The Glasgow team got very excited this morning to see these arrive in the post.
If you order a single copy via standard post, this is what will now arrive at your door – and (subject to stocks) replete with stickers!
How to make Posters
Wednesday, February 20th 2013
Something we’re often asked about is printing images that run all the way across the sheets of a newspaper, like a series of posters. Setting up a file to print as full spread posters is simple once you know how. But it is so, so hard to explain with words!
I am going to show you how to make a dummy, or mock-up of your newspaper, and then we need never confuse each other ever again.
1. Start by taking some blank sheets of paper. They can be any size or shape, it doesn’t matter too much. You want to have as many sheets of paper as you want to make posters – I’m going to make 3 double sided posters, so I have 3 sheets of paper here.
2. Sketch out a rough version of how each poster is going to look on the sheets.
3. Make sure you also sketch out how the back of each poster will look, if they have any artwork or text on them.
4. Now you should have a pile of sheets that are little rough versions of the pile of posters you want to order from Newspaper Club.
5. Gather the sheets together in the order and direction you want them to be printed in.
6. Now fold the whole pile in half.
7. Ta-da! This is your dummy newspaper.
8. Check through to make sure you’re happy with the order of the sheets – if not, you can rearrange them at this point until you’re happy with the way it looks.
9. Now, take a pen and number the bottom corner of every page. The numbers are the page numbers for your file. So page 1 in your dummy should look like page 1 in your file, page 2 should look like page 2, and so on.
10. Now look through your paper – you can see which page each part of each poster should be in your file.
11. Now you can pull the paper apart and see which page each half of each side belongs on.
So now you know how incredibly easy it is to work out how to make some posters, hopefully we can put an end to the sleepless nights and confused exchanges. However, if you are still unsure, please just drop us an email at support@newspaperclub.com. I can’t promise we can make this any clearer, but we do always get there somehow in the end. : )
Happy New Year
Wednesday, January 9th 2013
We’re all back and ready to print after a nice big Christmas break.
And for the new year, we’ve designed and printed some lovely calendars.These are a big thankyou to anyone who’s printed with us over the past 12 months, and a hello to anyone who plans to print with us over the coming 12 months.
The calendar has some of our favourite papers in it from the last year, and a handy guide to colours and text size for your reference. So you can see how things look in print.
We have a limited number sitting in a pile in the office, if you’d like one, just drop us an email at support@newspaperclub.com with your address and we’ll pop one in the post to you!
Some pictures from the Glasgow office
Thursday, November 29th 2012
Ben here. A few of us from the London office popped up to Glasgow yesterday for a few meetings and a nice dinner. Other people will blog about all the exciting developments discussed in the aforementioned meetings but I wanted to share some pictures from the Glasgow office.
It’s a lovely space, big and airy and filled with light. It’s in a building owned by a group called Wasps who provide studio space for small companies and artists. There’s a really nice atmosphere and even a fabulous cafe downstairs. It feels like a natural space for us to be in.
Anne, Emily, Rosie and Silje have made the space their own with some nice touches and variations on the CMYK theme.
And there’s loads of brilliant newspapers lying around.
(It’s worth noting that yesterday we agreed a new BLOGGING IS NOW MANDATORY strategy and so far London is winning 2 – 0.)
Step Three: Profit
Tuesday, July 17th 2012
We had a board meeting last week. You can see half of it above via the magic of timelapse. (The half of the table you mostly see consists of Tom and Gary. The half you briefly glimpse is Anne & Ben. You never see me.)
Lots of things were decided. Much exciting news was newsed. But the best bit was this, as detailed in Gary’s CEO memo:
“In our second full year of trading we’re very proud to say that we’re profitable. We’re not talking about a lot of money – just single figures as a percentage of our sales. However, it is enough to help ensure we can keep providing the levels of service that our customers seem to really appreciate. It’s also just enough to allow us to invest in developing our service.
We now employ full-time in Glasgow and London a small team of very clever people who are working on new Newspaper Club products. They’re developing ways to convert disparate pieces of useful and interesting digital information into printed formats that make it all a real pleasure to read.
It’s an exciting time. We really believe that this pretty hoary old medium has a lot of life yet in it. In fact, the potential of newsprint is enormous – but only when it’s usefully integrated with the web. Hold the front page!”
Exciting isn’t it?
There are some changes afoot – me, Gary and Anne are getting new titles, we’ve got plans for new products and we need to talk about investment – Anne’s going to add some more detail on all that later in the week. (Unless you’ve got a few hundred grand going spare, in which case gives us a shout). In the meantime; we’re in our second year of trading, we’re employing great people, we’ve got brilliant customers and we’re making an actual profit. Hurrah.
Week 160
Friday, June 29th 2012
The date of the first blog post (well, not the very first) tells me this is Week 160 of Newspaper Club, or day 1,120.
We’ve not been as talkative as we used to be about running the business. That’s mostly because there’s a lot more business than there used to be – both customers, and all the stuff to support that: profit and loss reports, management accounts, Skype calls, meetings, planning.
But that’s no excuse. We’re into the really difficult stage of running a business. We’re still small, but there’s real money, real jobs and real pressures. But, this is also where the meaty stuff is. We’ve learnt a lot, and we’re learning even more. Those thing seem worth sharing, and if not for you, then for our own sake. We’re going to try harder.
So, what’s going on?
