All the ephemera that's fit to print *

Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 is a publication that's been dropping through letter boxes over the last few days.

Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun.

We only printed 1,000 and they're all individually hand numbered.

In this post I'd like to elaborate on the design of it and explain some things I learned during the process.

From the outset there were two things I wanted to avoid.

Firstly I wanted to avoid a pastiche of a newspaper, complete with a crossword and a weather section. I hate stuff like that.

Secondly I wanted to avoid looking it like a newspaper that a designer had been let loose on. Graphics every-fucking-where. Something you might see from a bad brand. There's one out at the moment from Lush that betrays the format. Horrible and ugly.

Not our newspaper, no, no, no.

But I wanted to make use of the familiarity of the newspaper format and the vernacular.

It's notoriously hard to design something from a complete blank canvas. No house style, no corporate fonts, no brand colours, nothing. So I tried to make life easy for myself wherever possible. We call this reducing the enemies. To me this is what good design is about, reducing the enemies.

The brief was to be able to read it in bed without glasses on. So I wanted the type to biggish and nice and clear. No Ray Gun typography around here. You remember, readable.

I looked around for typographic styles I liked. In the ideal world it would be law that all books have to state what font they're set in on the inside cover. In reality this doesn't happen much. Much less than you imagine. Even design books don't say very often. I settled on Plantin because that's what Monocle use. 9 on 11. Simple, classic and reliable.

I chose a 5 column grid becuase that seems to be the grid used by most good looking European newspapers these days. Although I was tempted by Hayman and Scher's 6 column Khaleej Times.

I wanted one type style across the whole paper for body copy, but I wanted to have some fun with the headlines. On most of these I've tried to add a little typographic humour or cute reference (which is kind of why I chose Monocle's Plantin for the body copy).

For example the headline for Mad Men: Pitch Perfect is set in Futura because that was one of the only fonts around at the time the series was set. (Remember the furore last year when it was pointed out that most of the fonts used in the programme wouldn't have existed at the time?). I set the headline for Matt Jones' article in the Dopplr font, and so on.

The cover is set in Gotham, because that was the font used throughout the Obama campaign and obviously the font of last year. It's in 96pt becuase that was the super size the NYT used when Obama got elected. It folds over to be read as two halves because Russell was speaking at a Guardian conference and I thought it would look cool if he held up the Written On The Internet 2008 half.

I very quickly realised how important ads are to a newspaper. And not just for monetary reasons. They usefully fill all those awkward little spaces where there's no text. Without them the document feels dull and lifeless. Unpunctuated like a copy of Ulysses. Too much text. A lot of the posts had pictures, but where they didn't we used pictures from Flickr or just white space. Again I wanted it to be like a newspaper, without pastiching a newspaper.

Similarly the bit at the top looked very naked without a running header. The printer requires each page to have a folio so I added a keyline and some of our favourite Tweets from the year. It felt better with that furniture.

This Tweet is a quote taken from Michael Bierut's book. It sits above his article.

We didn't edit any posts at all. So they're full of typos and a lot of the columns end in strange places. This is an odd phenomenon. In a real publication the Sub Editor would shout for a few less (or more) words to make it fit just right. No sub editing here. But as Jeremy points out "The result is a tidy but raw blog-like feel that deals with presentation in a very matter-of-fact manner." That's more eloquent than I could have put it, but that's exactly what I was going for.

Given the chance to design something however you want, you've got to have a little fun haven't you? So I made a small list of things I'd like to see. Some great big dirty Helvetica is always a winner.

I wondered what Emigre's Mrs Eaves would feel like in a more humble, less designery scenario. Looks great if you ask me.

All those Mars Phoenix Twitters were crying out to be printed. I added a few little extras in here that no-one has spotted yet.

A great big full bleed picture. Unfortunately you can't do full bleed, but this is good enough. I wanted this to be like a pull out poster.

And I wanted some nice 100/100 red. We took everyone's content without asking, which we were terribly worried about. We put a big disclaimer in there (and sorry again if you're reading this and you're angry with us) and we tried to make sure authors got copies before anyone else (again sorry if you haven't got one yet, drop me a line and I'll chase that up.) But we obviously needed a way a crediting people. So I designed this little device. This isn't the stuff of design legend, but it took a while to get right and it sort of holds the whole thing together. I deliberately only used two colours (reducing the enemies again) so the red added some much needed vibrancy.

The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one?

I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life.

