Eames House of Cards

Much imitated but never bettered, the Eames House of Cards is our second ‘thing’. It’s a thing of things really, depicting what Charles Eames famously described as ‘good stuff’. If you ever stumble across the 1970 revision entitled ‘A Computer House of Cards’ grab it, they’re like gold dust (just make sure you post a few pics of ‘em somewhere so all of us can have a geez).

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.

Fanette Mellier [fanettemellier.com] has just completed her residency in Chaumont as part of the annual Festival International de l’Affiche et du Graphisme de Chaumont 2008 (they could think of a snappier title huh). She has also been putting the finishing touches on an ace new identity for the Parc Saint Leger Contemporary Art Centre [parcsaintleger.fr]. It’s modular and multi-faceted, comes in a variety of colours or in basic black and has a rather nifty set of punctuation that ties in with the geometric shapes that make up the custom display typeface which you can see above. Further proof that France is kicking serious graphic butt with this latest generation of creative types.

(Please) Loose Yourself in Me — From the Ecstasy EP / I Believe — From the Feed Me With Your Kiss EP / Soon (Don’t worry, you’ll probably know this one already) — From the Glider EP / Nothing Much to Lose — From the Isn’t Anything LP (just don’t try dancing to this… it’s confuddling) / When You Sleep — From the Loveless LP / Moon Song — if you have to bother with the Tremolo EP / Anything on the You Made Me Realise EP — it’s all good

Got a fave or went to the gig? Leave a comment and let us know.

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.

Self Service’s 100 Things

As an ode to Self Service [selfservicemagazine.com] magazine’s ‘100 Things’ series of features (sadly discontinued) we’re going to attempt our own list of 100 things (in 100 posts). That should keep us busy, huh. The first of our ‘things’ has to be the aforementioned ‘100 Things’ series and to kick it off here’s a few spreads to feast yer eyeballs on (click on an image to see if larger). Design & direction by Petronio Associates (formely Work in Progress) [petronioassociates.com]. More ‘things’ to come… 1 down, 99 to go.