Newspaper Club

Engineering Update: ARTHR changes and the upcoming Newspaper Club API

Thursday, May 19th 2011

We’ve been making lots of tweaks to ARTHR recently, based on your feedback. We’re not quite there yet, but very soon there will be more fonts and colours to choose from, a selection of beautiful cover pages, finer control of where stories are positioned, and more.

And we’ll have news for developers interested in building services that generate newspapers using ARTHR’s layout technology. Our Newspaper Club API is in the process of being documented and tidied up. We’ll post here when we’re looking for people to be beta testers.

But today we’re just making a few changes to help us get ready for all that. When your ARTHR newspaper next refreshes (later today), you may notice that some of the typography has changed in places – the fonts style and sizes might look slightly different. You might find that stories start and finish in slightly different places, or that there is more or less room after them. Or you might not notice anything at all.

We’re making these changes today so that you have time to adjust your paper before our next print run on Tuesday.

As always, if you have any feedback on ARTHR, or anything else, please let us know at newspaperclub@newspaperclub.com.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

File under: developments,engineering

Big news: short-run colour newspapers are here!

Monday, May 16th 2011

In our last blog post we hinted that there was some big news on the way. Well, it’s here. We can now print small runs of newspapers in full colour. Here’s one, hot off the press, hastily photographed by Engineering:

From now on, all orders under 300 copies will be printed on a brand new digital colour printer. Here are some things you might need to know.

How much will it cost?

As we’re trying all of this out just now we’re keeping the prices the same as black and white for one more week. After that, the prices for larger papers will rise slightly. A new price list will be available next week.

How should PDFs be set up?

At the moment, the page size for digital colour papers is the same as the old black and white size – 317mm x 457mm. In a few weeks it will change to 289mm x 380mm, the same as traditional colour. There still needs to be a 15mm margin around each spread (otherwise it can’t be printed).

To get the best from your colours, set blacks to rich black – unlike traditional newspaper there isn’t an optimum limit for ink coverage.

There are no changes to papers made in ARTHR. They’ll be created in the same way as before.

What about printing in black and white?

It’s still possible to produce a black and white newspaper, but from now on it will be printed in colour on the colour printer. To get blacks looking nice and dark set them to rich black rather than 100%K.

Printing dates and turnaround times

Print dates and turnaround times are the same as before. The print deadline is every Tuesday at 2pm and the papers should reach you within 7 days, often sooner.

Samples

If you’d like a sample just drop us a line at support@newspaperclub.com and we’ll get one out to you.

Posted by anne | Comments (4)

File under: developments,news

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.

Posted by Ben | Comments (2)

File under: art,developments,running a business

The Dab Hand

Thursday, April 28th 2011

This is a newspaper called The Dab Hand, designed by Amy McArthur, a final year Design for Visual Communication student at the University of Ulster, Belfast. As well as being beautifully designed it’s been hand-stitched to tear into two parts. We asked Amy to tell us a bit more about it:

The brief

The brief was to create a concept for the branding of a typographically themed restaurant. I decided to focus on early typography–the era of moveable type, compositors and printing workshops.

The restaurant name

‘The Dab Hand’ has the obvious meaning of someone highly skilled in a certain area; an expert. The name connotes quality and a commitment to excellence however it also contains a reference to type as it is said to originate from the early years of printing presses. The man who applied the ink to the wooden or metal type used an instrument known as a ‘dab’ and became known as ‘The Dab Hand’.

The newspaper

From my research emerged many similarities between food and early type—the craftsmanship, the process of perfecting and refining, the design element involved, the tactile nature of them both, the passion of those who are engaged in them and the language used to describe both food and type. I wanted to emphasise this relationship and establish ‘The Dab Hand’ as the place where the craft of cooking and the craft of typography converge.

I produced a menu that doubles up as a promotional publication for the restaurant, providing diners with something to peruse while waiting on their meal. It is printed on newsprint, as this is what was most commonly printed in the early days of printing. It is large format in order to increase its visual impact and maximise how the reader engages with it. Printed black on white, it references the ‘Pica’— the first English book to be printed in York, which was named after a magpie because of its colour scheme. Throughout the newspaper I have highlighted words that have meanings both in the sphere of cooking and also in the sphere of typography.

Cooking and early ‘hot type’ are both hands-on activities and so I wanted to engage the audience and design an experiential publication. Firstly by having the reader tear into the newspaper, almost like the preparation of food, and then by appealing to them through their senses—taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell through the content. The stitching was done on a standard sewing machine and took plenty of practice!

Lovely work Amy! Thank you for printing with us. More photos are available on Amy’s website.

Posted by anne | Comments (0)

File under: Newspaper Stories

Bank holiday opening

Thursday, April 14th 2011

With so many bank holidays coming up in April and May we thought we’d better mention what this means for orders and deliveries.

In one sense, we never close. Our website is open 24/7, so ARTHR will be working tirelessly to make those papers. In another sense, the humans who also work tirelessly to make those papers will be having a day off. So, on the following days our support staff won’t be available and there won’t be any deliveries.