"Last night a Baseline Grid saved my life". Seriously, it's so important and so useful for a project like this. All that is obvious but I wanted to restate it.

One last thing. When you print one of these you have to go and see it being printed. For all us sufferers of the Design Disease, that's like manna from heaven. Watch.

Newspaper Machines from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Good eh? There are loads more pictures in this Flickr set. There's lots more I could say. But you're probably all bored now, so you'll have to catch me in the pub.

People seem to like it. It's appearing all over Flickr. Lots of nice people have described it as beautiful which is more praise than I could have hoped for. I particularly like Jim Coudal's "whip smart and beautiful". I'm very pleased with that.

I should also thank Alex who helped us with a few speads.

So, the Really Interesting Group is the new thing I'm a partner in.

It's an experimental organisational structure, aptly described by Matt from Channel 4 as doing "projects for fun, money, or both". I say experimental as we're trying to make the structure different from a typical creative start up limited company, but that's for another time.

If you'd like to know more before then, drop me an email or pick up the phone. And if you'd like a copy of the newspaper pop over here and send us your details.

* Title borrowed from Moleitau.

Comments

[russell]

Blimey, you did quite a lot didn't you? You should have said, I could probably have done quite a lot of that in powerpoint.

[M.J. Parker]

So here's the big question: How much did it cost? Definitely curious! Let us know!

[facu]

passion. that´s what i see and most value of this.

inspiring.

[AndrewK]

Fantastic. Just the sort of thing I could imagine you'd come up with.

[Paul H. Colman]

The internet made better by the paper, and now the paper made better by the internet.

Nice.

[Anne]

I noticed the Clarendon thing. That was a nice touch. Thank you. I am definitely not angry.

[Jesse]

just sent my details off to get one sent to me. Can't wait to take a leisurely stroll through your paper

[dan]

Great post Ben.

[John]

Which came first, the idea or the collection of the content in your memories or somewhere else?

[Laurent Domenech]

This is brilliant, how can I get one?
Is it for sale somewhere?

[Ryan]

Lovely stuff. I do like a nice bit of newsprint.

Looking forward to getting one of these in the post. The integration of print & the internet is an interesting area, definitely under-used.

[Hannah]

Really interesting indeed. And good point about baseline grids!

[Daniel]

Great stuff – can't wait for Mr Postman to deliver mine!

[Richard]

I'm not either...really.

[Marcos]

I loved the post.
I have a simple question, and sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly he meant with a "100/100 red"?

[richard]

your baseline grid is ok (maybe a bit widely leaded for a newspaper) but wheres your cap-height grid?

and adverts are the ENEMY of newspapers. you should see what we could do without the crappy things (on which our entire business model is precariously balanced on, so unlikely we'll see the back of them), which brings us to the cols.. which are broadly based on the demands of advertisers rather than the desires of designers.. as almost all newspapers are tabloid now, ad agencies only need to supply one size of ad that can be slotted into most newspapers. they charge their clients per ad, so if they have to resize, the client gets another bill. when we did the berliner it took A YEAR to convince our commercial department and then for them to convince advetisers that a new ad size wouldnt be such a bad thing. hence our more slow and more elegant (we think) 5 col grid. My guess the pentagram 6 col would be solely based on ads. i could be wrong tho..

have i bored you yet?

probably..

good work though, nice to see people fucking with the format

and 100/100 is 100% magenta, 100% yellow that makes red marcos.

[DeepSpin (Dave Spathaky)]

Oh feck all gone. Really liked the look but I did want to smell the ink too.

An likelyhood of a reprint?

[dan burgess]

love it. I'd take that over the london lite any day ;-)

[Bobbie]

Love it.

I have no idea how much this cost, but in my experience it's not crazily expensive to do print runs of a certain volume.

I used to take our student rag to get printed at News International plant in Stratford; it was reasonable-ish.

[Oliver]

I'd really love to read more about your «experimental organisational structure» you used to describe your Really Interesting Group thing!

[Hans]

Great! Complimenti!

[Tom]

Humbug.

[Neil Martin]

This is absolutely fantastic. Such a great idea. My only disappointment is that I've only just read this post and seen that they've sold out. I would have loved a copy.

Like others, I'd love to get an idea of how much something like this cost.

[Andy]

Great idea and really well executed! Well done Ben and Russell - and thanks for my copy...

[Dave]

Ironically, it looks to me as if a designer HAS been let loose on it, much more so than the Lush piece.