Things to Make and POD
The lovely Miss Gemma Leigh recently pointed us in the direction of some ace (and totally official) prints you can now buy, that are taken from the Ladybird books archive [ladybirdprints.com]. Cabinet [picturecabinet.com] is the name of the company behind the venture. They reproduce the archival images on a ‘print-on-demand’ basis through memoryprints [memoryprints.com] and also offer image archival services. They certainly seem to be doing something right, having chalked up an impressive list of clients in a short space of time. The National Theatre [ntposters.org.uk] (the Eqqus poster from the 1970s is pretty cool), the V&A [vandaprints.com] and The Royal Photographic Society are just some of the organisations that very signed up.
in Illustration / Modern Relics / POD / Posters / Shopping
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Boicotube Gold
YouTube channel design is bit shonky, isn’t it. I only say this cause I’ve just set up the boicotube [youtube.com/boicotube] channel for all the moving picture flotsam and jetsam that comes floating through this here blog (as well as stuff I’m too lazy to post about but have added to the various boicotube playlists anyhow). It’s a shame it’s not as good looking and easy to navigate as Vimeo [vimeo.com], which is steadily gaining popularity with designers and image makers alike. YouTube only allows 3 playlists to be displayed on yer homepage at a time for some bonkers reason but please check them all out. It’s all gold (particularly the Crunchie ad featuring Naomi Watts). Here’s a music video that used to give me nightmares when I was a kid. Thanks Godley & Creme [wikipedia].
Modern People Live Through Modern Ideals
Polite Notice: We’ve just added some ace tshirts designs to boicoshop [shop.boico.net/apparel] as modelled by our luverly Zazzle model above (we’ll take some better pics soon, I promise) well as a couple of fabric designs that you can purchase now through the Bon Bon Kakku website, here [shop.boico.net/BBK001] and here [shop.boico.net/BBK002]. Let us know what you think or post slogan suggestions here and we may do another batch in a different style if you get enough good ones. Email Michael if you’re shy. boicoshop out.
Grace is Gonna Get You
Grace Jones is releasing her first album, in like… forever, and launching it with this eerie, eye-bending video by Nick Hooker [nickhooker.com]. Nice to see an artist who hasn’t decided to go all mellow on us over the years. The album should be out around October.
All City, All the Time
Movie posters might be shite these days… (I mean, have a look at your local cinema… would you honesty put that up on your wall) but it’s nice to see movie poster designers All City Media [allcitymedia.com] are not letting it get them down and putting those high quality yet rejected designs online so we can start to imagine a world free from unimaginative marketing directors and associated killjoys. Found via Danny Grey’s excellent blog [binkythedoormat.com] where he’s been getting stuck into the problems with modern movie poster design lately. I blame Adobe for encouraging people to design in Photoshop. It’s for messing about with photos not designing stuff, you dolts. The clues in the name (er… no, I don’t know why it’s a shop either).
100 Things: #002
Eames House of Cards
Much imitated but never bettered, the Eames House of Cards is our second ‘thing’. It’s a thing of things really, depicting what Charles Eames famously described as ‘good stuff’. If you ever stumble across the 1970 revision entitled ‘A Computer House of Cards’ grab it, they’re like gold dust (just make sure you post a few pics of ‘em somewhere so all of us can have a geez).
What’s Up #32: CatalogTree
CatalogTree [catalogtree.net] are graphic designers forging a specialisation in information graphics, and in doing so, blurring the line between traditional graphic design and illustration. It’s Graphic Illustration… er, no it’s Information Design… whatever, it sure is cool to look at… and teaches you about stuff at the same time! Go CatalogTree! For a closer look, there’s some pretty sizeable graphics over at Good magazine [goodmagazine.com] and more stuff over at Seed magazine [revminds.seedmagazine.com] (that’s the American, worthy, four-letter magazine title market sewn up then).
in Graphic Design / Ideas / Illustration / What's Up
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Need to Know Basis #2
Jenny Holzer [wikipedia] is twittering [twitter.com/jennyholzer]… or is it she? I’m not so sure. You decide ¶ Jeremy Leslie of magalophile bible, MagCulture [magculture.com/blog] has compiled a brief list of things what maketh a magazine for It’s Nice That [itsnicethat.com]… (Oh and I had a go the week before last too… thanks It’s Nice That!) ¶ Don’t know a lot about it but Your Name Here looks purdy interesting [vids.myspace.com]. Possibly a little heavy-handed on the Kubrick references, but is that a bad thing? ¶ Oldie but a goodie. Johnny Hardstaff’s showreel is pretty awesome. I want to see these on the big screen! This will have to do for now [rsafilms.com] ¶ Geoff McFetridge has finally added some content to his website. It’s been an age so without further ado [championdontstop.com]. Which gives me another reason to post some more of his awesome work. Below is the cover from the Warp Records release, ‘Montage’ [bleep.com]. Click on the image to see it larger. Don’t forget to scope out his wallpaper designs for Pottok [pottokprints.com] too.
