is print dying? by craig baldwin
no
Print is not dying, and this book is going to prove it to you, this book brings together the best articles I’ve found in my research. You will see there is a certain joy to books that digital will never be able to replace, the feel of them in your hands, the art direction of its design and its ability to outlast anything on the Internet.
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begin
physicality
personality
permanence
futuregazing
creativity endpaper
Introduction
p.8
Articles If print is dead then this is a very long good bye Less is more The right fibre
p.22 p.26 p.30
Examples U:D/R 01 Ronald Clyne at Folkways Nobrow volume 2 Channel 4 at 25
p.35 p.36 p.38
Articles Formless and definite content explained Show me the money (for art direction) Face the future
p.44 p.50 p.54
Examples How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul Wired magazine IdN magazine
p.59 p.60 p.62
Articles Publishing: The revolutionary future
p.69
Examples The Smashing Book It’s Nice That
p.79 p.80
Articles Future shock Five ways the iPad will change magazine design Screen test Print is dying...really?
p.90 p.94 p.98 p.102
Work Self promotion The Dot dot dot manifesto Making my manifesto TraDigiZines
p.110 p.112 p.148 p.162
Bibliography Predictions Credits
p.172 p.174 p.176
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begin -8-
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I’m fascinated by print and layout design, so for my final major project I devoted my time to researching the future of publishing and decided to use what I found as content for a book I would design and produce.
P
ublishing is in a state of perpetual change brought about by the advances of technology. Yet in the past decade technology has become a thorn in the side of publishing. The Internet has forever lowered the cost of entry into publishing your own material to blogs and forums. People no longer rely on print for the latest news, gossip and debate; they can get their fill every day of the week and contribute themselves. Combine this decrease in sales with the recession and a fall in advertising revenue and naysayers have become that much louder in declaring the death of print at long last. Would the publishing industry survive the transition away from its roots when most of their digital experiments have failed?
The new world of publishing
T
hey failed in their original attempts at going online because they tried to apply old world models to the new world and had their hands bitten for it. They expect the Internet to do what they tell it, but they do not control it, the consumer was first to take to the Internet and only in the past decade have companies seriously considered its potential and are having to learn about it as they try to integrate it into their plans. The publishing industry is not at ease in the surroundings of the Internet. But like advertising they will have to learn to accept that we now expect a two way dialogue and companies that try the old one way method will find themselves ignored as there is so much choice out there. They have to come to us on our own terms, and they don’t like it.
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Anyone can set up a blog nowadays in just a few clicks, sites like Blogspot and WordPress make it easy, Tumblr and Posterous make it easier still. And then there are plenty more sites to broadcast yourself on from YouTube to Twitter. The difference is whether anyone reads it, for that you still need to rely on bigger sites where there is a community. Yet independent sites like Smashing Magazine or Mumsnet can easily go toeto-toe with commercial sites with their large communities.
Print advertising revenue is falling and many do not see digital advertising ever being as lucrative. This is perhaps in part due to the recession and part a change in approach, when Sony dropped Fallon they made their thoughts clear, the big ad is dying; word of mouth and social media can be just as effective, and less costly.
We are at the mercy of Internet service providers however and people fear that we might lose net neutrality; that they might favour their own service over another’s and throttle our connection to them or block them altogether.
Books Print has been around for over a thousand years but it wasn’t until 1423 that movable type in Europe elevated books from being meticulously handwritten to being block printed and it’s taken many hundreds of years to become the tool of mass communication that we know them to be nowadays. Books are a symbol of authority and permanence. Artists’ books are some of the best examples of print you can find yet the image of books is being dragged to the dirt by ‘airport’ novels. These disposable tomes care not for the fact that they are printed and represent the most common exposure to books for most people. The industry that has built around these sort of books is particularly fragile as well and when people say print is dying it is usually these companies they are referring to. And they’re correct, too much do these companies rely on loss-making blockbusters caring not for their backlist that high street shops cannot afford to stock. When I think about it I find it rather ironic that in the face of the digital onslaught people see print as the last beacon of hope for tactility when it too is entirely digital driven during production.
The Chinese used wooden print blocks as early as 600AD.
Koreans first printed books with moveable type in 1241.
Stores like Waterstones don’t have the room to store the many thousands of books that form the foundation of our culture.
Looking ahead I see the industry having to undergo a serious shift; to survive they will have to utilise what makes a book, a book; the fact that it’s printed.
E-ink screens are not like normal LCD screens, they are as readable as a book. They sacrifice refresh rate and colour to do so.
eBooks An eBook reader is a digital book, designed to make books portable and utilise screen technologies such as e-ink to make continuous reading easy. The best example of an eBook reader is Amazon’s Kindle, it uses a 6 inch e-ink screen, keyboard, wireless access to an online bookstore, a week long battery life and can store up to 1500 books on its onboard memory. They make the consumption of formless content as easy as a normal printed book, and are far more portable, you try carrying around 1500 books. Thanks to the screen there is little eye strain which makes eBooks perfect for taking over the market that ‘airport’ novels currently occupy.
Formless content maintains its meaning regardless of its container. Most novels fall into this category.
However moving forward eBooks readers need to adapt to survive the rise of tablets. People will not want to carry an eBook reader, netbook and their phone in a similar way to how they didn’t want to carry a camera, phone and music player separately. Tablets are the next evolution of convergent devices bringing together netbooks and eBook readers. eBooks face a tough sell in the face of multi-purpose, full colour, touch screen tablets. - 11 -
Magazines Creative Review redesigned for their April 2010 issue while the British Journal of Photography redesigned for March 2010.
Magazines offer content that blogs could not; using their extra time and resources they provide more in-depth articles and professional opinions. Those that try to compete on time-based issues such as the latest news face a tough fight ahead of them. Magazines that have redesigned recently such as Creative Review or the British Journal of Photography cite the need to use what a magazine is; a physical object, and provide quality content on high quality paper stock and the best reprographics. The BJP also changed their frequency as they felt they no longer needed to publish the latest news as their website already covered this area. Not all redesigns are positive however; Design Week recently redesigned and put all their online content behind a subscribers paywall which seems a risky move in my view. Design Week doesn’t use its physicality, it just uses it as a container to provide you news that an online presence would better serve and yet you have to subscribe and pay the extra cost for all the print even if you just want the online content.
Design Week is weekly news publication printed on cheap feeling glossy paper, not a great use of print.
Magazines that compete for news may yet have a chance however as they are better at experimentation than newspapers and the paper can be exploited further to make the experience more tactile.
See the work of Jasmine Raznahan for a very literal interpretation.
Tablets It used to be that the best way to make your product safe from digitisation is either to exploit the physical medium in an unusual way or to use definite content and lay it out in a way that would make it awkward to consume any other way. The iPad, and tablets in general, change this. They are the reversal of a decade long trend of miniaturisation in technology; instead of getting smaller, tablets present hardware that is, for the first time, suitable for the consumption of creative layout design that has all the hallmarks of traditional print design. Just because you can transfer definite content from one medium to another does not mean you should do it irrespective of the hardware. Tablets offer touchscreen interaction and connectivity that needs to be utilised successfully if the tablet is to become worth its currently hefty price tag. The iPad is especially up against it as the first such tablet that has to change the mind set of its potential audience. It is a very young market that needs to get everything right lest you alienate your market with missteps - 12 -
Definite content changes its meaning when you change its container.
There are numerous tablets coming in 2010, many built on Google’s Android OS or HP’s recently acquired Web OS.
I feel the Guardian has done this excellently, whilst their midweek newspaper sales are nothing to write home about their commitment to their brilliant web design and iPhone app is commendable.
The Apple iPad was released in the USA at the beginning of April, the 3G came out at the end of April. As of going to print the iPad has not been released anywhere else but has sold over a million units.
Early attempts such as Popular Science and Time have kept it pretty safe sticking to the page metaphor and just adding swipes. There isn’t anything particularly ground breaking so of course people are going to question paying the same price (or greater) for the printed publication when the printed copy is nicer.
Perhaps they have become so obsessed with competing with digital they’re forgetting what’s unique about print. Maybe it’s the recession and a bid to cut costs but making their publications feel cheaper does print no justice whatsoever.
That’s not to say they won’t be able to achieve success, but it requires a change in the mind set of publishing. People are not going to pay the same price for digital content, the Internet has embedded the idea that information should be free and they’re going to have to prove to us their content is worth the price, they need to bring their brand and editorial to the web. Everyone can blog nowadays, the free exchange of ideas was the founding principle of the Internet and many do not want to see it commercialised to do the bidding of its commercial masters.
Along comes the iPad
T
hen the iPad was announced; Apple’s tablet was heralded as the saviour of the publishing industry, finally a piece of hardware suitable for the consumption of newspapers, books and magazines complete with all the hallmarks of publishing; it’s excellent editorial art direction. With its large display many publishers see it as an opportunity to put meaningful content into the digital realm but I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as copy and paste. If people are going to pay for this new form of content, content they could probably get for free online, then publishers are going to have to bring something new to it. The iPad represents the opportunity to rethink the page metaphor. For centuries we have become used to the definite canvas offered by the spread of a page. No longer are we bound by this, new technology deserves a new approach and to do this we have to embrace the idea of the infinite plane that a tablet like the iPad offers a window into.
A new place for print
B
ut what about print, people are so quick to shout about its demise but can anyone really envisage a world without paper? Print is simply too big to disappear into the night, people have an emotional connection to the printed page. There is still plenty that paper can offer; publishing companies are just losing sight of it. They need to take advantage of what print has to offer, its unique selling proposition is the fact that it’s a physical - 13 -
object, something that digital will never be able to take away from it. They need to stop just using it as a container of words, they need to exploit the physicality of a book, look at using paper stocks, print processes and bindings that make the book truly delightful to the touch. People will find a nice book a pleasant change from the emotionless feel of glass screens and backlit words. Print can lift a design, by taking it beyond the computer screen and putting it on paper a design becomes something so much more than if it were just shown digitally. It’s this personality that people have come to love, the use of typography and imagery, the sort of experimentation that magazines can risk on a monthly basis that sets itself apart from what novels achieve. And finally, books have a permanence about them. Their content outlasts anything on the Internet, an article on a blog lacks context and is lost in the constant flux within months of it being published; books give a sense of history.
About this book
Sure digital can close the gap between print and digital in terms of reading comfort but at the end of the day it’s still going to be a glass or plastic touchscreen without texture.
