Quiet please

Those of you who have been following my antics for a while will know that when things go quiet around here it normally means I'm up to something. Well, I'm up to something. Again.

I've got a new pair now. In fact I've finally got a pair that I'm absolutely in love with. You see, I have spec wearing heros, and I've finally found a pair that pays homage to these fine gentleman. Here they are:

The one and only Eric Morecombe (he's the one with the glasses and not the short chubby one with hairy legs on the right). Never has a man done more for the spectacle wearing gentleman. A hero and sorely missed.

This picture belongs to the person that took it.

Some of you will know that I'm a huge Philip Larkin fan and he always looked gorgeous in his horn rimmed spectacles.

picture belongs to Mr. D. Bailey

This picture of Michael Caine by David Baily is just the best picture of a gentleman wearing spectacles ever taken. I have forgiven Michael for many a terrible film because of it (even the film with the killer bees or wasps or whatever they were).

Many thanks to Oliver Goldsmith. Many, many thanks for a pair of proper spectacles.

I’ve been working on a similar idea as niiu, slightly different but never the less similar and it is both depressing and exciting at the same time to see that someone else is closer to getting it finished than I am. If I’ve understood niiu correctly, the service will allow you to aggregate your own printed newspaper from your favourite newspaper feeds and (this is the brilliant bit – and I sincerely hope they pull it off) they deliver it to you, every morning at 6.00 O’clock. They just pop it in your letter box.

This is for me the central theme around “the future of digital being print” and if you sit down and spend a couple of minutes thinking about it I’m sure you’ll understand why.

Many thanks for the Email Niko.

There is one thing I’d like you to know; I’m way more disappointed in myself than you could ever be in me.

You read printweek right? Right, of course you do. If you’re one of the advertising and planning lot then I know that you regularly read printweek in order to gage the impact your “creative thinking” is having on the market as a whole and to generally keep your eye on things.

Of course you do.

This is a really interesting article about the state of the magazine market, how the recession has affected their business and interestingly how printers are helping them to sort it out. It’s called “Magazines count the cost of survival”.

“With advertising down and sales on the wane, the situation looks bleak, but publishers and printers are collaborating to ensure that their magazines survive. And some sectors aren't as adversely affected as you might think […]”

There’s lots of interesting stuff in there that applies to all kinds of businesses, but I especially like the role that the printers are playing in this. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, if you are buying print, designing for print or publishing on paper then you must have a very close relationship with the people that are going to produce it for you because they really can help. It's a little business idea that could help in all lines of business; dropping the arrogance and asking for help and working with people that are willing to help you in the first place.

I am soon to be old, very old; older than I have ever been before. Next week I shall be turning 38, which is close enough to 40 to make the youngsters snigger, but still far enough away from 40 to annoy, well, everybody over 40.

I shall be spending my birthday in London (it’s a present from Eva – and she’ll be there too), in fact I will be in London from the 19th until the 21st of May. So, if you fancy meeting up let me know.

That’s it really.

I was digging through some of my old stuff this week, just to remind myself that I used to get my fingers dirty, when I found the prints you can see above and below. In fact I found a lot of nice old things that I used to do and will be posting about them over the course of the coming week too (mail art, xeroxgraphy etc.) but I really like these old prints. They're from my days as a student and I think I did them sometime around the summer of 1992 but I'm not sure. I did them on an old Gestetner duplicator that I had found in a skip outside a catholic church. Now, these machines were basically the for runner to photocopiers, but instead of using xerography you had wax stencil sheets that you would type into and then print off inky bits of paper. If you're old enough you can probably remember the inky smell of the paper. These little mimeograph machines where proper little printing presses, and a hell of a lot of fun to use as this video shows:

I had managed to get my hands on a bunch of wax stencil sheets and ink and simply started playing with them. I quickly realised that instead of just typing stuff you could actually cut images into the sheets and with a lot of trial and error produce some pretty interesting stuff, especially when things go wrong (as you can see below).

The whole process was incredibly time consuming, prone to error and injury (I have a number of scares on my finger tips from careless stencil cutting) and compared to what is technically possible today horribly old fashioned but, and this is the important bit, it was a huge amount of fun to do. I was addicted to making these things, so much so that I moved the press into my bedroom.

When I finished university and moved to Germany the Gestetner landed back into a skip (I came here with one suitcase - the bloody thing wouldn't fit in) which is something that I deeply regret. I'd like to have it back because there is something that I would like to do with it. So if you know of someone who has one and wants it to go to a good home could you let me know please?

That's it for now, a little blast from the past.

I've outlined the categories so I thought it might be a good idea to give you an example of where I think all of this is going. First up is "The Incidental", which I think is really exciting. I particulary like this:

One thing that’s very interesting to me is using this rapidly-produced thing then becomes a ’social object’: creating conversations, collecting scribbles, instigating adventures - which then get collected and redistributed. A feedback loop made out of paper, in a place.

I think it's quite brilliant and I found it over here.

1. Ideas.
More than anything I plan to have a little think about ideas. I may even come up with a few of my own and I’ll be packing them all into the ideas category. Obviously, I have some ideas already and I’ll be writing about them here soon. These ideas are business ideas – ideas intended to make money. All of my current ideas revolve around the convergence of digital and print and are based on my current gut feeling that the future of digital is print. Confused - read this for starters (it's very, very good).

2. Advice
Over the course of the last sixteen years I’ve been involved in digital printing, worked for Williams Lea and HH Associates and I’m currently (among other things) the production controller for a commercial printer with a 30 Million Euro turnover. I like to think that I know a little bit about what it takes to get something on a piece of paper and I’ll be giving some advice around getting stuff done. There will be advice for buyers, printers, planners, agencies, designers, procurement and students.

3. Sustainability.
I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this subject but it’s an area that needs to be covered. There’s good and there’s bad in everything isn’t there?

4. Tools.
As I hope you shall see in the coming weeks I’ll be taking on this subject in much the same manner as the other stuff I’ve written over the last couple of years. The tools section won’t be about “printing tools” or any such thing but will be about the tools of the internet and how they can be used in building and creating exciting printed things.

That’s it really. The only real rule that I’m laying down for myself is that it has to be interesting and must be full of ideas. Remember, the premise – the gut feeling – is that the future of digital is print and that’s what this will all be about so I’m hoping that even if you don’t think that none of this is of interest to you, you’ll stick with it. You may even learn something.

A couple of months ago I got a call from somebody with an idea which simply blew me away. It’s a great idea. A proper idea, an idea that I think could go far, and if the person/people in question don’t bugger it up could pretty much change the way we think about a few things.

That conversation got me thinking. It got me excited about my old friend print. Some of you may have noticed the “the future of digital is print” tweet a couple of months ago (or was it weeks – I simply can’t remember). The future of digital is print has been banging around the back of my mind ever since and won’t let me go which normally means that it something that I what to think and write about. Which is what I intend to do.

So, I’ve come full circle. This blog will change again because I have changed again. So, for the time being, (and for the foreseeable future) “and as if by magic” will be about the future of digital being print.

I hope you will find it interesting.