It’s Educational
Bored of flicking through teens miming to crap tunes on YouTube? Swing by the Internet Archive [archive.org/movies] and take a trip back in time. Here they’ve dug up and stock piled loads of vids and clips from all over the place including some ace educational films from the 60s such as Our Mr Sun [archive.org]. There’s also a heap of clips from films produced by ‘industrial’ film company, Calvin [wikipedia] including out takes and non-commercial work such as their self-parody shown above entitled ‘Your Name Here’. ‘#Bfl O {ggGX = STwWcfl x 2s4′ is the name they gave to a film that takes a some lovingly languished-over shots of moving picture making equipment from the 60s and throws a bunch of hyperactive chimps into the equation [archive.org]. It’s odd.
The POD Report
Weather and blogging. It’s funny how page views from different countries go up and down depending on whether it’s summer or winter. It happens with blog posts too and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but haven’t got round to it until now (sorry).
Firstly, it you are interested in POD (Print-on-Demand) [wikipedia] productions at all – and, in terms of minimising the effect print production has on our environment, it’s something we should all be interested in – you should head over to Andrew Losowsky’s Magtastic Blogsplosion [losowsky.com/magtastic]. Andrew welcomes another POD provider into the fold, MagCloud [magcloud.com].
MagCloud is worth noting because, as Andrew points out, a) they talk exclusively about magazines and b) Hewlett Packard are behind this one, so there’s the hint that printer manufacturers are taking POD seriously indeed. What I found particularly interesting is that Andrew highlights the fact that POD services are too often pitched at hobbyists. While it seems perfectly fine to be producing magazines about your dog or your cousin’s wedding for a select group of friends and kinfolk (who you would probably end up buying copies for on their behalf anyway), it also dilutes the real benefits of POD production could provide to larger commercial entities such as newsstand titles or those simply wishing to reach a boarder international audience.
Essentially, someone needs to work out a way, to use one of those nifty internet terminologies, to further ‘monetise’ POD publications. To make them more commercially viable (ie cheaper and easier to distribute). MagCloud is a tiny glimmer of hope that this might be possible, but without mixing up the amateurs and the professionals it’s not far enough removed from yer lulus [lulu.com] and yer bobbooks [bobbooks.co.uk] to make any real progress. (As a sidenote, why do POD providers never have a ‘design’ category in their topic lists and should we be worried about it’s exclusion (when Art & Photography gets a look-in almost everytime)? I’m guessing the answer has to be ‘yes’.)
I recently received an invitation to contribute to a magazine on Issuu [issuu.com], a site Andrew mentions in the same article. Although, I personally find the navigation a little convoluted, especially when trying to decide wether to ‘bookmark’ or ‘follow’ a particular edition or user, Issuu should be of interest to POD providers because it unwittingly shows them a new format for distribution that is lively and exciting and manages to swerve past many of the pitfalls of ‘vanity publishing’ [wikipedia] (’Vanity publishing’ refers to publications produced at the expense of the author but has, in recent times, also been used to refer to POD authors, although with POD, these authors only incur costs of they purchase the books themselves).
Which brings me neatly round to a brief update on Press Publish’s (the boicozine mothership) very own publishing projects and where they’re at [presspublish.info].
mm (millimetre) We’ve been planning our next POD publication for some time now. mm (millimetre) magazine happily provoked quite a bit of interest when we originally announced the project. Unfortunately, it’s still on hold until your humble author (ie Me) finds the time and the appropriate POD producer to hook up with to the help produce the publication on a regular basis. The original thought was to use a number of POD producers to expand the magazines coverage, although they would each have their own formats so the magazine would need to be reformatted each time or produced in a way them was applicable to each one. See, tricky, huh. So that may still happen although we’re personally holding out to see if MagCloud is any good. More news as it comes to hand.
Estates of London Hopefully the next project to roll off the ‘presses’ (can you say that with POD?) will be the Estates of London project which we’re hoping to produce via Blurb [blurb.com] (who are currently holding a POD photographic book competition worth checking out).
Estates of London will be a visual survey of post-war housing estate architecture in London. Something we feel has been neglected for years and yet have had a massive impact on the fabric of modern Britain. There will be more about this project here and over on our Flickr site in the coming weeks. If you are interested in helping out with this project we’d love to hear from you. Email [michael at presspublish.info].
Anomalies The main problem/joy with Press Publish is that we have sooo many ideas that it’s tricky to keep them all moving at once. Along with boicozine, mm and Estates, there is also the boicoshop which is coming together nicely (more product to come!) and a follow up to Zine #1 [shop.boico.net], documenting more posts from the boicozine blog.
It’s for this reason too that Press Publish is looking for a business partner to help get things moving. It’s grass roots stuff so previous experience isn’t necessarily required but if you do have experience in the publishing field we’d love to hear from you. Again email Email [michael at presspublish.info] for further information.