Physicality section p.16
Personality section p.40
Newspapers are going to have to take these risks as well if they want to survive p.54
Permanence section p.64
T
his book was produced as a way of bringing together the articles that have helped shape my opinion as part of my final major project. The articles have been divided into their relevant sections, physicality, personality, permanence and futuregazing. I included futuregazing to look into the future of publishing and what impact the iPad will have. There is also a creativity section which includes work that represents my interest in producing physical work, included in this section is my self-promotion, my manifesto, the making of my manifesto and the TraDigiZines I produced in the first five weeks of my project. At the end I reference all the articles I’ve included and give my closing comments on how I would like events to unfold in the endpaper. I hope you enjoy this book, all layout design by myself Craig Baldwin.
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Futuregazing section p.84
Creativity section p.106
Endpaper section p.168
Newspapers Guardian reported that over 60% of bigger magazine websites are profitable. I apply this idea to news websites as well.
Mostly BBC News, being in the UK has its advantages, no adverts on BBC’s website.
Books and magazines can survive because they see that they shouldn’t compete with the Internet on news based up-to-date content instead using their longer production span to bring higher quality content and professional in-depth analysis that blogs cannot afford. Newspapers face a rough time ahead and I honestly don’t see them lasting to the end of the decade. They publish yesterdays news and more people opting to find out the latest news either on their websites or elsewhere. Their biggest threat currently are free newspapers and the psychology that the Internet has put in their readers; why are we paying for news? Newspaper doesn’t use print to its full advantage and doesn’t have the turnaround of online news content. It was reassuring to see recently that there is a profit to be made from online advertising but I doubt this would support an entire newspaper’s staff in the long run. Personally I will not mourn the loss of newspapers, I read all my news online, either on the Guardian website or on BBC News. Newspapers are cumbersome and I want to know the news as quickly as possible, perhaps I’m not the ideal market as I don’t take advantage of their long form journalism, but I am part of the younger audience who they will have to adapt for.
News websites News websites are the best hope for newspapers in the short term, but unless they can be made to make a profit they won’t save the large staff numbers of established newspapers. Some websites see paywalls as a means of sustaining themselves in the future. The Times has recently announced that they’re going to be putting a £2 per week paywall around all of their content. Hoping for a similar success as The Financial Times is just ignorant of the facts; they don’t offer a specialised resources like the FT does. It’s a bold move that will end up failing unless everyone else does the same, which they won’t, sure the Sun and the Daily Mail have announced similar plans, but there are many out there who won’t. Also how do they expect to attract new readers in the long run when all their content is not accessible? The Guardian has said they never want to use a paywall, and as part of the TV License I already pay for the BBC News website so that will always remain ‘free’ to me and I will never pay for access to the Times. I’m not saying that social media will be able to replace news websites, and independent blogs don’t have the man power to report on issues around the world but together with other news websites they make the paywall position untenable.
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I admit it’s not exactly free, £100+ per year but it’s a necessary evil that I already pay for so I might as well use their news website as well, which is just as good as any other out there.
Phys - 16 -
sicality - 17 -
The physicality of the book is what you feel, the paper stock and the print processes, the sort of attributes that gets a bibliophile all worked up, digital can never replace this. This is perhaps the most obvious attribute of printed publications, you’re experiencing it right now holding this book, the feel of it in your hands, the joy of flicking through the pages of this book perhaps even the smell. I would never expect digital equivalents to be able to imitate this quality, nor should they; the sense of touch is something precious to books, magazines and newspapers and would be a waste of innovation for digital publications when they have new attributes. It is more than just the feel of a book however, it’s the special processes that can only be used by print, processes such as spot varnish, letter pressing or embossing and help put print in a world of its own. Don’t go thinking this is all print has however, these are just aesthetic pleasantries that add to the experience but are not at the core of the physicality of a book. A book is a physical object, how hard can it be for publishers to realise this and utilise it?
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Physicality contents Articles If print is dead then this is a very long good bye
p.22
Less is more
p.26
The right fibre
p.30
written by Michael Johnson
written by John Stones
written by Anna Richardson
Examples U:D/R 01 Ronald Clyne at Folkways
p.35
Nobrow volume 2
p.36
Channel 4 at 25
p.38
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The publications that end up enduring will be the ones that exploit what print alone can do.
luke hayman - 21 -
if print is dead then this is a very long good bye
...
by michael johnson
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After all, take a quick look around the design world and ask yourself which sectors have a secure future? Branding? Almost certainly. Digital? Er, yes. Animation? Of course. Product and 3D? Absolutely.
hasn’t told us or the message is taking a heck of a long time to get through. Bookshelves groan with new magazines, specialist shops like London’s Magma and Amsterdam’s Nijhof and Lee are stuffed to the gunnels with new design books, every month. Magma even opened their third shop, specialising in graphic ephemera and general printed curiosities, and it’s survived the recession.
As a contrast, just a quick scan of the ink-based sectors reveals the slow death of traditional media - The poor Observer’s demise is predicted on a weekly basis. The Guardian’s midweek sales are by all accounts terrible. Blogs can showcase, discuss and dissect new ideas weeks, even months before journals. In the next few years we’ll see if the Kindle will put a torch to those paperbacks that gather dust on our shelves.
Some sectors still need printed things – in education the students check out prospective Universities online, but their parents still like a glossy prospectus for the coffee table, and if tens of thousands of pounds are being committed to an education, you can’t blame them. In other cases, ‘print’ seems to be becoming much more DIY. When producing ‘things’ for V&A fetes and xmas cards we’ve unearthed new and unexpected sources of income. An old and infamous poster on the ‘life of a graphic designer’ has been reprinted three times - sales of it must be up to three or four hundred, and counting.
And the pace of change will only get greater: the most heard client request last year? ‘Can you show me what it will look like on an iPhone?’ Not many of them say ‘I know, let’s do this as a limited edition foil blocked book’. There’s probably now a clear age-divide over print versus digital. Designers over 35 were drawn into the profession by traditional means – album covers, posters and club flyers, messing about in the screenprinting department at school. Generation Y (or whatever letter we’re up to now) has been using and abusing Powerpoint for a decade at school or dabbled with their MySpace backgrounds. ‘Album covers’ are now 50 pixel-wide pictures on their iPods, not gatefold cardboard experiences. Digital ‘stuff’ is home, not away and it’s unlikely that they’re drawn to design via traditional means. ‘Doing a nice bit of print’ is more a creative curiosity rather than a craving.
It’s no coincidence that Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook have started their own publishing enterprise – they’ve judged that there’s still a market for the kind of book that they love and would want to buy themselves. They can print as few or many as needed, and if the books prove viable probably pocket more than the standard ‘5% of net’ royalty that induces depression in most budding design authors. This move to self-publishing and production will probably continue. If posters just become big pieces of paper held up on design blogs for other designers to coo at, that’s not really viable. But if they buy them? Well, why not?
At the turn of the last decade, many of London’s design companies still treated ‘print’ as the bedrock of their business. Designing annual reports was both creatively excellent and profitable, now they are on-line pdfs. A statement such as ‘let’s do a series of posters for this project’ would be met with enthusiasm and interest - now clients will just grin politely and change the subject. Or just ask ‘why?’
American designers last year found a way to support Obama by uploading their poster designs digitally for people to print out at whatever size they wished and now the designs have been collected in a book from Taschen. A neat way to preserve an art form on-line, and move it into the 21st century.
Entire corporate identities can be designed, detailed and virtually artworked before someone asks – ‘hang on, what about the stationery’. The dreaded phrase ‘electronic stationery’ has taken over, a process best summarised as one where your favourite layouts are radically re-interpreted (ok, destroyed) by the blunt instrument that is Microsoft Won’t (sorry, Word).
We’re going to see more of this. Print may have been toppled from the top of the design tree, but it isn’t going to go quietly.
For some, adjusting to the change has taken time. In the nineties, johnson banks would produce dozens, sometimes hundreds, of posters a year. Sixty by forty inches remains a favourite size, and the receiving of the proofs, the smelling of the ink? Fantastic. We all learned from the masters and virtually every one of them (Hoffman, Brockmann, Fletcher, Glaser) built careers around getting ink onto paper via the poster. But if printed stuff really is dead, either someone - 23 -
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Designers, authors, and publishers will have to work even harder to produce something that justifies the resources of the physically printed book.
john stones - 25 -
LESS is
MOR The tactile, aesthetic needs of book enthusiasts have meant the digital reading experience has left them largely unfulfilled - as evidenced by the recent proliferation of limited editions in print, says John Stones. - 26 -
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his own, he, too, has set up as a boutique publisher, as well as continuing to design books for others. ‘We did need to think long and hard about our motivation. If the book is better and easier to read, and feels nicer in the hand, then it is justified,’ says Pearson. Rather than numbered limited editions, White’s Books (as his publishing company is called) offers classics in ‘fine editions’, with marker ribbons, special colours, cloth binding and wrap-around cover illustrations, which retail for £20.
It’s the books in the middle that are being squeezed
‘I consider tactility and legibility more than I could before, I can set the type myself and spend a stupid amount of time doing so,’ says Pearson. Each has a print run of one or two thousand, the sales of one paying for the print run of the next. Specialist indie bookshops, such as To Hell With Books in London, are springing up dedicated to these limited editions and self-published books, which are also finding space in quite different kinds of retail environments. For instance, Browns Editions, the exquisite limited editions produced and published by creative consultancy Browns, frequently linked to the exhibitions of Jonathan Ellery, are available in the stores of Paul Smith and Colette, as well as online from the designers.
The limited edition has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent years, in no small part fuelled by the cult of luxury that was so much part of the ‘naughty noughties’. It’s a tactic that has been effectively deployed across the spectrum, from furniture manufacturers such as Established & Sons (which has specialised in the strategy and have issued limited-edition furniture for tens of thousands of pounds) through to mainstream confectionery brands such as Kit Kat, which also found the limited edition an effective marketing strategy.
These blur the distinction between limited-edition graphic design and the work of art, foregrounding the work of graphic designer, and are, perhaps, more comparable with photographers’ or artists’ books.
But the word edition is originally a publishing term, and so perhaps a limited-edition book requires less by way of justification. While it can, of course, simply be a smart way of dressing up a small print run, the recent increase of limited-edition books points to something beyond that. Faced with the threat of the digital realm, the tactile, visual and even fetishistic needs of the bibliophile needs to be cultivated.
