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I thought it was worth writing an additional post with a bit more detail about the truffle newspaper we’ve made this year. When I say ‘we’ve made’, it’s important to note this includes Ian who designed it so beautifully, and The Newspaper Club who actually got the thing printed. (I thoroughly recommend anyone who wants to make a paper about, well, anything really, to use them.) The papers arrived this week and they look and feel great.

The paper will be available in store (to take home) for anyone wanting to learn more about truffles. Some of the pages are shown below. It’s been fun making it and we’ve had to do a lot of digging around ourselves (not sure if that’s a truffle pun, but if it is, it’s not intended) and have learnt a lot along the way.

There’s an interview with Simon Harvey – an ex military dog trainer who now trains truffle dogs in Tasmania. And also an interview with Peter Marshall from Terra Preta truffiere in NSW. Some of you may recall Peter from when we went truffle hunting with him last year. His approach to truffles is quite unique and he’s a fascinating man to spend time with, which hopefully comes across in the article.

There’s also hints and tips on looking after truffles, a few recipes (thanks to Tony, Kate and Andrew), some facts and figures about the industry, plus some other nonsense in there as well.

A page for the fact fans

I’m pretty sure it was P Diddy who once said ‘Truffles are the bomb’

They’re not that easy to find…

The magical world underneath the trees

You can see the newspaper in the Newsagent

The other day Art unveiled these wonderful new stickers. Loving designed and printed over the last six months they feature round, square and rectangular shapes. The rest of the team seemed to like them. It was hard to tell.

I know what you’re thinking, how can I get my hands on a sheet of these amazing stickers? Simple! We’re going to be giving away one sheet with every order you make, while stocks last. So get ordering, sticker lovers.

Tonight in Minneapolis the world renowned Walker Art Center will open Graphic Design: Now in Production a joint exhibition with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. Curated by design luminaries Andrew Blauvart and Ellen Lupton with help of specialists like Jeremy Leslie and Armin Vit.

Jeremy describes the exhibition well, ”The exhibition is a large-scale (and rare) overview of the last ten years of graphic design. As the title suggests, it focuses on the way graphic designers have broadened their practice beyond client work to include self-production and self-publishing. ”

We’re privileged to be featured in the exhibition with other brilliant things such as Chris Doyle’s identity guidelines, Christophe Szpajdel The Dark Lord of Logos (who coincidently designed the RIG logo) some Daniel Eatock goodness and Peter Buchanon-Smith’s Best Made Felling Axes among many others.

The exhibition is at the Walker Arts Centre until 22 January and then will be at the Cooper-Hewitt 2 June until 3 September.

I’m off to ask the CEO for a plane ticket.

We get asked a lot if we have any Newspaper Club tshirts. And we don’t, but maybe we should.

So if we built these tshirts, would you be interested in owning one? There are more over here. Let us know via Twitter or Flickr or one of those cool planes with a banner hanging off the tail.

There’s a brilliant exhibition in the foyer-ery bit of the Guardian at the moment. It’s called Not to be sold separately: The Observer Colour Magazine 1964-1995 and features covers and spreads from that period.

There are some great covers.

This one is particularly cute.

And this is an interesting article about women working in The City.

“Hard work is no good, I’ve learnt, without luck too. I gave them assurances of no future children, and of being able to arrange my domestic life so that it wouldn’t interfere with work.”

“Inside the office of the future”.

So good.

It’s free, open to the public and a five minute walk from Kings Cross. More details here.

We had a big meeting the other day. A proper meeting with an agenda with eight items on it.

We have these approximately twice a year to check on how we’re doing as a business, check all the team are happy and suggest ideas for the future.

The big news is that there’s no new news at the moment. There is some very exciting stuff we’re working on, stuff we’ve been wanting to do from day one, but it would be foolish to announce that until it’s all finished. But rest assured that there are good, exciting developments planned for the rest of the year.

Personally these meetings always remind me how good everyone else in the team is. Hiring Anne Ward has been the best decision we’ve made. Our customers are very happy. Here are some recent tweets from actual customers.

And as we tweeted last week. “we have more customers than we did”.

That’s not because of our multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, that’s not because of my award winning design, that’s because Newspaper Club is a well built product with a delightful customer experience all wrapped inside a well run business. The delightful customer experience is all down to Anne. She’s our delighter. She’s also the closet person to the actual business and therefore is able to offer fantastic insight into what further developments customers would like to see. Her ideas are invaluable.

The well built product bit is down to Tom (obviously). Newspaper Club is a towering technical achievement as recognised in the Special Technical Achievement Award from the BIMA’s last year. But more than that Tom is a powerhouse development team of just one. Sometimes we forget how good he is when we’re saying, how about we just incorporate that, or we just do this and he just nods and says, yep, yep. I’ll stop now, I’m probably embarrassing him.