For a start, we’ve had two brilliant new people join us. Rosemary is up in Glasgow working full-time with Anne, Emily and Silje to manage all operations, customer service, and well… everything. This is brilliant, because a) Rosemary is brilliant, and b) Anne can go on holiday now.
And Mike is down in London, working with me, to develop the site and future products and services. This is brilliant, because a) Mike is brilliant, and b) I can go on holiday now. He’s sat to the right of me, looking very serious, staring at the Backbone.js documentation.
We’ve been joined part-time over the summer by Jase, who is helping us with some design work. He’s sat opposite me, doing some typing wearing a great pair of red headphones.
Behind me is a whiteboard. It says: “ARTHR II: PRINT HARDER”, with lots of post-it notes underneath.
I’m really worried about talking about stuff before it’s real. Talk is easy, and shipping is hard. But dammit, I’m really excited about this. So, if you promise not to hold us to it, we’re completely overhauling ARTHR, using everything we’ve learnt about how people have used it over the last couple of years. When there’s something to show, you’ll see it here first.
Anyway, I need to stop typing this, and go and read some blog posts about how to test asynchronous Javascript with QUnit. Onwards.
Our busiest week yet
Friday, May 11th 2012
As anyone who’s shipped will know:
Shipping digital things is hard, shipping physical things that get delivered on vans is harder.
Making customers happy is hard, delighting them is harder.
Twitter is a very real, raw, place to receive feedback.
Last week was our busiest week ever, and this week looks like beating that. So it’s been incredibly satisfying to see some lovely comments about the thing we ship on Twitter.
Credit for this feedback goes to Anne, Emily and Silje in Glasgow. They are the people who work hard to respond to all the emails we get, answering the many questions we get asked. They are the people who work hard to get orders rushed through for that last minute deadline.
A good week for Newspaper Club. Thank you.
big big thanks to Silje and everyone @newspaperclub for getting my newspaper printed to the correct standard & on time, much appreciated!
— Daniel Shires (@Sound_of_Shires) May 8, 2012
thanks @newspaperclub for printing my work to a good standard with quick delivery once again! #design #happy twitter.com/ThomasJDesign/…
— Thomas James Design (@ThomasJDesign) May 9, 2012
ANOTHER lovely job received from @newspaperclub even if I’m not 100% on my design anymore, I still love my paper
— holly catford (@hollycatford) May 10, 2012
would recommend @newspaperclub massively…such a fast turnover i love my papers
— jordan barbrooke (@bjor_dan) May 10, 2012
There is no new news now, there might be some later
Tuesday, May 10th 2011
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.
Newspaper Club Evening Class
Tuesday, March 15th 2011
If Newspaper Club had an official strapline, it would be something like “helping people to make their own newspapers”. It’s not snappy. It’s not punchy. But it’s true.
One of the main goals of Newspaper Club is to help people get from having a great idea for a newspaper, to having the confidence to hit ‘print’.
We try and provide useful information on the site, and we’ve put a lot of effort into making ARTHR, our online layout tool, into something that lets anyone have a go. We answer hundreds of enquiries a week, helping people with anything from margins to finding a designer to delivery & subscription services.
But sometimes nothing beats meeting people face to face; explaining and answering questions when everyone involved can point at the same piece of paper.
With this in mind, last week, Art and Engineering had an outing to our friends at the School of Everything, just up the road in Bethnal Green, London. We ran an evening class called ‘How to Make Your Own Newspaper‘.
Twelve people attended for a couple of hours. We talked through a brief history of newspaper design, how the printing works, how to use ARTHR, and some design tips and tricks that we think work well on newsprint. And we answered lots and lots of questions, gave out sample papers, and had some jaffa cakes.
Here I am explaining, how the printers work through the medium of overly complex diagrams. Don’t worry, this was brief.
As the old cliche goes the teachers learnt as much as the students. It’s always great to meet your customers. We got a clearer understanding of what we’re explaining well and what we’re not, as well as just finding out more about the background of people.
And we had a lot of fun. And not only that, but it was sold out. It sold out very quickly. Which got us thinking. Maybe we should do it again?
If we did, would you be interested?
Fictional News and Friendly Service
Thursday, March 3rd 2011
There’s a lovely post here about someone who’s used Newspaper Club to produce a ‘prop’ paper – a fictional newspaper for an interesting looking film. It’s a good looking paper too. We do quite a lot of these – papers for film and theatrical productions – it’s not the world’s biggest market opportunity but it’s always good to find another niche.
But what’s especially pleasing is to read positive things about our service because, well, that’s almost entirely Anne and I’m sure we don’t say enough nice things about her.
So let’s fix that now.
It’s Anne that keeps us going. Tom lashes the code back together periodically, Ben and I occasionally do talks for people and organisations, Gareth strategically strategises at a very high level, but it’s Anne that makes the whole business actually work. We’re an atoms business, we ship physical stuff to real people and inevitably there are questions and occasionally problems with the supply and shipping of those things. In our early days Ben and I would respond to those emails but it soon became clear that grumpy sarcasm wasn’t an effective customer service model – Anne has replaced it with energetic, helpful niceness.
That’s probably why we now get emails that say things like:
“just a quick email to say a huge THANK YOU. We are really happy with the finished product, and the service you have provided us with has been fantastic. Thanks also for your prompt responses to all of the emails I sent you.”
and
“May I congratulate you and your team on a most professional service. You “do exactly as it says on the tin”!!!—not to be taken for granted indeed. I am very happy with the product.”
That’s good isn’t it? We don’t say thank you to Anne enough. So – Anne – Thank You.