The over-publishing current in the mainstream book market is clearly soon to be a thing of the past, and in the foreseeable future a large proportion of printed books could be special editions of one sort or another. Designers, authors, and publishers will have to work even harder to produce something that justifies the resources of the physically printed book. ‘People think the limited edition is an easy route, which it is, in fact, not at all - it’s as demanding as selling an ordinary book, and people need to be to know it is there in the same way,’ warns Murray.
‘We always try to make a unique thing, an object as well as a book,’ says Damon Murray, co-founder of Fuel Design, known for both its own finely crafted publications and its design for others. ‘It is the way the book market is going gradually - the airport paperback can now be read on your iPod or iPhone.’ Typical is Fuel’s most recent limited edition, the Jake Chapman novel Memoirs of My Writer’s Block: there is a standard paperback (for £14) and also a limited edition of 100, in a navy cloth box with gold foil and a numbered and signed etching (for £295).
‘It needs to be worth buying. People are not fooled - a slipcase and a print on its own is not enough,’ he concludes.
‘It’s the books in the middle that are being squeezed,’ suggests David Pearson, who previously, as Penguin’s design director, had done more than most to return the design of the mainstream paperback to the graphic design-fest that it had once been. Now established on - 27 -
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Print may have been toppled from the top of the design tree, but it isn’t going to go quietly.
michael johnson - 29 -
The right fibre
To make an impact in a world dominated by online media, paper has to trade on its special properties. Anna Richardson considers the latest trends in terms of tactility, colour and texture, as well as the increasing popularity of bespoke stock for global brands.
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“With paper working so hard, it’s no wonder that designers still value it so much.” Paper needs to work hard - it constantly has to demonstrate its Green credentials, make projects more desirable and tactile, and justify its very existence in the face of the onslaught from the Internet and electronic media.
Colorlux Ebony Gloss by GF Smith. For a leaflet promoting exhibition and book The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Studio Frith used Fenner’s Clervaux - making a simple, folded leaflet intriguing to the touch.
Many paper mills have gone bust and a lot of ranges are disappearing. There is a diminishing role for paper in many areas, but an increasing role in others, believes Jon Cefai, creative director of Kent Lyons. ‘The idea that paper is becoming something special is where its strength is,’ he says.
In the new window design for Parisian chocolatier Pierre Hermé, meanwhile, Marianne Guély used a variety of Arjowiggins metallic papers (including Curious Cosmic Alien Green, Mars Red and Blue Planet) to evoke the store’s favourite flavours of anise, lime and vanilla.
Many specialised print projects require paper to lift the design - invitations needing the materials to make an impact, or small print runs of brochures and leaflets that have to feel tactile. A print run of thousands, meanwhile, requires FSC paper to minimise its environmental impact.
According to James Grove, marketing director at GF Smith, paper also works increasingly hard in reinforcing global brands’ values. From fashion to finance, companies are demanding the same paper for all their global operations, rather than different domestic renditions. This means that many international brands are starting to use bespoke papers, which can reinforce particular brand values - and also provide an extra guard against knock-offs and fraud.
Kent Lyons is currently completing a self-initiated project exploring the production of paper, from start to finish, and gauging what paper means to people within the design industry. ‘Paper isn’t a dirty word,’ says Cefai. ‘It’s its misuse and waste that is bad.’
Gucci Group-owned Alexander McQueen, for example, uses a bespoke coloured GF Smith grade, internally called Alexander McQueen Grey. The paper has a customised shade, texture and finish, is used globally and reflects the brand’s values of quality and craftsmanship.
Produced in collaboration with GF Smith and Generation Press, Pulp Paper is a book that shows paper off in all its glory - reflecting many of the trends of tactility and colour. It uses 15 stocks in 18 different sections and documents a visit by Kent Lyons to the GF Smith Colourplan paper mill in the Lake District. Cefai particularly enjoyed experiments in printing four-colour images on coloured paper, such as sorbet yellow, which gives the images ‘this amazing warmth.’
With paper working so hard, it’s no wonder that designers still value it so much. In his contribution to the Pulp Paper book, Adrian Shaughnessy of Shaughnessy Works confesses to being a slightly odd graphic designer. ‘I don’t have a paper fetish,’ but adds, ‘There’s no question that paper products like books and magazines have proved their durability. The book is a great piece of technology, and will remain important as long as people want to read and as long as people value the portability and sheer effectiveness of paper-based products.’
Many cite the tactility of paper as its UPS and stock such as Arjowiggins’ Curious Touch (a perennial favourite) takes this to another level, as it responds to a touch’s temperature change. Combinations of textures are also popular - a coarse board on one side teamed with a gloss finish on the other, for example. The promotional pack for Commes des Garcons’ new perfume Daphne, designed by Studio Small, combines printable book cloth Flaxprint by Fenner Paper on the outside with an inner glossy black
‘We think twice about making anything these days,’ writes Nat Hunter of Airside. ‘But often nothing will do the job as well as paper can.’
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Magazines will never die because there is a visceral feeling of having that thing in your hands ... It’s the difference between looking at a woman and having sex with her.
george lois - 33 -
*
Examples Here I have provided examples that demonstrate an excellent use of Physicality, this is pretty difficult to demonstrate through photography however as this is all about how they feel in the hand. But I hope you can understand what I’m talking about when you see these examples, try to see them for real if you can.
U:D/R 01: Ronald Clyne Designed by: Unit Editions Publisher: Unit Editions Published: 2010
Nobrow Volume 2 Designed by: Sam Arthur & Alex Spiro Publisher: Nobrow Published: 2009
Channel 4 at 25 Designed by: Spin Publisher: Culture Shock Published: 2008
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Perso - 40 -
onality - 41 -
The personality of the book is its design and layout, the play of typography and colour combined with the purpose of the book; design is art with a purpose. I believe that print helps typography, layout and imagery to transcend its individuality and become a collected whole. This is the personality that I talk of, you’ve heard of a book’s tone of voice, this is the visual tone of voice of a printed publication. This category is perhaps the least quantifiable as it talks about what is printed on the page, it is neither the fact that it exists (physicality) or that it will be around for years to come (permanence) but how it looks. Perhaps it is this intangibility that makes it what it is, only print receives the budget required to achieve the level of quality required to truly harness its personality. When digital content is in the rush it always is, art direction will fall by the wayside. Publishers need to maintain their budgets somehow otherwise their content will be the same as all the blogs on the Internet, where will their personality and brand be if not in the design of their products?
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Personality contents Articles Formless and definite content explained
p.44
Show me the money (for art direction)
p.50
Face the future
p.54
adapted from an article by Craig Mod
written by Khoi Vinh
written by Anna Richardson
Examples How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul
p.59
Wired magazine
p.60
IdN magazine
p.62
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&
formless
definite
explained
content
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by
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od
defined by content
In the context of the book as an object, the key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page. Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries. Whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts and resizes itself to fit the page. In a sense, Definite Content approaches the page as a canvas - something with dimensions and limitations - and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole.
For too long the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content.
Put very simply, Formless Content is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only text. Definite content usually has some visual elements along with text. Much of what we consume happens to be Formless. The bulk of printed matter - novels and non-fiction is Formless.
Let’s divide content into two broad groups. Content without well-defined form (Formless Content) Content with well-defined form (Definite Content)
In the last two years, devices excelling at displaying Formless Content have multiplied - the Amazon Kindle being most obvious. Less obvious are devices like the iPhone, whose extremely high resolution screen, despite being small, makes longer texts much more comfortable to read than traditional digital displays.
Formless Content can be reflowed into different formats and not lose any intrinsic meaning. It’s content divorced from layout. Most novels and works of nonfiction are Formless. When Danielle Steele sits at her computer, she doesn’t think much about how the text will look printed. She thinks about the story as a waterfall of text, as something that can be poured into any container.
In other words, it’s now easier and more comfortable than ever to consume Formless Content in a digital format.
Content with form - Definite Content - is almost totally the opposite of Formless Content. Most texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry fall under this umbrella. It may be reflowable, but depending on how it’s reflowed, inherent meaning and quality of the text may shift.
Maybe not. But we’re getting closer.
You can sure as hell bet that author Mark Z. Danielewski is well aware of the final form of his next novel. His content is so Definite it’s actually impossible to digitise and retain all of the original meaning. Only Revolutions, a book loathed by many, forces readers to flip between the stories of two characters. The start of each printed at opposite ends of the book.
Important to note is that these aren’t complaints about the text losing meaning. Books don’t become harder to understand, or confusing just because they’re digital. It’s mainly issues concerning quality. One inevitable property of the quality argument is that technology is closing the gap (through advancements in screens and batteries) and because of additional features (note taking, bookmarking, searching), will inevitably surpass the comfort level of reading on paper.
Is it as comfortable as reading a printed book?
When people lament the loss of the printed book, this comfort - is usually what they’re talking about. My eyes tire more easily, they say. The batteries run out, the screen is tough to read in sunlight. It doesn’t like bath tubs.
A designer may, of course, working in concert with the author, imbue Formless Content with additional meaning in layout. The final combination of design and text becoming Definite Content.
The convenience of digital text - on demand, lightweight (in file size and physicality), searchable - already far trumps that of traditional printed matter.
For an extreme and ubiquitous contemporary example of Definite Content, see Tufte. Love him or hate him, you have to admit he’s a rare combination of author and designer, completely obsessed with final form, meaning and perfection in layout.
The formula used to be simple: stop printing Formless Content; only print well-considered Definite Content. The iPad changes this. - 45 -
This is an illustration explaining how formless content is simply non-formatted text, such as the content of novels or newspapers, content that can easily be transferred into various containers.
formless
The containers you view it on could be anything such as the printed page, your computer screen or a mobile device such as a smart phone with no thought for resolution or layout. The majority of all printed matter can be categorised as formless content and in most cases this is what you will find in a bookstore.
} =
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Definite content on the other hand has been specifically formatted for its container, with attention paid to the layout, typography and imagery. This sort of content can not be easily transferred to containers that it was not originally planned for.
definite
Content designed for the printed page could probably not even be moved to a different size page and is often not resolution independent so even content on one device might not be suitable for another. It is thanks to this hefty trade off that definite content is often more visually appealing and interesting.
