Boicovideo #4: Vogue Hommes Japan
More magazine science with a lesson in feature to advert flow courtesy of brand spanking new publication, Vogue Hommes Japan [voguehommes.jp]. Part of the Boicozine series of mini-movies about magazines. PS When I say ‘gold foil’ I actually meant ‘metallic ink’. Oops!
Boicovideo #3: Little White Lies
The third Boicozine mini-feature on magazines stars all 19 issues of innovative cinema magazine, Little White Lies [littlewhitelies.co.uk] produced by The Church of London [thechurchoflondon.com]… oh and the hippity hop flyers link I mention in the filum is here… [toledohiphop.org].
Boicovideo #2: L’œil / Design / The Architectural Review
The second Boicovideo features vintage editions of three magazines, L’œil [artclair.com/oeil] from 1970, Design [vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad] from 1963 and The Architectural Review [arplus.com] from 1962.
Boicovideo #1: Destill Magazine Review
This is a bit of an experiment, partly inspired by a presentation by Jeremy Leslie [magculture.com/blog], Mark Porter [markporter.com] and Richard Spencer Powell [monocle.com] at St Bride’s last Wednesday, courtesy of YCN Live (Thanks James! It were top.) [ycnonline.com/live].
The big question that seems to be floating about at the moment is once you acknowledge the influence online media has had on traditional print media, how do you then make yourself visible when readers may not even be viewing your content through your own website. I’ve often wondered how many people visit Boicozine directly or prefer to view these here posts via a reader such as Google Reader [reader.google.com]. I know many of you still do because of the encouraging (and occasionally negative) comments I get when meeting readers in person. Film is shaping up to be the last vestige of branding for publications starting to aggregate content. So without further ado. The first Boicozine mini-movie thingy. It’s about a new magazine concept called Distill [distilldigital.com]. Let me know what you think of the video. Too fast? Too shabby? Too much like I’m liking the sound of my own voice? Post comments here on on the boicovideo Vimeo page [vimeo.com/boicovideo].
Stuff from above #4
Stuff from above for this month includes clockwise from top left (going in a sort of spiral motion): Dear Lulu book [lulu.com] by James Goggin [practise.co.uk] and students from Hochschule Darmstadt as an experiment to test the print limited of the Lulu.com POD publishing system. × The little patterned square is called ‘Arthur’s Weave’ and is a new Bunkum Replete print to be produced for Bon Bon Kakku [bonbonkakku.com] in the coming months × 25×4 [25by4.channel4.com] is a book produced to commemorate the 25th anniversary of radical british television broadcaster, Channel 4 [channel4.com]. Designed with appropriate vim and verve by Spin [spin.co.uk] × Great British Editorial [indexbook.com] is a weighty tome featuring a random assortment of… well, what it says on the tin, which hangs together surprisingly well, even with the omission of any sort of explanatory copy. × The Fever Zine sandwich is an ace little compendium of illustrations produced by Alex and Simon at Fever Zine [simonwhybray.com/feverzine] for this year’s V&A Village Fete [scarletprojects.com] × The little square here are Bunkum Replete prints currently available, again through Bon Bon Kakku × Athletes is a minibook / exhibition catalogue featuring illustration by Siggi Eggertsson [vanillusaft.com] as shown at the Vallery gallery in Barcelona [vallery.es] × Kasino A4 [wearekasino.com]. Why has it taken me so long to write about this awesome magazine? A curse on meself for not mentioning it earlier. It is ace. This is the family issue, which naturally features input from the editorial teams various family members (including some ace fashion shoots). Will give you the warm fuzzies. × I know many of you tend to turn your nose up at collectable designer vinyl figures but have a look at these [strangeco.com]. They’re so darn cute. They’re designed by Friends Like You [friendswithyou.com] and go by the name of ‘Wish Come True’. They… er… jingle too.
Be Damned Again
I love a good independent publishing fair and this one is the daddy [publishandbedamned.org.uk]. What sets Publish & Be Damned apart from any other indie publishing fair is that this one is carefully curated. You can’t just turn up with a bunch of raggedy photocopies in yer hand. This is the creme-de-la-creme of zine culture. Turn up this Sunday to the Rochelle School in East London [afoundation.org.uk/rochelle], or be damned to spend the rest of eternity never knowing just how cool indie publishing can be. There’s a full list of participants (including the excellent Fever Zine [feverzine.co.uk]) on the website or look em up on [facebook]. You can see some pics from last year’s event on [flickr].
Saucy Treasure
Whilst on assignment at Nick Bell Design [nickbelldesign.co.uk], Nick very kindly let me have a rummage around the studio for things to post and I came across an issue of Avant Garde magazine, published in November 1968. Designed by Herb Lubalin [typogabor.com/herb-lubalin] and featuring artwork by Tom Wesselman [artnet.com]. So there’s now a bunch of saucy 60s stylee pics over on our [flickr] page for your perusal. Enjoy.