The well run business bit is down to Gary, our CEO. Unlike most Start-Ups™ we have hired someone far better and far more experienced than us to run the business. This has been another key decision. I’ve personally seen lots of start ups fail because the owners are too close to the business. We’re trying to be as far away as is healthy.

Lastly, if you think this blog post is a bit silly, you are mistaken. If you’ve ever shipped you’ll know this stuff is a big deal.

If you’ve arrived here via Twitter you’ll have noticed that I cleverly linked to the same article with 3 different headlines. That’s because this beautiful paper by Begg in Scotland covers three very important points.

Firstly, although it was made before my legendary design advice post, it’s the perfect example of a well designed paper. They’ve used big, bold, contrasty pictures, simple black text and avoided the pitfalls we discussed. ARTHR and any desktop publishing software like InDesign or Pages are only platform programmes. Their output is only as good as the input they’re given. There’s no magic ‘make this look loads better’ filter. If the content you are working with is great to start with it will look great in the finished product. It pays to think a bit about images and text before you start making your paper.

Secondly, they’ve managed to make making a newspaper look easy. Sometimes people worry about what to put in a paper. How to fill those pages? If that’s bothering you – worry not! With us you can make a paper as small as 4 pages. Or if you’d like more pages you can follow Begg’s example and use a nice simple cover (one page down) a great big photo in the middle (three pages down) and some contact details on the back (four pages down) leaving the rest for your articles or other written content. Simple.

Thirdly, isn’t it blooming gorgeous?

We often get asked for advice on designing a newspaper and what sort of quality you can expect when printing with us. We cover this in our help section but it is worth repeating every now and then.

If you have any questions not covered here, or if the stuff below sounds like gibberish, or you just get stuck you can email us support@newspaperclub.co.uk or you could come along to our School of Everything class on Thursday 10 March.

To get the best possible looking printed product you should always remember that you are designing artwork for a newspaper, not a magazine, glossy brochure or website.

Newspaper presses are industrial-scale machines designed to operate at very high speeds to allow publishers to produce and distribute large numbers of copies quickly and economically. They are not designed for perfect high-fidelity reproduction or to be able to match Pantones or exact colour mixes. You can achieve very good quality results with newspaper printing but only if you start the artwork design process with the print process in mind.

Below are some hints and tips which should help you to produce excellent results.

Text
Text works best if it’s black; colour can be used but it works best if only headings of font size 14 or above are in colour.

White text on coloured backgrounds should be used sparingly and only at font size 14 or above.

Small type (under 12pt, or 14pt if the font is a serif) should always be made up from only one of the inks. ie 100% cyan and not 50% cyan and 50% magenta to avoid registration issues.

Coloured text on coloured backgrounds should be avoided all together.

Blacks
Blacks should always be 100%K only, whether for text or solids; do not use ‘rich black’.

Colour
If you have large solid blocks of colour bear in mind the ink may rub off on facing pages (and your hands).

If you repeat a standard or corporate colour repeated on every page there will often be noticeable variation, as exact colour matching can’t be guaranteed.

Image quality
Images should be a minimum resolution of 150dpi.

Photographs work best when they have a clear, strong subject and a lighter background; dark or ‘moody’ pictures will reproduce less well. (We mean moody like a Morrissey album cover not moody as in stolen.)

Blank spaces
If you have a blank page or space opposite heavy pictures or text it is possible that there will be a noticeable ‘ghosting’ impression on the blank area. It is also possible that you will notice ‘show through’ from the other side of the paper.

Of course if you use ARTHR almost all of these issues can be avoided. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to produce a handsome looking newspaper. I hope these tips help.

Further Reading
Designing a black and white newspaper
Designing a colour newspaper
Our general help section

They weren’t printed by us. I think they are just on a daily broadsheet. I think they are promoting an exhibition at the end of last year. They appear to be by Bortusk Leer. Very little seems to be known about Bortusk.

You can buy prints some here and there’s a Flickr group set up by fans, but there’s very little information.

Anyway, I see them a lot around Shoreditch where Newspaper Club has an office. I like them. And they remind me of the many unusual things you can do with newsprint. We’ve only been going a year but already we’ve printed newspapers for stage props, for short films, for art exhibits, for final shows, for portfolios, for annual reports, for birthday presents, for weddings and for wrapping paper. We haven’t printed anything for Bortusk, but maybe we will one day.

This lovely project from Flourish Creative illustrates that point beautifully.

They say, “Every year we like to send out a Christmas card with a twist, and 2010 was no different. We went for a newspaper-style approach, with the outside pages covered in a festive design so our friends and colleagues wouldn’t be caught short if the wrapping paper ran out.”

A few more pics here.

Newspapers – we’re as creative as you are.