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Art direction is too prohibitively expensive to survive in the world of digital publishing.
khoi vinh - 49 -
Show me the money (for art direction) by Khoi Vinh
Economic Indicators The main premise of the column is that though both publishers and publishing designers want the iPad to save publishing, their interests are in fact somewhat divergent: “What publishers mean when they say they want to save publishing is that they want to derive enough revenue from the digital distribution of their content to support the ongoing, profitable production of that content. What designers mean when they say they want to save the publishing industry is that they want to save their jobs. Or save design jobs. Or at least preserve the way that publishing designers practice design. Which is to say that they want to continue to create editorially specific solutions using a wealth of skills and tools - typography, illustrations, photography, and ambitious layout creativity that very much depend on the wealth of publishers.” Do I think this kind of art direction is possible on the iPad, or any other tablet device? The answer makes for the thrust of this first column. Basically, I make the argument that even if the iPad can save the publishing industry (an iffy proposition, to be sure) it won’t save art direction for the simple reason that art direction is too prohibitively expensive to survive in the world of digital publishing. Not long ago I watched R.J. Cutler’s documentary “The September Issue,” a fascinating if incomplete look at Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the rarified world of fashion publishing over which she lords. In one particularly memorable twist in the film, the magazine’s editors decide to nix an already completed story that entailed a photo shoot with a rough price tag US$50,000. Poof, out the window. What was essentially an enormous sum spent on art direction - discarded. Of course, not every publication operates at the expense level of a Vogue, but it’s safe to say that like Vogue most print magazines have very high operating costs. They spend far more money per content unit (article, photo shoot, interview, etc.) than Web sites do, and of course that includes the cost of art directing and designing the content.
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Pointing out this disparity is not meant to demonstrate that Web publishers are cheap, but rather that print publishers have traditionally been quite flush. For decades, print publishing attracted incredibly robust advertising dollars, year after year, building whole empires as a result. That steady influx of healthy cash, combined with the relatively leisurely pace of publishing a magazine once or twice a month, or even once weekly, is what supported the remarkable run of visually stunning and culturally memorable publishing design that started in the middle part of the last century. Every article in every magazine looked different, looked gorgeous, because publishers could afford to make it so.
Bottom Line That’s over. For a million reasons, it’s over, but mostly for one reason: the Internet remade the economics of publishing. The evidence suggests that very, very few if any publishers are able or will be able to recapture those vertiginous levels of advertising revenues for digital publishing on the Web. And even if they do, even if they can turn the corner and evolve their business models on the Web, the generally ruthless economics of publishing in that environment has already made publishers unalterably averse to the significant expenses of art directing content. The same will follow for the iPad, at least that’s my position. What we’re seeing right now, in the Popular Science app, and what we’ll see in the coming months from other ambitious digital magazine products, is a bubble for digital art direction that will burst quickly. I’m not saying that these magazines will all fail (well, I basically am, but of course I’m not certain about that). Rather what I’m saying is that these publishers are right now enthralled by the newness of the iPad and they perceive in it an opportunity that really doesn’t exist. The iPad looks to publishers like a fresh start in the world of digital, one more last chance to recapture the old ad dollars that the Web essentially dissolved. Even if those ad dollars return, what these publishers are wishfully ignoring at the moment is the fact that the kind of art direction these magazines require is very labor intensive and very expense-heavy - it costs a lot of money to art direct. It’s a value equation that worked for print but won’t work in tablet media, just like it didn’t work on the Web. When that realization dawns on publishers, they’ll stop paying for it.
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The boundaries between newspaper and magazine norms have become increasingly blurred.
anna richardson - 53 -
Face The Using distinctive fonts is an effective way of enhancing a publication’s identity. As the boundaries between magazine and newspaper blur, designers are making some innovative choices, finds Anna Richardson. - 54 -
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Schwartz’s recent work for The New York Times’ Sunday style magazine T, for example, eschewed the aesthetic of pretty details and flourishes with Giorgio Sans, a sans serif addition to Giorgio, Schwartz’s previous font for the magazine. ‘This was a very plain sans serif with very straight proportions,’ he says.
agazines and newspapers have been through the wringer over the past year, but as recovery beckons, several relaunches are imminent, and a key element in cementing a brand’s success is using the perfect font.
Christian Küsters, founder of CHK design and digital type foundry Acme Fonts, set a new benchmark some years ago with a redesign of Architectural Design magazine. He chose Wim Crouwel’s Gridnik font, which, he says, looks ‘a bit like an interior from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The corners are rounded and it’s quite modular. It looks architectural’. Küsters is now redesigning AD again, opting for the new font AF Module, based on architectural blueprints. ‘It comes in different weights and is a constructed font,’ he says. ‘It’s very contemporary, and also works well on-screen because of its modular nature.’
The boundaries between newspaper and magazine norms have become increasingly blurred, however. Newspapers are generally more conservative in tone, their readership more loyal, but also sensitive to changes, says Stephen Coles of Fontshop, while magazines have more leeway and can be bolder and more experimental. ‘They are also printed on better paper, so you can specify type that is more delicate’, Coles adds. ‘Newspaper type needs to be rugged, especially in the body copy.’
There is also a tendency towards slab serif fonts, notes Nordling, as well as vintage fonts and handdrawn lettering - not so much type as illustration. ‘With no budget for illustration or photography, a more exuberant [design with] type becomes a good way to fill your page and convey the feelings you’re trying to get across,’ says Schwartz.
Having said that, newspapers have recently strayed from the dull and overused, and are experimenting with sans serif, says Örjan Nordling, type designer and creative director of Pangea Design in Stockholm, who developed the typeface FF Dagny for Sweden’s leading daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. ‘In Sweden, a lot of the new typefaces are arriving from the sans serif family. It’s part of the Modernistic idea,’ says Nordling.
With the latest technology, developing type for different platforms and screen sizes is another consideration for designers. The new version of Firefox, for example, supports Web Open Font Format. ‘Websites [are becoming] more fully representative of the way magazines look in print,’ explains Coles, even though he thinks font designs, screens and user interfaces have to get better for text to be read as well on screen as in print.
In the case of Dagens Nyheter, Nordling originally helped in its redesign from broadsheet to tabloid, which called for a more compact setting. Pangea produced a sans serif, DN Grotesk, to complement the existing serif DN Bodoni, which then evolved into FF Dagny, put on general release last year. ‘We were looking for a typeface with more contrast and dynamic lines,’ explains Nordling, and FF Dagny now constitutes the main building block of the newspaper.’
Nordling, meanwhile, is looking to a new breed of font design. ‘Perhaps there will be typefaces with a new anatomy that will take the best from different type families - digital and traditional,’ he says.
Magazines are also increasingly defying preconceptions. Coles cites music magazine Bearded, which uses Amasis throughout. ‘It gives it a more serious, considering tone,’ he suggests, ‘but it’s not stuffy or old.’ The trend has mostly been one way, with newspapers looking more like magazines, but some magazines are now looking more like newspapers, to gain the authoritative voice and level of trust of the latter, says Christian Schwartz, co-founder - with Paul Barnes of Commercial Type, which designed The Guardian’s Egyptian typeface. What is expected from different magazine genres is also blurring. ‘The splintering of the mass audience has undone some of the typographic clichés,’ says Schwartz. ‘Now there are fashion magazines that are entirely in Helvetica or completely unexpected [types], to appeal to their particular market.’ - 55 -
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I don’t think that magazines can ever be as culturally important again as they once were.
luke hayman - 57 -
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Examples Personality is difficult to get across in words so I’m hoping these examples will provide a clearer insight into what I mean. Personality is the appearance of everything inside the publication, the play of type and colour and I feel these examples show it off in the best possible light. The best is often seen in magazines.
How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul Designed by: Adrian Shaughnessy Publisher: Laurence King Publishing Published: 2005
Wired magazine Designed by: Andrew Diprose & Gary Codogan Publisher: CondĂŠ Nast Published: May 2010.
IdN magazine Designed by: IdN Publisher: Systems Design Published: 2009
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Perma - 64 -
anence - 65 -
The permanence of the book is how it outlasts anything, books act as the back up of our cultural history, they can’t be easily deleted like content on the Internet. You need to look no further than Amazon’s remote deletion of Orwell’s 1984 off users’ Kindles to understand the importance of keeping books around as a cultural and historical back up of mankind. Books last for hundreds of years whereas an online article is lost in the constant flux of the Internet within a few months. On top of this whose decision is it what content is allowed into an online marketplace? Censorship is an unnecessary evil that is much easier to maintain on the Internet (see Google’s now defunct Chinese search page and how the truth was hidden from its viewers). The Internet is as fleeting as word of mouth and just as hard to keep track of, a printed publication acts as a permanent landmark in mankind’s history. Yes the Internet offers unrivalled convenience but it is the publishers’ business models that are broken, not the books that they sell.
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Permanence contents Articles Publishing: The revolutionary future written by Jason Epstein
p.69
Examples The Smashing Book
p.79
It’s Nice That
p.80
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Publishing: The revolutionary future jason epstein
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The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialised marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
“The unprecedented ability of this technology ... will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives”
Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitisation will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitisation offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralised, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter’s overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes. Gutenberg’s technology was the sine qua non for the rebirth of the West, as if literacy, scientific method, and constitutional government had been implicit all along, awaiting only Gutenberg to throw the switch. Within fifty years presses were operating from one end of Europe to the other, halting only at the borders of Islam, which shunned the press. Perhaps from the same fear of disruptive literacy that alarmed Islam, China ignored a phonetic transcription of its ideographs, attributed to a Korean emperor, that might have permitted the use of movable type. The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which much of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant. Karl Marx wrote of the revolutions of 1848 in his Communist Manifesto that all that is solid melts into air. His vision of a workers’ paradise was of course wrong by 180 degrees, the triumph of wish over experience. What melted soon solidified as industrial capitalism, a paradise for some at the expense of the many. But Marx’s potent image fits the publishing industry today as its capital-intensive infrastructure - presses, warehouses stacked with fully returnable physical inventory, its retail market constrained by costly real estate - faces dissolution within a vast cloud in which all the world’s books will eventually reside as digital files to be downloaded instantly title by title wherever on earth connectivity exists, and printed and bound on demand at point of sale one copy at a time by the Espresso Book Machine[1] as library-quality paperbacks, or transmitted to electronic reading devices including Kindles, Sony Readers, and their multiuse successors, among them most recently Apple’s iPad. The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives. Digitisation makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter - the human inability to read what is unreadable - will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.
“Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.”
Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate - one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide - 70 -
Web. Titles will also be posted on authors’ and publishers’ own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper. This future is a predictable inference from digitisation in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat. Digitisation will encourage an unprecedented diversity of new specialized content in many languages. The more adaptable of today’s general publishers will survive the redundancy of their traditional infrastructure but digitisation has already begun to spawn specialized publishers occupying a variety of niches staffed by small groups of like-minded editors, perhaps not in the same office or even the same country, much as software firms themselves are decentralized with staff in California collaborating online with colleagues in Bangalore and Barcelona. The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer’s work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years. In preliterate cultures, the great sagas and epics were necessarily communal creations committed to tribal memory and chanted under priestly supervision over generations. With the invention of the alphabet, authors no longer depended on communal memory but stored their work on stone, papyrus, or paper. In modern times, communal projects are limited mainly to complex reference works, of which Wikipedia is an example. Though social networking will not produce another Dickens or Melville, the Web is already a powerful resource for writers, providing conveniently online a great variety of updated reference materials, dictionaries, journals, and so on instantly and everywhere, available by subscription or, like Google search and Wikipedia, free. Most time-sensitive reference materials need never again be printed and bound.
“Most time-sensitive reference materials need never again be printed and bound.”
Informed critical writing of high quality on general subjects will be as rare and as necessary as ever and will survive as it always has in print and online for discriminating readers. Works of genius will emerge from parts of the world where books have barely penetrated before, as such works after Gutenberg emerged unbidden from the dark and silent corners of Europe. Gutenberg’s press, however, did not give Europe, with its tight cultural boundaries, a common tongue. Digitisation may produce a somewhat different outcome by giving worldwide exposure to essential scientific and literary texts in major languages: Rome redux, while translators will still find plenty of work.
The cost of entry for future publishers will be minimal, requiring only the upkeep of the editorial group and its immediate support services but without the expense of traditional distribution facilities and multilayered management. Small publishers already rely as needed upon such external services as business management, legal, accounting, design, copyediting, publicity, and so on, while the Internet will supply viral publicity opportunities of which YouTube and Facebook are forerunners. Funding for authors’ advances may be provided by external investors hoping for a profit, as is done for films and plays. The devolution from complex, centralized management to semi-autonomous editorial units is already evident within the conglomerates (for example, Nan A. Talese at Random House and Jonathan Karp at Hachette), a tendency that will strengthen as the parent companies fade. As conglomerates resist the exorbitant demands of best-selling authors whose books predictably dominate best-seller lists, these authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales. With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears. Traditional territorial rights will become superfluous and a worldwide, uniform copyright convention will be essential. Protecting content from unauthorised file sharers will remain a vexing problem that raises serious questions about the viability of authorship, for without protection authors will starve and civilization will decline, a prospect recognized by the United States Constitution, which calls for copyright to sustain writers not primarily as a matter of equity but for the greater good of public enlightenment. Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that “content wants to - 71 -
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Without the contents of our libraries - our collective blacklist, our cultural memory - our civilisation would collapse.
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be free” - much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorised file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others. These and other solutions will emerge opportunistically in response to need, as such solutions usually have. It is futile at this early stage, however, to anticipate the new publishing landscape in detail or to specify the rate of evolution, which will be sporadic and complex, or the future role of traditional publishers as digitisation advances along a ragged and diverse front, while publishers, writers, and readers adapt accordingly. Timing will be apparent only in retrospect. So far I have attempted to foresee the digital future in instrumental terms. There is also a moral dimension, for we are a troublesome species with a long history of self-destruction. The industry that Gutenberg launched eventually made possible wide distribution of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to say nothing of Babar the Elephant and The Cat in the Hat. But his technology also gave us The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the nonsense that turned Pol Pot in Paris from a mere fool into a mass murderer. Digitisation will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils.
“Digitisation will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils.”
Digital content is fragile. The secure retention, therefore, of physical books safe from electronic meddlers, predators, and the hazards of electronic storage is essential. Amazon’s recent arbitrary deletion of Orwell’s 1984 at its publisher’s request from Kindle users who had downloaded it suggests the ease with which files can be deleted without warning or permission, an inescapable hazard of electronic distribution.[2] In Denmark music downloaded by subscription self-destructs when the subscription expires. So does my annual subscription to the online Oxford English Dictionary unless I renew it. Much other reference material that is usually time-sensitive and for that reason need never be printed and bound is already sold by renewable subscription. If I were a publisher today I would consider a renewable rental model for all e-book downloads- the “lending library” technique of the Depression era - that more accurately reflects the conditional relationship, enforced by digital rights management software, between content provider and end user. I would like to add a few words about the evolution of my own interest in digitisation. From the beginning of my career I have been obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist - the previously published books, still in print, that are the indispensable component of a publisher’s stability and in the aggregate the repository of civilizations. In this sense, it is fair to say that book publishing is more than a business. Without the contents of our libraries - our collective backlist, our cultural memory our civilization would collapse.
“Actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.”
By the mid-Eighties I had become aware of the serious erosion of publishers’ backlists as shoals of slow-moving but still viable titles were dropped every month. There were two reasons for this: a change in the tax law that no longer permitted existing unsold inventory to be written off as an expense; but more important, the disappearance as Americans left the cities for the suburbs of hundreds of well-stocked, independent, city-based bookstores, and their replacement by chain outlets in suburban malls that were paying the same rent as the shoe store next door for the same minimal space and requiring the same rapid turnover. This demographic shift turned the book business upside down as retailers, unable to stock deep backlist, now demanded high turnover, often of ephemeral titles. Best-selling authors whose loyalty to their publishers had previously been the norm were now chips in a high-stakes casino: a boon for authors and agents with their nonrecoverable overguarantees and a nightmare for publishers who bear all the risk and are lucky if they break even. Meanwhile, backlist continued to decline. The smaller houses, unable to take these risks, merged with the larger ones, and the larger ones eventually fell into the arms of today’s conglomerates. To offset the decline of backlist I launched in the mid-Eighties the Reader’s Catalog, an independent bookstore in catalogue form from which readers could order 40,000 backlist titles by telephone. The Internet existed but had not yet been commercialized. The Reader’s Catalog was an instant success, confirming my belief in a strong worldwide market for backlist titles. But I had underestimated the cost of handling individual orders and concluded, with my backers, that if we continued our losses would become intolerable. The Internet was now available commercially. Amazon bravely took advantage of it and in the beginning suffered the losses that I feared. But by this time I had begun to hear of digitisation and its buzzword, disintermediation, which meant that publishers could now look forward to marketing a practically limitless backlist without physical inventory, shipping expense, or unsold copies returned for credit. Customers would pay in advance for their purchases. This meant that even - 74 -
Amazon’s automated shipping facilities would eventually be bypassed by electronic inventory. This was twenty-five years ago. Today digitisation is replacing physical publishing much as I had imagined it would. Relatively inexpensive multipurpose devices fitted with reading applications will widen the market for e-books and may encourage new literary forms, such as Japan’s cell-phone novels. Newborn revolutions often encourage utopian fantasies until the exigencies of human nature reassert themselves. Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements - musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata - that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers.
“Celebrate the inevitability of digitisation as an unimaginably powerful enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all depend.”
The most radical of these fantasies posits that the contents of the digital cloud will merge or be merged - will “mash up” - to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence, an all-encompassing, single book or collective brain that reproduces electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds. To scorn a bold new hypothesis - the roundness of the earth, its rotation around the sun - is always a risk but here the risk is minimal. The nihilism - the casual contempt for texts - implicit in this ugly fantasy is nevertheless disturbing as evidence of cultural impoverishment,[3] more offensive than but not unrelated to the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labours and hope for posterity.
The huge, worldwide market for digital content, however, is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom. I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitisation as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all - readers and nonreaders - depend.
Notes [1] A project that I helped found. [2] See also Amazon’s more recent attempt to block sales of books by a major publisher because of a pricing dispute. [3] For a critical account of this view, see Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), pp. 26, 46.
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Printed matter is harder to discard, so it gives online content a sense of history.
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Examples For examples of Permanence I have looked at popular digital publications such as blogs and websites and seen which ones have published a book. Even when digital distribution is quicker, cheaper and, perhaps, further reaching they felt a printed publication was still a valid and useful format to complement their website.
The Smashing Book Designed by: Various Publisher: Smashing Media GmbH Published: 2009
It’s Nice That Designed by: It’s Nice That & Joseph Burrin Publisher: It’s Nice That Published: 2009 & 2010
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The importance of real-life, tangible elements that supplement daily online content can never be underestimated.
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Future - 84 -
egazing - 85 -
I’m not going to stick my head in the ground and ignore the future. Tablets offer an unparalleled world of interactive publications and I look forward to it. But that’s not to say things will be plain sailing for them, there have been attempts in the past to reinvent the magazine and all of them have failed. What makes this new platform any different? Well, this is perhaps the first innovation that puts the magazine back into your hands and adds something new to the experience, something that technology hasn’t offered before; a large colour touchscreen. Still it will be very interesting to see how things develop, the iPad may be the first but it won’t be the last; if suitable Android or webOS tablets comes out then there will be plenty of competition.
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Futuregazing contents Articles Future shock
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Five ways the iPad will change magazine design
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Screen test
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written by Fraser Speirs
written by Luke Hayman
written by Adrian Shaughnessy
Print is dying...really?
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written by Graydon Carter
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What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
fraser speirs - 89 -
- 90 -
by
Fr a
se
rS
pe
ir s
Fu t sh ur oc e k
I’ll have more to say on the iPad later but one can’t help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.
The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.
Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”. I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.
People talk about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, and I don’t disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There’s another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can’t work them.
What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock. For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.
Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that’s because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won’t work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/ car analogy. My bad.)
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party. Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
I’m often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they’re thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.
In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.
Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here. - 91 -
“ - 92 -
We are obliged to move forward and address the technology of the day not by asking it to do what has been done before but by testing its abilities to reach into the unknown.
malcolm garrett - 93 -
FIVE
ways the iPad will change magazine design by Luke Hayman
2
The end of frequency Say goodbye to the idea of monthly magazines, or weeklies, or dailies. Print publications, already under siege by the Internet and 24-hour news cycle, will have to learn to adapt to a world of instantaneous updates. This is most obvious for news and business publications, but it’s just as true for fashion, entertainment and specialized titles.
1 3 A reversal of a decadeslong trend
For as long as I’m been alive, publication formats have been getting smaller. First, oversized magazines like Life and Esquire either disappeared or switched to conventional formats to save money on paper and mailing. Then editorial content started moving online, shrinking to fit computer screens and then even smaller for PDAs and 140-character tweets. The iPad represents the first time this trend has been reversed. Instead of smaller, more low-res content, we have the chance to get bigger, brighter, sharper content. Designers used to making it smaller may have trouble learning to go the other way.
