Mark Porter

First of all, thanks everyone for your comments and tweets — it’s humbling to read what some of you wrote, and your interest and support is much appreciated.

I did smile at the speculation over my departure being announced in the same week that Carolyn McCall (CEO of Guardian Media Group) quit to run a low-cost airline. I’m afraid there’s no basis to the conspiracy theories; I’m leaving for two very simple reasons.

The first, as I said on friday, is that I just began to feel that I’d done everything I could at the Guardian. As well as doing the major redesigns of the paper and the website, I’ve redesigned Weeekend five times, G2 three times, etc etc you get the idea. Of course there are always new things to do (don’t mention the ip*d), and it would have been very easy to stick around. But if you stay in one creative job too long it gets hard to keep approaching everything with a fresh eye, and when that happens its time to move on. But I still have a great relationship with the Guardian and the plan is that I’ll continue to do projects with them in the future.

The second reason is that my private work outside the Guardian had grown to the point where it was becoming incompatible with the day job (not to mention the demands of my young children).

So that’s the strory. From April 17th I’ll be independent again for the first time since the mid-90s, and I’m really excited about it. I have no desire to get into the big studio thing — the smart way to work these days is small, fast, flexible and most of all, fun.

I’m already working with some newspapers in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and I aim to keep on designing printed papers as long as there are any left to design! But I expect a lot more of my work to be digital in the future, and it would be great to do more magazines too (I have one magazine project coming up in France but I’d love to do more). So I’m pretty busy in the short term, but I’m also up for talking about anything interesting that comes along.

And let’s also hope that I’ll now have the time to post here more frequently, and get my undernourished Twitter stream (@IamMarkPorter) flowing more freely… Watch this space!

It feels very strange to be writing this, but here goes… I’m leaving The Guardian.

It’s been a very tough decision. I’ve spent 14 amazing years here since I first came in to work on a redesign of the Weekend magazine, and ended up staying. I’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment, and time and again when I felt it was starting to get boring, something new and exciting would come onto the radar. I’ve worked with some wonderful designers and editors and done some fantastic projects. But I’ve been here a long time and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve done it all, most of it several times over. So it’s time to move on. More news to come soon on my plans for the future.

…with Guardian infographcis chief Michael Robinson in Grafik magazine this month. Can’t post a link as it’s not online, but it’s part of an interesting infromation design special in the print mag (excuse the dodgy iphone picture).

You may have noticed that I dropped off the radar completely for the last month. I had to take some time out, but I’m happy to be back with some news about another, and very gratfying, award for the Guardian. Read the rest of this entry »

…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

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

An ex-Guardian designer who’s currently passing through Vietnam on a world tour sent me this pic today; that titlepiece looks strangely familiar.

I’m building up quite a collection of these now, if anyone sees any more please sent them to me!

Read the story here!

The weekend redesign launched last saturday. I meant to post some pages earlier, but the unaccustomed snow which brought London to a hault impeded my progress too. The second issue has just shipped so here are some more pages from the first. Read the rest of this entry »