Mark Porter

Lots of buzz going around recently about this project. Read the rest of this entry »

…over at the SPD blog. Its always amazing, and slightly scary, to see the resources that go into high-end American magazines. To British eyes its undoubtedly impressive, but I often get the feeling that the effort and manpower expended is out of proprtion to the results. In this case the ideas, the commissioning and some of the spreads are fantastic. But I cant say I think the new design is an improvement on the old one, and the format is definitely worse.

Mario is full of praise for the design of fd, the Dutch business paper I did a couple of years ago.

…an interesting response to the app here. This is touching on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately; high-resolution screens and touch-screen interfaces are starting to open up a new way of engaing with content which is not the same as web or print, but might — just might — give us the best of both worlds one day.

Over the weekend, we released the first Guardian iphone app. You have to pay for it (£2.39 in the uk) but it has a lot more functionality than most of our rivals. More info here. Mainly positive reviews so far. Tell me what you think

http://womenmanagement.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-magazine-covers_05.html

Looks a bit like an American twen (in Spirit if not design). Wonder what the inside looks like?

I recently visited Ljubjana to be a jury member for the 4th Slovenian Biennale of Visual Communication, and give a talk. It was a fascinating, if exhausting, few days. For a small country (2m inhabitants — London alone has 7.5m) theres a thriving design scene, and we saw some great work. Ljubjana also has some terrific restaurants (and we had the good fortune to be there during the truffle season), so it was a rewarding trip in many ways.

While I was there, I gave a few interviews, one of which you can find here. I can’t understand a word of it, but if anyone reads Slovenian, please let me know if I said anything stupid.

http://www.neurope.eu/

New website from New Statesman, to go with Esterson Associates’ recent redesign of the magazine. Use of grid and vertical column of picture trails (or pixies as we call them at Guardian Towers) on the front is very guardianesque, I think

While I was in Italy putting Internazionale to bed, the Tages Anzeiger (the other main Zurich paper) launched their redesign, hot on the heels of their main rivals, the NZZ. Read the rest of this entry »