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4 A reset on advertising The mean little conventions of online advertising - banner ads, pop ups, and so forth - aren’t popular with readers, with advertisers, and certainly not with designers. The iPad’s a new medium that will create a whole range of opportunities. Once people start exploiting what it can do, we may see the kind of creative renaissance that will deliver the next George Lois or Lee Clow. People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone.
A new way of telling stories Editors have been telling us for years that people won’t read long stories online. Yet they will read 1,000-page novels on their Kindles. What will they be willing to read on their iPad? I predict the return of long-form journalism. At the same time, visual storytelling will take deeper, richer forms. Information design will be more important than ever. Something like New York’s Approval Matrix that we designed back in 2005 with Adam Moss is popular in print but will really come to life in this format. Some people might subscribe to it all by itself.
5 - 95 -
A new role for print If digital magazines with rich, uncompromised, real-time content corner the market on delivering what you need to know right now, what’s the point of print? I think that the publications that end up enduring will be the ones that exploit what print alone can do. The best ones will be things that you want to save, not toss in the recycling bin. They’ll project a sense of craftsmanship and permanence. And each one should be an object that just feels terrific in your hand. If you’re spending most of your freetime holding an iPad, you just might welcome a change of pace.
“ - 96 -
A book that can be augmented with fresh data and additional content might just be the attraction that finally weans readers off words on paper.
adrian shaughnessy - 97 -
Screen If early indicators are to be believed, the world of publishing is about to be turned inside out. Apple’s new iPad has just been launched and there’s endless speculation about the impact of Steve Jobs’ latest piece of sexy hardware.
According to Jeremy Leslie, magazine designer and proprietor of the Mag Culture blog, the quick, low-cost pdf is a non-starter. ‘What a waste of time all those pdf page-turners are,’ he says. ‘The trouble is they’re a cheap, easy tick for the digital box (while also lazy and unengaging), but they are loved by digital-sceptic publishers who have had their hands bitten with larger digital attempts.’
A recent article in The Guardian noted that it is ‘variously predicted to transform our experience of reading electronic versions of books, newspapers and magazines.’
Yet Leslie thinks the outlook for digital publishing in the magazine sector is bright. ‘The proliferation and take-up of various e-readers have encouraged more progressive magazine publishers to investigate the area,’ he says. He singles out two successful examples of iPhone publishing apps: Empire’s movie database and Distill issue 3. He also praises The Guardian’s new app as a ‘classy example of editorial content being provided in a new medium and adding to the experience, rather than mimicking its source.’
Until the iPad is tested, however (it’s worth remembering that not all Apple products are successful: Apple Cube, anyone?), we don’t know if this latest piece of Cupertino wizardry will do for publishing and reading what the iPod did for the delivery and consumption of music. What we can say, however, is that there are no publishing moguls who are not wrestling with the problem of how to adapt content for electronic publishing. Too often the solution is to dump a pdf of the printed content online and call it the electronic version. Yet it is clear that if electronic publishing is going to take off, then at the very least the content must be specially designed for whichever format is selected for publishing.
But what about books? Seems to me that the book that fine specimen of robust and timeless technology - will only be replaced with an electronic alternative if something much better comes along. The vast majority of people I see on the Tube are still reading oldfashioned print books, and I only ever see the occasional e-book. However, I see lots of people hunched over their phones - and they are not making calls.
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test
What is the best way to adapt editorial content for electronic platforms? As publishers assess the likely impact of the Apple iPad on the reading experience, adrian shaughnessy listens to the professionals' views.
Enhanced editions is a new venture set up by publishing professionals. It believes it has the answer to the print versus electronic conundrum. No clunky pdfs for them. Instead, they offer a slick multi-faceted reading experience for delivery to the iPhone, making full use of the device’s media capabilities. Peter Collingridge, one of the founders, says, ‘As lifelong publishers and technologists, we refused to believe that the (final) coming of the e-book looked as dull as a Kindle or Sony Reader. We felt it should be an exciting, converged, multimedia device like the iPhone, and that, accordingly, books should be re-thought from the ground up to make the most of these devices.’
And it’s here, in the ability to ‘update and supplement,’ that we find the holy grail of electronic publishing. At a stroke, this exposes the inherent weakness of print books, namely that they are often quickly out-of-date. But a book that can be augmented with fresh data and additional content might just be the attraction that finally weans readers off words on paper. Both Leslie and Collingridge are optimistic about the future. ‘Innovation has been scarce in publishing,’ notes Collingridge. ‘But I draw comfort where others see fear; that the interests of Google, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft and many others in one oldest “gentleman’s” professions signal its future longevity rather than its demise.’
Download one of Collingridge’s book apps and you can choose to listen to a spoken word version, watch a filmed reading by the author, or manipulate the text to create a text-only version that suits you. It doesn’t stop there, either. The Enhanced Editions philosophy extends to ‘beautiful type on tilt scrolling pages, embedded video files, a network connection to the Web, context for how the book fits into the world, the ability to e-mail (and send to social media) key quotes, and, of course, the ability to listen or read, or do both, and swap from one to the other without losing your place - plus the ability to update and supplement the book content at any time.’
Leslie seems to nail the problem when he rightly dismisses electronic formats that ‘mimic’ traditional formats. If electronic publishing is to thrive it will do so by creating new ways of consuming the written word, rather than a slavish aping of the old. Only then will we sit on the Tube surrounded by people reading The Times or Martin Amis on their smart phones or other electronic devices.
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“ - 100 -
The lesson of history is that all technology changes culture.
milton glaser - 101 -
Print is dying ...
really? by Graydon Carter
It’s become fashionable to proclaim that print is dying, as if a medium that has been around for more than five centuries might, like a guest who has overstayed his welcome, suddenly glance about the room, see his hostess nodding off in her chair, and realize it’s time to call it a night. I have my doubts about the all-encompassing scope of the so-called digital revolution, but as the father of five children, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about. Kids have a zillion ways of finding out just about anything they want, when they want, but the smart ones - historically, the magazine subscribers of the future - still read. The reading business is not the same as the search-and-find business, and if you’re in the print version of the latter, on either a daily or a weekly basis, you have reason to be anxious. The rest of us have a fair chance to survive and perhaps even thrive. As the monks who were put out of business by Gutenberg’s printing press could have told you, technological innovation is nothing new. The telegraph put the Pony Express out of business after just 19 months of operation. There used to be a piano in most middle- and upper-middle-class homes. Once the record player and the radio came into being, the business of making pianos for home entertainment crumbled. E-mail is hurting snail mail. But not every media revolution ends with one combatant lifeless on the ground, blood trickling from his mouth. Television didn’t kill radio. It just changed it. Television had a similar effect on the movie business. During the three decades after World War I, Hollywood enjoyed an unrivaled hold on the nation’s imagination. In the years after World War II, when affordable television sets threatened to turn every living room in America into a mini movie theater, the studios’ first response was an instinctive one: panic. They forbade actors from appearing on TV, in the vain hope of strangling the upstart medium before it truly took hold. But Hollywood eventually figured out that since TV wasn’t going away it might as well learn how to make money off of it. Stations and networks eager for content were happy to pay for old films that had been left to rot and for new series that could be shot cheaply and quickly on the studio lots. Today, the major studios all have profitable television production arms. But here’s the part I - 102 -
“
Television didn't kill radio. it just changed it.
”
like about this analogy: after trying every gimmick in the book - 3-D, Cinerama, even Smell-O-Vision - the studios discovered that the best way to save their core business was to keep making great films, a mission they have had sketchy success at.
one has at least three and a truly great one has all four. Additionally, our stable of world-class photographers continue to find creative, visually arresting ways to reveal truths about our subjects in images that will stand up to any thousand words you throw at them.
Like those moguls who ventured into TV once they realized there was no turning back the clock, we at Vanity Fair have learned to navigate the digital waters with a lively Web site that I like to think of as a younger, more irreverent sibling of the print edition. We post a dozen or more items each day on our main blog, VF Daily, and routinely make news with our original content - everything from an edited and fact-checked version of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech (it almost made sense by the time we’d finished with it) to video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded (a lot of Republican traffic for that one).
The fact is that people still want great, well-told tales. We see it on vanityfair.com, where our longer articles routinely top the Most Popular list. We see it in the fact that our print circulation (both newsstand and subscriptions) is emphatically up at a time when everyone tells us it is supposed to be down. Commercial television is six-and-a-half decades old, the magazine is nearly 300 years old, and the printing press is five-and-a-half centuries old. But the art of storytelling is millennia older than all three. So if print journalism’s business model is changing, our only move as editors is to double down on delivering what our readers have always wanted from us: compelling stories and iconic photographs. And it won’t matter if they’re read on a laptop, a cell phone, or on paper.
But don’t expect us to turn into the Huffington Post anytime soon. Americans have taken to inhaling their news in catch-as-catch-can fashion from whatever screens they happen to have at hand: televisions, computers, cell phones, even those little TV sets in elevators. But in this age of constant information availability, it’s important to take a step back every now and then - once a month sounds about right - to immerse ourselves in the stories that define our times. At Vanity Fair, our writers continue to do what they’ve always done, ferreting out everything there is to know about a given subject and then pulling it all together in a gripping, satisfying narrative. A good Vanity Fair story should have at least a couple of the following elements: access, narrative arc, friction and disclosure. A great
You could argue that the magazine is as brilliant an invention as anything Apple will come up with. We take glorious stories, combine them with arresting photography, illustration and design, along with stunning advertising images, and bundle the whole thing into a package that is inexpensive, easy to use and available almost anywhere. (We’ll even deliver it to your door.) It can be passed on afterward or recycled. And you don’t need instructions or batteries.
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Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly.
walt mossberg - 105 -
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Cre
eativity - 107 -
The creativity section is a bit unusual, no more quotes and research, this work was completed separately from my final major project, but still shares its vision. This section is a bit of a break from previous ones, instead of containing research and quotes I decided to include some of my previous work to show where I’m coming from. In a way I wanted to show that I practice what I’m preaching in this book, but not just when it comes to just print design, The main part of the creativity section is the manifesto chapters, my manifesto is all about who I am and how I work so I feel it was important to include in this book when I’m talking about making your work tactile. The posters I created for my manifesto were all done by hand and show my commitment to tactility. The TraDigiZine chapter includes all the poster zines I created in the first five weeks of my project and show my willingness to experiment with print.
