Noisy Decent Graphics

Review of 2010 part 1

Time for some reviews of the year then.

First up a boring, self indulgent one about me. Then over the weekend a much more interesting one consisting of links from my delicious.

2010. It's been a good year.

As Newspaper Club we won the Design Museum's Design of the Year award for Graphics. That's a nice award to win as you don't enter yourself your peers nominate you. And it's from the Design Museum too. Very chuffed to win that. 

 Newspaper Club also made it into the D&AD Annual and we picked up a British Interactive Media Association award, a special award no less, for Technical Achievement. Full credit must go to Tom Taylor for that one.

Newspaper Club has had a fantastic year. We've taken a Christmas joke and turned it into a business with a six figure turnover, staff and actual customers. We've navigated software, usability, financial and fulfillment issues. 

We were even in Time magazine.

But most importantly we've made an actual product and put that into the world. We've shipped. And as Tom says, "You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t". We have and the vast amount of stuff we've learned along the way will ensure the next project is a thousand times easier. And there will be another project.

One of the most exciting things I've worked on this year has to be Nike Grid, which claimed the 3rd best digital campaign and the 6th best poster in Campaign's Review of the year.

You've all read about that before, but it's nice to be involved with a project that's a realisation of stuff people are talking about in many different sectors. Digital, maps, mobile, real time data, the city, visualisation - all that. It's a real collaborative project too and on the second version I got to work with Stamen, which I'd been wanting to do for a long time. Hopefully that project will grow next year.

 I also continued to work with w+k on the Guardian and Observer account. We relaunched the Observer with much success in a difficult market.

I think this is my favourite Guardian campaign of the year.

 

One of the more surprising and pleasing things of the year was the success of BRIG which turned out exactly how we planned without us planning anything.

Way back we had this idea of a space where all the interesting people we know could work together formally or informally. You know like all those Tech Shed Co-Working places in America, but less aggressive. And that's sort of happened. And like Russell says we don't do enough stuff together. Yet.

Look how happy these people are. Believe it or not, these people are working.

But looking at BERG's Flickr stream the other day it struck me all the brilliant things that have happened in that building in the nine short months we've been in there.

You will all be familar with Dentsu and BERG's lovely Making Future Magic video. Lots of that was shot in and around the BRIG (obviously as BERG are based there).

James, who was the start of dConstruct partly made his Iraqipedia books in the BRIG. Seems like ages ago now, but they were tantalisingly left on his desk for ages before his talk.

The brilliant Pseudos were always around. Newspaper Club is based there. And Chris, Phil, James, James and Leila and various visitors from all over the world drop in.

It all that was one Agency we'd be off to some fancy foreign land to win Something Of The Year.

But it feels good that our building, the BRIG, is becoming part of the fabric of a very interesting time.

It's also worth mentioning other things we've worked on - Dextr, Starling and Radio Roundabout. All exciting projects that I enjoyed working on and you'll be hearing more about next year.

And that's kind of it. Some great stuff up there. Exciting stuff. But there's a niggling feeling at the back of my mind. Frustration. Anger even. Stuff I've wanted to achieve that hasn't been achieved yet. Stuff that's nearly working, but not quite yet. Gotta fix that in 2011.

And if you fancy a laugh.

 

Single Input Login Form

I think this is a good idea from Amrinder (read the full story here).

I spoke to Iain today and he thinks it's worth trying too.

So let's try it.

I'm going to try and persuade Engineering tomorrow. Wish me luck.

 

12 IN 12

Remember this?

It's now available as a Newspaper Club print at Craig's talk at D&AD New Blood.

More info here.

That's all. Good afternoon.

I PRETEND TO WORK

Meanwhile, over on Newspaper Club Andy Smith has made this gorgeous thing.

We won!

 The judges contemplating the floor.

Wow. Tonight the category winners of the Design Museum Designs Of The Year awards were announced. Amazingly we won the award in our category, Graphics. That's pretty crazy.

There are a few thank yous over on the Newspaper Club blog.

The other category winners are here on the Wired blog.

Stuff, recently

For the last few weeks I've been working with W+K London as the Creative Director on the ad campaign for the relaunch of The Observer.

We made a TV ad which was brilliantly written by Rob Burleigh and David Stevens, brilliantly directed by David C Kerr (from That Mitchell & Webb Look, among other things) and brilliantly acted by Justin Edwards (from The Thick Of It). I mostly stood around telling everyone the objective was to get home on time.

   

We created a press campaign too. For the teaser ads we used quotes from an online campaign set up to save The Observer when it was faced with possible closure back in the summer. Some of the quotes from well known people were amazingly bold things for a brand to say. So we used them as 6 sheets.

 

And there's this.

The whole idea behind the campaign is pause, review and reflect which came from something John Mulholland, the Observer editor, wrote about the role of Sunday newspapers in the future. A few days before we were due to do a photoshoot of the paper I asked the creatives at The Observer to run me off three section headers with pause, review, reflect written in Prelo the lovely font they're using in the paper. I wasn't really sure what they were for, but we shot it and it looked great. So we ran it.

