board is scheduled to hand down its decision on these rates by Thursday. As part of their general muscle-flexing of late, music publishers asked the board to increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads from 9 cents to 15 cents per song. (more…)
The notion of ‘push’ is when you push your content towards an audience who may or may not be aware of its existence. In a ‘pull’ environment the consumer pulls their content towards themselves because they are interested in it. (more…)
Why is WordPress such a powerful tool? It was first released in May 2003 and has seen constant improvements resulting in it being on 2.6 since July 2008. It has become more and more relevant to a publishing company as the WordPress software has developed and is now able to support ‘magazine‘ themes. This has led to a buzz around WordPress now being called a CMS (content management system) as opposed to just a blogging tool. A number of agencies have sprung up offering ‘premium’ themes that offer a wide range of functionality and, through enhanced admin panels, the editor has a truly flexible publishing platform. Currently WyntonMagazine is catching my attention as it’s a free theme. But some tasty looking premium themes are Revolution and Mimbo. (more…)
As a web designer I often wonder what other web designers get up to all day. So I thought the least I could do is share a day with my colleagues. To the best of my knowledge there are just under ten of us at IPC. In no particular order myself, Nadeem Akhtar, Andrew McManus, Steve Lambert, Sam Scott, Rob Trikilis, Ed Walker, Kieran Delaney, and Justin McCormack. If I have missed any one out apologies. A month ago , I recorded a day in the life of Charlie Francis…. (more…)
Take a close look at this recent cover of Parents magazine. We spend a lot of time here debating whether the logo should go in front or behind the subject. However, this particular example makes an entirely different sort of point. Find more examples of failure in communication at