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Creativity contents Work Self promotion
p.110
The Dot dot dot manifesto
p.112
Making my manifesto
p.148
TraDigiZines
p.162
the poster design I did for my self promotion project
my manifesto and the posters for it
a look at the work I did for my manifesto
the poster zines I produced during the project
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The Dot dot dot manifesto
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My manifesto I am Craig Baldwin. I set out writing this manifesto with the aim of defining myself in a world full of designers crying out for attention; I am a designer with a keen interest in pixel perfect design and well laid typography. But that isn’t all there is to know about me; I can work expertly with a whole range of different media, from cardboard and fabric to model making and collage and everything in between, I blend a skilful use of computers with a creative, experimental and quirky tactile hands-on attitude. I don’t know of many designers who have moved from 3D computer generated typography to stop motion animation using handmade models in one year but that is just the sort of designer I am, versatile and unfazed by something new or unexpected. Computers are a natural extension of my abilities, I augment my work with them rather than hamper it, in reality I create, virtually I refine and perfect. I intuitively pick up new skills along the way, I have self taught myself most of what I know and pick new things up quickly, I’m a strongly independent person with imagination to spare but with the ability to work well with others and combine our creativity towards a great outcome. I approach my work with an ordered and coherent attitude; organisation is your best friend when your mind races through different techniques and concepts when you first receive a new brief to work on. In defining these rules I hope to encompass what and who I am, how I work and my beliefs of what makes a design great, they are not simply there to be read and followed, I am a constantly evolving person, hence the title, who cannot easily be contained by a set of specific rules instead these rules aim to outline a way of working, a way of thinking that I observe when working. I am a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, oft times better than master of one.
The ten rules 1. Design is art with a purpose. 2. Touch can never be replaced. 3. Design is in the detail. 4. Be colourful, but not for the sake of it. 5. Hard work pays its own dividends. 6. Steal from everywhere. 7. Seek criticism, be nice about it. 8. The best ideas come at night. 9. Always take down notes. 10. Don’t design for the money (but don’t do it for free). 11. Break the rules.
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Design is art with a purpose. Start off with a bit of controversy shall we? When it comes to the discussion about whether design is art, or is art design I always refer to Milton Glaser circa 1973. “In design, there is a given body of information that must be conveyed if the audience is to experience the information ... On the other hand, the essential function of art is to change or intensify one’s perception of reality.” Essentially to me that means design must convey a message no matter how the design achieves this purpose. A great example is Stefan Sagmeister’s giant inflatable monkeys, he categorises this as design as its purpose was to attract attention and it did just that. Meanwhile art has to aim for something that’s much harder to quantify, which always seems the way of art. How can you define whether or not a piece of art has failed to alter our perceptions? This seems less like a purpose to me. Design has a defined purpose. Even if it presents itself as artistic if it conveys its message successfully then that is good design.
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Touch can never be replaced. For me it’s as simple as that. They say that most of our perceiving of reality is done through our eyes, so it seems an awful shame to give them even more work by making everything digital and beyond our finger tips. Sure computers offer a world of convenience and connectivity but there is something about the tactile pleasure of holding a book that can never be replaced. Even if tablets do become mainstream, books will always have a place, as long as they use the fact that they’re a physical object. It always seemed odd to me that I put so much emphasis on the physical object when I did so much digital work during my time at University. But perhaps it was this overuse of digital that made me rebel and get in touch with being in touch. This manifesto point was the first I decided on and it’s this total commitment to this that drove me to undertake this final major project.
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Design is in the detail. Why do typographers spend hours pouring over the most minute detail? Why have I spent hours lining everything up in this book? Why do we have baselines, kerning, tracking etc.? It’s because a design comes into its own when the details are perfect. When a design is made by the typography and the elements in it, when this is your profession would you not want the work you show the world to be the best it can? Besides I’m a bit of an obsessive compulsive so it’s not exactly surprising to know that I spend a lot of time perfecting the details of my work.
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Be colourful, but not for the sake of it. I think this manifesto point is mainly in reaction to those Swiss style posters that were floating around at the time. You know the ones, where Helvetica is combined with little else except a bit of red, or sometimes nothing at all. Colour is great. Let’s not be boring, minimalism isn’t just having black typography on a white background, minimalism is the removal of anything surplus to the purpose of the design. And remember the purpose of design is to convey a message. I mention this as I like minimalist design, but minimalist design can be colourful. But let’s not go splashing colour about for no real reason, remembers your colour theory and colour wheels that art lessons taught you.
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Hard work pays its own dividends. I don’t think this one needs all that much explaining really. Like any career in this world, working hard and in excess of requirements pays it own dividends in the end. Whether by providing extra design ideas as well those required, having a back up plan or just working more than expected you will benefit in the long run. For me at University this was especially the case near hand in, as everyone else panicked about finishing all their work, my hard work earlier in the semester was rewarded with a more gentle winding down. I found it almost relaxing and it continues to be the same today. This also relates to leaving things until the last minute, sure you can play games or watch TV but being able to sleep the night before hand in is worth the extra work.
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Steal from everywhere. Now when I say this I don’t mean walk into your local shop and loot the place blindly. This has more to do with inspiration and the cultivation of ideas than physical goods you find in the shops. It was Jean-Luc Godard who said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.” The argument about originality seems like a dead end to me, no idea is original, everything comes round in cycles, like fashion repeating itself, and eventually we come back to the same idea. It’s how we go about that idea that is original, each of us has the ability to bring something new to an idea. Do not doubt in your ability to be yourself.
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Seek criticism, be nice about it. Inspired by Craig Oldam’s 10 Penneths’ “find faults, not friends”. I find that it’s easy to get people to say that my work looks nice, it’s just a matter of finding the right person. This ultimately does not help me, how can we progress if we are surrounded by yes men who say everything we do is ‘nice’. I had a tutor at University called Andrew Foster, everyone seemed to be scared of him but that’s because he said it like it was. He was one of the greatest tutors I ever had, he told me what was wrong about it but always with the backing of a well formed opinion. I had him for the first time at the beginning of the Manifesto brief, the brief that generated this work, and so in a way this point is dedicated to what he inspired in me. Find people to criticise you, but be nice about receiving it, after all design is very subjective, you’ve just got to learn whose opinion you trust the most.
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The best ideas come at night. Being sleep deprived is the worst state I can be in, my brain doesn’t work, I can’t focus and more importantly I can’t think of anything creative. I always found it annoying that when I was trying to settle down to sleep my brain would work in overdrive and think of all these ideas. But by writing them down (the next point by the way) they proved to be invaluable in the morning. I have come to learn that’s how I work as a creative person, I can’t force my creativity and I just have to rely on my ability to think of something as I lay my head my pillow and try to sleep. Admittedly it means I have terrible trouble when it comes to falling asleep, but that’s what Sleepeaze is for.
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Always take down notes. This one is related to the last point. Until you jot down notes of your thoughts and ideas they’re just noise in your head, and as useless as noise. Taking down notes extends beyond just writing down thoughts and ideas however, write everything down that seems pertinent, you never know when it might come in handy. Take notes in lectures, when reading, when watching TV, anything, it could come in handy at the strangest moment. Of course it’s extra handy if you make a note of the date and where you thought it because if it’s something a lecturer mentioned simply having their name allows you to research them and go in depth more. Naturally this means you should have a notebook and pen with you at all times, or your phone, whatever.
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Don’t design for the money. Aah, money, money, money. Everyone wants it, well almost everyone. This is no bad thing, I’d like quite a bit of money. But when it comes to design I don’t think you should be doing it just as a way of making money. You should enjoy design, I like designing, perhaps this is why I have no problem working hard at it. By the time you come to University if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing then why are you doing it? No one is making you do it, might as well get yourself into huge amounts of debt doing what you love, except gambling. This also works from an ethical point of view as well, to use Adrian Shaugnessy’s terminology, don’t go losing your soul to design. If you don’t like the company you’re designing for then don’t design for them. I’m sure this is easier to say when you’re financially secure but it’s an important message nonetheless.
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Break the rules. As you didn’t get the brief you might not fully understand this one, we were only meant to have ten manifesto points at the most so by outlining eleven I am breaking the rules and following the eleventh rule. Get it? Again by this I don’t mean go break the speed limit and run red lights, I mean the rules of design. See them as guidelines, they’re there to observe, but you don’t have to follow them. Apparently you shouldn’t put white type on a black background, there should be hierarchy in typography, no more than a couple of fonts on a page etc. As Laurence Fishburne said as Morpheus in the Matrix: “These rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” You’ve just got to find the best way of breaking them.
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Making my manifesto My manifesto was the most fun I’ve had in design, though the timing wasn’t perhaps the best, we were only given two weeks and I decided to do the most work I’ve ever attempted. Luckily it was the first project of the semester so I had plenty of time after the crit to finish it before hand in. Good job too because cutting out all those letters for the eleventh poster alone took ages. In this section I go behind the scenes and show how I came upon the final idea and the thinking behind it.
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This poster was one of the most simple that I did, I simply printed out ‘design is’ and ‘with a purpose’ and stuck it over the Art studio door sign. I gather this annoyed them somewhat but to my surprise it wasn’t just ripped down as soon as possible they actually adapted it like in this camera phone image (hence the poor quality) ‘is design art’ and in another one they were much more direct ‘design is art’. I thought this was quite fun but it did apparently annoy them quite a lot and people seemed to take it a bit seriously, which is exactly what annoys me about art, they take themselves far too seriously.
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For ‘touch can never be replaced’ it obviously had to be a physical representation of this, an attribute that applied to the rest of the series. In the beginning I played with tape and the shadow it cast on the floor but it didn’t really make sense as you can’t touch shadows. - 150 -
I set about creating big letters to represent touch inspired by the tactile work of Stefan Sagmeister in his book. However I didn’t want to make the entire sentence out of this so I played with various materials until I decided upon salt, I picked salt because everyone can imagine what it feels like, it’s very gritty and I really liked those art programmes that used it to draw something on a black floor as a kid. Plus it’s cheap. As for making type out of it, it’s a bit fiddly, getting the kerning and tracking right took quite a few attempts and wasted a lot of salt but I got there in the end.
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This angle shows how the cardboard letters were constructed, they’re pretty big, their front face is derived from a 30 by 30 centimetre square which gives the letters a very blocky appearance. They’re made out of corrugated cardboard as this had the most visibly tactile appearance which was important. Originally they were held together by tape and double sided tape but this wasn’t strong enough so I gave them all a bit of glue and that worked a treat.