Photography by Jonathan Kitchen.

There was some other exciting online stuff, but I shall talk about that later. The campaign seems to have gone down well. Read more on the w+k blog.

In other news Newspaper Club has launched as a small beta. It's fascinating seeing what people are doing with the platform and we're already working on tweaks, but more about that another time because the most bloggable news is that I'm amazed and proud to report Newspaper Club has been nominated in the Design Museum Design Of The Year awards. Incredible news.

  

  

  

An exhibition of all the nominees (including the iPlayer, the Kindle, a BMW and err, us) is on now until June at the museum. We commissioned the brilliant James Bridle to create a special one page newspaper for us which you can take away from the show. One side features a massive logo, obviously. The other side features a map for a walk which starts at the Design Museum. You can read more about A Wide Arm Of Sea on James' blog.

All good stuff. Good times.

Newspaper Club on Radio 4

In case you missed Saturday's PM programme, click here to listen to the short feature they did on Newspaper Club.

Newspaper Club logo

I don't normally do this, but I've just written about the Newspaper Club logo on the Newspaper Club blog and I thought you guys would like to read it as well.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

You may have noticed we've slightly changed the Newspaper Club logo. The previous one used a temporary paperboy graphic whilst we worked behind the scenes to create a bespoke one. 

I'd like to tell you about the thinking behind the logo and show you some of the versions that didn't make the cut. Other start ups don't give you that level of transparency, do they? When you think of newspapers you probably think of that 'funny marmalade' font. And you'd be right. That font you're thinking of visually equals newspaper, so I elected to use that. Simple. I'm a huge fan of not over complicating design, as my old boss used to say, "you might say cliché, I might say crystal clear communication". 

Most of the typography that would pass as crystal clear communication for a newspaper masthead is based on the font Blackletter. Blackletter has it's uses, but on screen is not one of them. In fact, it's more Duchy Originals than Daily Oregonian as over an incredible 1,000 years Blackletter has undergone many cuts and derivatives and most broadsheet newspapers today use stylised versions. Or typefaces based on a gothic Blackletteresque font, more accurately.

I needed a version that said 'newspaper' as instantly as Blackletter but worked well on screen.

Back in June (on day one in fact) I looked at several versions and settled on Brauhaus . It has been simplified and is therefore better for online use yet it still retains the newspaper feel I was after. To make the letters more distinctive I opted to change the N and the C for slightly tweaked versions of the Blackletter N and C.

That's the word marque sorted but for a modern start up you need an icon for all those pesky 32x32 square icons you have to create. And that's where the paperboy came in. The original inspiration was the Paperboy Atari game from the 1984. That's a sort of digital newspaper joke for people of a certain age. 

A little character would be handy for all those icons and also for guiding you through the newspaper making process. It feels right for Newspaper Club as we're a friendly tool for people and communities not a secretive, hard edged, spiky tech dot com.

We used this chap for a while, but it was just a place holder. We wanted our own, so we tasked the amazing Rexbox with creating one for us. Rex has worked on all sorts of cool stuff including co-creating LittleBigPlanet and stuff for Disney and MTV. Here he is. The paperboy, not Rex.

The result is a modern, friendly logo whilst hinting at the visual history of the newspaper masthead. We hope you like it.

Newspaper Club

A few weeks ago you may have noticed this gorgeous thing whistling around my Flickr pages.

It's a newspaper we designed and printed for the BBC called 8.

It's a collection of essays which came out of 8 studies commissioned as part of the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. The paper contains articles by Bill Thompson, Katherine Corrick and Pat Kane among others. Brendan from the BBC talks more about the project here.

I'm particularly fond of the cover. Looked great on the press.

Back in January when made TOFHWOTI we said it was a product of the future. The success of that project made us investigate that a bit more. We spoke to 4iP, Channel 4's investment fund, who agreed to fund a separate business called Newspaper Club.

Newspaper Club will have two components. It's main purpose is to allow anyone to curate, create and then collect (by that I mean print, but that doesn't alliterate) newspapers. It might be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a yearly “best of” printed product for obsessive bloggers. You'll be able to organise this stuff online and then print as little as a few to as many as a few thousand.

Like TOFHWOTI but made by you.

Those newspapers will be based on template designs and the user will have limited design choices. Obviously. Which is why I've been thinking about this stuff.

But we realise that some people may want a bespoke option to create something extra special, like 8 for the BBC. A document created from scratch. We're currently working on another one for Penguin which I'll tell you about soon.

Newspaper Club is a major project, lots of people already seem excited by it and there is a lot more I want to tell you. Stuff about how we're working as a team, how we're building the Newspaper Club brand, 4iP, designing templates and so on. But I shall save that for another day.

We launch in September, but in the meantime you can follow our adventures on the blog over here. According to Tech Crunch it's 'hilariously frank'. You can sign up for a beta invite here, you can read our insightful Twitter updates and if you'd like a bespoke newspaper for your corporation you should give me a call or drop me a line - ben@riglondon.com.

More to follow.