Hasta La Ideas

There’s been a veritable deluge of newsprint publications coming into CR towers in the last two weeks so thought we’d share a selection with you…

First up is the Frieze Projects newspaper. Frieze Art Fair held it’s first New York event earlier this month entitled Frieze Projects New York. For the event, Frieze invited eight international artists to respond to the location of the show, Randall’s Island in the East River, and turn the island park into a an experimental platform for contemporary art. Mulberry, the event’s sponsor, produced this unbound, newspaper-like publication (designed by Construct) to introduce each artist and their approach to the commission…

S.E.H Kelly is a two-person men’s clothing company based in East London. It’s publication, Some British Makers Vol. 1, features photos taken and info gleaned from visits to a small clothes-making workroom in North London, the only maker of horn buttons in the UK, and two woollen mills in Yorkshire.

“We tend to make our printed stuff with Newspaper Club,” says Sara Kelly of the project, “and they just printed this for us, to introduce ourselves and the kind of craft we employ to the stores in Japan who stock our stuff.”

Here are some images:

For any of our readers who don’t know, Newspaper Club was founded by Ben Terrett, Russell Davies and Tom Taylor in 2009 to make it easy for designers (and non-designers too) to make their own newsprint publications. Also hot off the Newspaper Club press is this self-promotional mailer by illustrator Andy Smith – a 12 page newsprint publication that shows off 12 of Smith’s poster designs:

“Business is certainly booming at the moment,” says Newspaper Club MD, Anne Ward when we asked if the unusually high influx of newsprint projects to CR towers was reflective of a rise in interest in the services they offer. “May is usually our busiest month but this May our orders are at least double last year’s,” she adds.

Paper-obsessed artist Rob Ryan has also taken advantage of Newspaper Club’s services – we just got the first issue of his studio’s new quarterly publication S.P.Q.R. which is available from Ryan’s Etsy shop for the princely sum of £2.

“Basically, it’s going to be a collection of pictures and words that I’ve been working on within the preceding three months,” explains Ryan. “Anything that I draw or design always starts its life as a note or a scribble somewhere in a note book and I’m kind of hoping that this project will become more like that, a printed notebook of thoughts and ideas,” he continues. “Ninety percent of my notebook stuff is rubbish and really quite embarrassing, so don’t expect too much,” he adds.

Despite his modesty, the first issue of S.P.Q.R. is full of lovely imagery – and also a short written piece by Ryan in which he explains how he ended up working almost exclusively with cut paper.

Last but not least is another first issue newspaper from a design studio, also printed by Newspaper Club. The Moon on a Stick, by Cheltenham-based ASHA (the studio behind the recently held first Cheltehham Design Festival) is by far the most ambitious of all the publications shown in this blog post – it’s 72 pages for a start, making it quite a big ask in terms of engagement time.

Essentially, The Moon on a Stick is a vehicle for showcasing projects ASHA has worked on and, despite an initial worry about delving into such a lengthy own-trumpet blowing exercise, it’s actually pretty engaging, thanks mostly to a playful approach to design and layout. Each feature sports different combinations of headline, display and text typefaces which stops it from being visually bland and kept me leafing through.

Also, peppered among the many case studies of ASHA projects are nuggets of editorial gold like the Best in Class spread that shows two great CV packs the agency received from graduate hopefuls, showing that creativity when applying for a design job really is worth the effort. Here are some spreads:

For more info about Newspaper Club and how to create your own newsprint publication, visit newspaperclub.com

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