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This one is all about the detail so besides being small these cut out letters were placed so that ‘detail’ wasn’t immediately apparent from the angle you can read ‘design is in the’. I feel this represents the idea that a design isn’t complete without the detail. - 153 -
One of my original ideas for this was to use a stencil and represent varying colours through it, to let it be a container for different colourful scenes behind it. This was the first stencil I cut out, using Rockwell Extra Bold as the typeface, I chose Rockwell because it had a lot of volume and it was a pretty straight font which made it easier to cut out. - 154 -
Perhaps the most straight forward poster idea, whilst working late with tape on another project I decided to create this poster using the tape to create the letter forms and a clock I nicked from the Lecture Theatre nearby. To be honest it’s not actually five to nine, as you can probably see from the outside light, but University closes at nine so this was an important time. - 155 -
Steal from everywhere, and I literally did, the letters are Futura heavy and cut out of posters that I took from various notice boards throughout the school. I hope they weren’t anything particularly important but I did return them in the end; the letters are pinned to the Design pathway notice board. - 156 -
These letters are cut out my perennial favourite typeface DIN and wrapped around the table at which we sit during our tutorials and crits, so the very table we sit at when we’re seeking criticism. This was also the table I had my first tutorial at when I came to the Winchester School of Art all those years ago.
- 157 -
The best ideas come at night, it’s rather fitting then that this poster idea came to me whilst trying to sleep, though that could be said for most of the other posters. The most annoying thing about getting up to write down an idea is the glare of my bedside light after my eyes have adapted to the darkness. So using this I wanted a poster with a certain glare to it so I used an OHP, the font Blackout and projected this in pitch black in the Lecture Theatre and took a photo of it.
- 158 -
I could probably think of a reason why the point devolves into a single word, but at the time there was no real reason of why I was doing it. This was done using the computer plugged into the projector in Lecture Theatre B, arguably the place I took down the most notes, followed closely by Leature Theatre A where guest lectures took place. - 159 -
You would not believe how fiddly it is to get Photoshop to work with an image of a bank note (it’s got automatic security against such things) but somehow in the end I convinced it to save this image. Can’t remember how though. The font Blackout was used for the cut out lettering, taken on my cutting mat at home. - 160 -
Although not specifically made for the last manifesto point it’s the only place it’s featured so it made sense to use this as the last poster, summing up all previous points. This took the most time, cutting out every single letter and sticking it to the wall with satisfying kerning and leading. One of my favourite of the whole series.
- 161 -
TraDigiZine At the beginning of my final major project I produced a weekly poster zine called the TraDigiZine, inspired by a talk I went to by Feverzine creator Alex Zamora. I used each zine to experiment with layout and to sum up what I had learnt in the week running up to it. In the end I made five, after which I began working on this book.
- 162 -
01 My first TraDigiZine set the ground work for the rest, I’d only researched for a week and was beginning to understand that print was becoming a more unique proposition and that using it for no real reason other than as a container was dead.
- 163 -
02 In the second week I visited the Brighton Zine Fest and found an enthusiasm I did not expect. I also started forming my opinion and why print is so appealing in the face of digitisation, I also used the poster to bring together useful quotes from the articles I had read.
- 164 -
03 By the time of the third TraDigiZine I had narrowed down my view of what makes print so appealing using the headings Physicality, Personality and Permanence and used the zine to explain my initial views on what each of these titles meant for print.
- 165 -
04 By now I was in the early stages of finalising what my final outcome would be, an important discovery that week was also the momentous change that tablets represent to the layout of more traditional publications that have long been confined by the canvas of the page.
- 166 -
05 This was the last TraDigiZine I produced, production of my book had begun and I used this zine to experiment with print methods for the Aesthetics & Emotions section that was later cut from the book. The use of line halftoning produces a desirable result.
- 167 -
- 168 -
End
dpaper - 169 -
The endpaper brings together any loose ends such as article references in the bibliography, my own predictions and thanks and acknowledgements. So you’ve reached the end of my final major project book, I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen, you might not have read every article and that’s fair enough but make sure you get a good feel of the book. I have written the author’s name next to every article but for the sake of completion I’ve written a bibliography so you can find where the article originally featured. Predictions is my attempt at predicting the future of publishing, or rather, how I hope it turns out. Finally, I’ve put together a page of thanks and acknowledgements, it also deals with the normal stuff you find at the end (or beginning) of a book and who printed this book and on what paper, I’m always annoyed when this information isn’t included.
- 170 -
Endpaper contents Articles Bibliography
p.172
Predictions
p.174
Thanks
p.176
find out where all the articles in this book came from
I predict what I hope comes to pass in publishing
thanking those that helped make this book possible
- 171 -
Stones, J., 2010. Less is more. Design Week: Publishing and design, p.17-18.
Richardson, A., 2010. The right fibre. Design Week, p.16.
p.30
p.24
p.26
Physicality
Johnson, M., 13 January 2010. If print is dead then this is a very long goodbye. Thought for the week. Available from: http://www. johnsonbanks.co.uk/
Lois, G., 12 March 2010. George Lois on the iPad. The New York Observer. Available from: http://www. observer.com/
p.22
p.32
p.28
Mod, C., 4 March 2010. Books in the age of the iPad. CraigMod. Available from: http://craigmod.com/ Hayman, L., 2009. Luke Hayman. Creative Review February 2009, p.25.
p.44
p.56 Personality
p.52
Vinh, K., 08 April 2010. Show me the money (for art direction). Subtraction blog. Available from: http://www.subtraction.com/
p.48
Richardson, A., 2010. Face the future. Design Week: Publishing and design, p.13.
p.50
p.54 - 172 -
Epstein, J., 11 March 2010. Publishing: The revolutionary future. The New York Review of Books. Available from: http://www. nybooks.com/
bibliography
p.69
p.72
Leslie, J., 2010. From pixels to printing press. Creative Review May 2010, p.62.
Permanence
p.72 Various, 2009. It’s Nice That Volume Two. Self-published, p.3.
p.82
p.20 Hayman, L., 27 January 2010. Five ways the iPad will change magazine design. New at Pentagram. Available from: http://pentagram.com/
p.94
Speirs, F., 29 January 2010. Future shock. Fraser Speirs. Available from: http://speirs.org/
p.88
Various, 2010. It’s Nice That Volume Three. Self-published, p.23.
p.90
Garrett, M., 1991. The book is dead. Graphics World March 1991.
Futuregazing
p.92
p.104 Mossberg, W., 31 March 2010. Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close. All Things Digital. Available from: http://ptech.allthingsd.com/
Carter, G., 28 March 2010. Opinion: Print is dying...really? Media Week. Available from: http://www. mediaweek.com/
p.102
p.100
p.96 - 173 -
Shaughnessy, A., 2010. Screen test. Design Week: Publishing and design, p.14-15.
p.98
Predictions Rise of the tablets
Death of newspapers
As more and more people get access to the Internet on their phones they’re going to find the mobile web a brilliant way of making themselves more productive during their commutes, if they want to that is. If tablets do become mainstream, which ultimately I hope they do, then people will find a new world of convenience by carrying around all their magazines, documents, news and novels with them, always ready at their finger tips. If Apple’s iPad 3G is a sign of things to come then these tablets will also be connected on the move, mobile phone companies will increasingly find themselves as data providers so they better sort out their 3G and soon-to-be 4G networks.
Personally I’m not a fan of newspapers, the medium has nothing wrong with it but in an age of free access to news online I can’t see the point of them really, they’re not the most convenient things to carry around either when you can access the news on your phones; the packed tube is no place for a big paper. This also comes down to the ‘death of reading’, people may still be willing to read novels but when it comes to news the shorter the better it seems, newspapers’ long form journalism seems best kept for the weekend. There are other uses for newsprint but startups like the Newspaper club are not going to be the saviour of newspapers but it does however show that there is still a market for the use of newsprint, newspapers just needs to explore new areas outside of their traditional market.
And if at the end of the day people want to relax then perhaps a nice printed publication will make a welcome change while they’re reading before going to bed when their lack of portability isn’t much of an issue.
- 176 174 -
To end this book I’ve decided to take everything I’ve learnt in the articles I have read and to extrapolate the line. This probably isn’t an accurate prediction, rather it is how I hope things turn out in the future using my own opinion.
RIP Airport novels
Magazines
With people reading everything on their tablets I don’t see a place for ‘airport novels’, the sort of ink and paper brick that takes no interest in its physicality. Sure these sort of books can be thrown away and you don’t need to worry if you spill your coffee on it but people have managed to cope with increasingly sophisticated belongings so I don’t see any problem really, just need to make sure you extend your warranty. As you might realise I’m not a fan of such novels; they’re awkward to hold, don’t stay open and aren’t really built to last.
I love magazines, they are experimental in their layouts (unlike newspapers) and make greater use of their physicality (compared to most books), these attributes combined make magazines an exciting place to be. However their transition to tablets might not be very smooth if they keep charging more for their digital counterparts, besides they really need to be thinking outside the box, literally, the page metaphor can be done away with. As Malcolm Garrett said, new technologies shouldn’t be asked to do what has been done before, but to reach into the unknown, and that’s exactly what magazines need to do.
It’s a good job people won’t need these novels as well as the companies that publish them and take large risks on best sellers will have probably gone bust by now, we’re already seeing music labels struggle so I don’t see book publishers being too far behind them, it’s just not a business strategy that’s going to work in the new world.
Of course I don’t see magazines as printed publications ever disappearing, they’re just too nice to hold, but I don’t necessarily want to be carrying around a load with me all day, so a perfect digital counterpart would let them be with me all day every day on my tablet.
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First published in the UK in 2010 by Craig Baldwin. Š Craig Baldwin 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, transmitted in any form without permission from the author. Disclaimer: All attempts have been made to ensure facts, sources and credits are correct at time of going to print. Any inaccuracies or omissions will be corrected in future editions, if there ever is one. Design: Craig Baldwin http://craigbaldwin.com/ Printed in England by Colourworld Printed on Naturalis Smooth Recycled from GF Smith Main body copy set in DIN, also used: Bebas, Blackout, Chopin Script, Farnham Text, Gill Sans, Helvetica, League Gothic, Myrid Pro, Orator, Superpoint Rounded and Univers. This does not include the quotation marks. Thanks and acknowledgements: Danny Aldred, Andrew Foster, Mia Frostner, Jeremy Leslie, Lost & Taken, Tim Metcalf, P&G Wells, Holly Wales, my fellow students at the Winchester School of Art, all credited authors and my Mum for keeping me fed while at University.