What’s Up #34: Ludovic Balland
Ludovic Balland’s foliosite [ludovic-balland.ch] is almost, completely monochrome which highlights how bold his studio’s typographic vision is. To achieve this they’re not only manipulating existing typefaces in new and exciting ways but also creating new typefaces from old (or from scratch). If you are looking for a sample of his studio’s more exciting work, seek out the compendium they produced for the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art [bb5.berlinbiennial.de] entitled ‘When Things Cast No Shadow’ [jrp-ringier.com], where a crazy cast of typefaces that should be jostling for attention are roped into order with surprising results.
As a sidenote jrp | ringer are also the publishing house behind Ezra Petronio and Suzanne Koller’s forthcoming (and rather expensive) monograph [jrp-ringier.com]. You may know them better as Work In Progress [petronioassociatesblog.com].
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The POD Report
Weather and blogging. It’s funny how page views from different countries go up and down depending on whether it’s summer or winter. It happens with blog posts too and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but haven’t got round to it until now (sorry).
Firstly, it you are interested in POD (Print-on-Demand) [wikipedia] productions at all – and, in terms of minimising the effect print production has on our environment, it’s something we should all be interested in – you should head over to Andrew Losowsky’s Magtastic Blogsplosion [losowsky.com/magtastic]. Andrew welcomes another POD provider into the fold, MagCloud [magcloud.com].
MagCloud is worth noting because, as Andrew points out, a) they talk exclusively about magazines and b) Hewlett Packard are behind this one, so there’s the hint that printer manufacturers are taking POD seriously indeed. What I found particularly interesting is that Andrew highlights the fact that POD services are too often pitched at hobbyists. While it seems perfectly fine to be producing magazines about your dog or your cousin’s wedding for a select group of friends and kinfolk (who you would probably end up buying copies for on their behalf anyway), it also dilutes the real benefits of POD production could provide to larger commercial entities such as newsstand titles or those simply wishing to reach a boarder international audience.
Essentially, someone needs to work out a way, to use one of those nifty internet terminologies, to further ‘monetise’ POD publications. To make them more commercially viable (ie cheaper and easier to distribute). MagCloud is a tiny glimmer of hope that this might be possible, but without mixing up the amateurs and the professionals it’s not far enough removed from yer lulus [lulu.com] and yer bobbooks [bobbooks.co.uk] to make any real progress. (As a sidenote, why do POD providers never have a ‘design’ category in their topic lists and should we be worried about it’s exclusion (when Art & Photography gets a look-in almost everytime)? I’m guessing the answer has to be ‘yes’.)
I recently received an invitation to contribute to a magazine on Issuu [issuu.com], a site Andrew mentions in the same article. Although, I personally find the navigation a little convoluted, especially when trying to decide wether to ‘bookmark’ or ‘follow’ a particular edition or user, Issuu should be of interest to POD providers because it unwittingly shows them a new format for distribution that is lively and exciting and manages to swerve past many of the pitfalls of ‘vanity publishing’ [wikipedia] (’Vanity publishing’ refers to publications produced at the expense of the author but has, in recent times, also been used to refer to POD authors, although with POD, these authors only incur costs of they purchase the books themselves).
Which brings me neatly round to a brief update on Press Publish’s (the boicozine mothership) very own publishing projects and where they’re at [presspublish.info].
mm (millimetre) We’ve been planning our next POD publication for some time now. mm (millimetre) magazine happily provoked quite a bit of interest when we originally announced the project. Unfortunately, it’s still on hold until your humble author (ie Me) finds the time and the appropriate POD producer to hook up with to the help produce the publication on a regular basis. The original thought was to use a number of POD producers to expand the magazines coverage, although they would each have their own formats so the magazine would need to be reformatted each time or produced in a way them was applicable to each one. See, tricky, huh. So that may still happen although we’re personally holding out to see if MagCloud is any good. More news as it comes to hand.
Estates of London Hopefully the next project to roll off the ‘presses’ (can you say that with POD?) will be the Estates of London project which we’re hoping to produce via Blurb [blurb.com] (who are currently holding a POD photographic book competition worth checking out).
Estates of London will be a visual survey of post-war housing estate architecture in London. Something we feel has been neglected for years and yet have had a massive impact on the fabric of modern Britain. There will be more about this project here and over on our Flickr site in the coming weeks. If you are interested in helping out with this project we’d love to hear from you. Email [michael at presspublish.info].
Anomalies The main problem/joy with Press Publish is that we have sooo many ideas that it’s tricky to keep them all moving at once. Along with boicozine, mm and Estates, there is also the boicoshop which is coming together nicely (more product to come!) and a follow up to Zine #1 [shop.boico.net], documenting more posts from the boicozine blog.
It’s for this reason too that Press Publish is looking for a business partner to help get things moving. It’s grass roots stuff so previous experience isn’t necessarily required but if you do have experience in the publishing field we’d love to hear from you. Again email Email [michael at presspublish.info] for further information.
So Yesterday This Happened
Part of the perils of being an avid magazine collector. Can anyone recommend a decent free standing shelving unit? This so isn’t the one.
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