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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.

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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.