Friday 22 April
Monday 25 April
Friday 29 April
Monday 2 May
Monday 30 May

As most of our printing is done from Tuesday to Thursday we’re hoping that this won’t cause too much disruption. Deliveries might take slightly longer over any holiday weekends so if you are thinking of printing something around these times and need your order for a specific date do let us know in advance. Otherwise it’s busy-ness as usual.

Posted by anne | Comments (0)

File under: news

Newspaper Club does more in the US (much more, really)

Tuesday, April 12th 2011

NEWSPAPER CLUB LAUNCHES IN THE US!!!

That was the headline I wanted. But we debated it and decided it wasn’t quite right. In fact, can one describe doing more in any market nowadays as a true launch? I mean, the web is everywhere so you’ve already launched pretty much everywhere from the time you upload your site and arrange for your carrier to deliver worldwide. And perhaps a true, full-blown, honest-to-goodness US launch should involve having a US-made product (we’re still printing in the UK, as it’s so competitive)?

So let’s say we’re doing more in the US as of last weekend. Much more.

What more? Well, we have a new US-friendly newspaperclub.com domain. This means people in the US – for the first time, ever (as far as we know) – can order digitally-printed newspapers in runs as low as 5 copies, get them delivered to their home or work address, and do this in good old greenbacks.

We also believe our US offer of larger runs using traditional newspaper presses – from the ridiculously low 300 copies upwards – is incredibly competitive. First, you’ll probably struggle to persuade a printer to do a run of fewer than a 1000 copies. Second, we think we’re very reasonably priced.

So. Da-da! Lady-in-hat-crashes-bottle-against-hull-as-the-band-plays. Sort of.

Posted by Gareth | Comments (3)

File under: news

The Long Good Newspaper

Tuesday, March 29th 2011

The Long Good Read is a site that highlights the most popular, most interesting, long form content from the Guardian, twice a day. It’s the meaty, good stuff. The stuff you want to sink into on a Sunday morning, over a cup of coffee.

It was created by Dan Catt at the Guardian. It fetches all of the articles over a certain word count from the Guardian API, and uses data from the Guardian Zeitgeist to pick the best articles for the day. Those are published on the site at 5am every day, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed or stick the articles in something like Instapaper or Readability.

The only problem is that, except perhaps for the Kindle, no-one really enjoys reading on a screen, especially for long-form content like this. And so we helped Dan to produce a prototype of a paper version of a week of The Long Good Read (12th-18th March). And here it is.

Dan says:

This issue with 14 stories weighs in at 24 pages. It feels like a real thing, you can hold it, fold it, take out wasps and flies in one arcing sweep with it, it’s a thing of wonder.

It’s also different from reading a newspaper, your eyes aren’t skipping round the page as much, scanning articles figuring out which ones to read. Sure, in this case not every article is going to appeal and you can quickly move onto the next one (and the one after etc) until you find something you want to read. But when you do it’s always something decent to get your teeth into.

It feels like something I’d want to subscribe to, a longer title could be “Things Probably Worth Reading as Filtered by Everyone Else, Weekly“. I can see myself reading it on the train (indeed I did) and doodling in the footers, or settling down with my slippers and liquorice pipe in front of the fire with it.

Read more about it over at Dan’s fantastic blog post explaining what worked, what didn’t, and why.

And watch this space: Dan’s having another go next week.

Posted by Tom | Comments (1)

File under: case studies

Pricing news – we’re now VAT-free (mostly)

Monday, March 21st 2011

Having spent a few weeks to-ing and fro-ing with the VAT people we’ve received some good news: most of our orders from now on won’t incur VAT. So on the weekend we put up some new VAT-free pricing.

If you’re handy with a calculator you may notice the headline price isn’t going down uniformly across all our newspapers – there have been some chunky increases in the price of newsprint recently and we’ve decided to move to a heavier weight of paper for a good proportion of our larger orders. We’ve also made the pricing more consistent. But for almost all of you who are not VAT-rated Newspaper Club is now a lot cheaper.

However, note the ‘almost’: we’ll still have to charge VAT on some newspapers. It’s quite a complicated area but the general rule of thumb is that if a newspaper contains a significant amount of written information it’s VAT-free; if it doesn’t – for instance, if it’s entirely full of photos – then we need to charge VAT at the standard 20% rate. In addition, for those papers that we write and/or design (a lot fewer now than formerly) we’ll need to charge VAT.

If you’re in doubt about the status of your newspaper please see what we say about VAT here or get in touch.

Posted by Gareth | Comments (0)

File under: Uncategorized

Some Brief Downtime

Wednesday, March 16th 2011

Just a brief note from the Engineering Dept.

The website will be offline from 2pm GMT on Thursday 17th March (tomorrow), for up to two hours. This is so we can make some behind the scenes changes to the site, including some performance improvements in ARTHR.

We’ll still be contactable by email, at support@newspaperclub.co.uk.

Anyway, as you were.

Update: This has been completed – we’re all up and running as normal.

Posted by Tom | Comments (0)

File under: engineering

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?

Posted by Tom | Comments (7)

File under: developments,running a business

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