A look behind Norman Rockwell's process

Fascinating.

MagCloud geeks wow 'em at Cannes Lions ad fest

Gisele Wertheim-Aymes reports from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival:

Sorry to say, it's not the creative talent or marketers who are setting the agenda here. Sure there are cool ideas, but it's the geeks who have created and will create more and more tools, unlocking a world of free and flowing communication and importantly captivating consumer attention.
...
Coming from a magazine publishing background I marvelled at MagCloud....

As chief geek at MagCloud I couldn't be more proud :-), but let's be real: tools and services like these are nothing without creatives to drive them. What motivates me each day is seeing people discover MagCloud and doing things with it they never could before.

That Which I've Missed While Paying Attention - John Battelle's Searchblog

That Which I've Missed While Paying Attention - John Battelle's Searchblog: "I spent a good couple of hours at HP this week as well. FM has done business with nearly every division of HP over the past four years, and it's remarkable to spend time simmering in the culture of a company that is, in just about every way possible, Really Grown Up."

Damned with faint praise.

The world of money

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Out of the stone age -- for another year or two!

My dev workstation as of two days ago was about 5 years old. As usual it is so much trouble to recreate the work environment that you have accumulated over such a long time that performance has to get *really* bad before I'm willing to upgrade to a new system.



What is not obvious is that's two quad-core 64-bit CPUs. Along w/8GB of RAM, I am now a *much* happier camper! My qualitative experience exceeds what Vista tells me it is, and that's not bad.



Let's see how long this lasts before I'm waiting on disk swapping again....

How it's made: a personal newspaper

Printing & finishing, ooh la la! Can't get enough of videos like these.


the most fun Ben's had all year from russelldavies on Vimeo.

By contrast, digital production in an HP Indigo shop seems so, well, tame. Modern technology always seems to lose the visceral qualities of what it replaces....

YouTube - The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

YouTube - The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

Saw The Ting Tings on a DirecTV special yesterday, they had our 2-year old dancing wildly (she's good!) and the 8-year old pounding out the beat. Quirky vocalizations reminiscent of B52s and Talking Heads, just great!

The MagCloud publisher experience, phase 1

Thanks to Bill Holland for the reference :-)

Underground Art School, Passing You a Note

Wow! I like where this magazine is going.

"Here we are, first issue (or class session)! This issue is designed like a note we'd like to hand to you. It's a little bit of an introduction from us. Mainly, it's a TYPOGRAPHIC BONANZA to get you riled up to live and make. Then, we will leave it up to you to create a statement."



MagCloud | Magazine Underground Art School | Issue Passing You a Note

Luscious Garage in SF

I think I finally found a garage I would enjoy patronizing.

The fig tree and the philodendron are the first things that meet the eye in the repair bay of Luscious Garage. Then the two Toyota Priuses come into focus — one with a slightly dented rear door, the other on a lift with two tires off and rusty brake rotors exposed. Then comes the eerie sense that something is missing: grime.

San Francisco Journal - At Specialty Garage, Making Hybrids Even Greener - NYTimes.com:

Campaign sleepover w/Little Mermaid

Obama Groove, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

Steve Jurvetson had lunch w/Joe Biden today, and solicited questions to ask via his Flickr photostream. This answer was not quite to the reader's question, but I love it anyway:

“Well, let me share a story. On the second day of the convention, my young granddaughter Finnegan came to me in the hotel and said “we need a sleepover.” I had promised her a tent and all when we got back, so I told her that it would have to wait a few days. “Well, no, I mean now. Barack’s kids have already talked to Barack. Can you pull the beds out of the room and we’ll put in mats, and have pizza and popcorn and Little Mermaid.” So Barack’s two daughters, two of Michelle’s brother’s children, my 11 year old nephew and two grandkids all had a sleepover. When I looked in the room and saw all those black and white children cuddled up together, it tells me more about what the core of this election is about. I knew we had made the right decision. We have become genuinely close friends.”

Many thanks to our roving reporter!

Scott Adams tells us how he draws a comic strip

Maybe some budding cartoonists using MagCloud can get a tip or two from Dilbert creator Scott Adams over on his dilbert.com blog:

Most syndicated cartoonists still draw on paper, then scan the art and e-mail it to their syndication company. They're going to be pissed when they see this video and realize how much extra work they have been doing.

Read the whole article and find a link to the video: Scott Adams Blog: Cartoonist Tools 10/08/2008.

The video is ok, but would be more compelling and drive more sales if 1. there was a narration, and 2. it was posted to YouTube rather than being held captive on the Amazon page.

Manufacturing a book, circa 1947

Love this!


Edit: the Vimeo version I found was deleted, updated to one I found on YouTube.

New Magazine: Go Away Come Home

This new magazine documenting the Seattle band Spanish for 100's last two summer tours is fantastic, and even better with the band's music in the background!

Enabling storytelling

Jonathan Saunders is one of the first to take the plunge as a publisher on MagCloud.

i like to tell stories: Stories, Now Touchable.: "the printer is still in beta, but has been helpful in addressing my concerns and honestly reacted well to all my thoughts and attention to detail. i am a stickler or pain in the ass, so i was impressed with the good effort the printers have put forth."

He's a pain in the ass? Sure, but the kind who is a perfect Beta user. He's let us glimpse his process for creating a quality product, and that won't only help him reach his own objectives, it's going to help future MagCloud publishers everywhere. Thanks, Jonathan!

Putting the "New" in "Best New Magazines"

There has been a fair bit of blogging about MagCloud since we went public last month, and most of the attention is on our print on demand fulfillment of magazines. Yes, HP is well positioned to provide this service given we are a market leader in commercial digital print with our Indigo presses, and thousands of print service provider customers worldwide. I have no doubt the HP machine of R&D and marketing will continue to win in the POD marketplace.

But at MagCloud we are really doing something a bit different than POD. We're lowering the barriers to access POD services to enable whole new categories of publications. Our tagline is, after all, The Best New Magazines. My colleague Nathan provides a perfect example: what he likes to call a "reference magazine." We're all familiar with reference books: bulky and generally expensive tomes that provide critical information you need to refer to repeatedly. Online search engines have replaced the need for many hardcopy references, but Nathan's Color Thesaurus cannot be so replaced.



Not only is Nathan's reference magazine a valuable compilation of the results of an online color naming experiment (what words do people use to describe specific colors?); when published via MagCloud it also provides an excellent wysiwyg color reference to use when producing a MagCloud magazine!

Read more about Nathan's magazine on his Mostly Color Perception blog: Digital Pages Are Different.

More on the technical metric, "suckiness"

Derek graciously provides one answer to the question in my blog's tagline.

According to Powazek, the current business model for magazine publishing “sucks”, as about 70 percent of printed magazines are unsold.

MagCloud, print-on-demand service for magazine publishing launched - sfnblog

design for mankind: best. news. ever.

Thanks, MagCloud, and Mankind Mag's lovely advertisers [to be revealed on Monday] for making my dreams come true! -- design for mankind: best. news. ever.

Wow, to be someone's best. news. ever. is a dream come true. MagCloud couldn't be more proud! I wish my blog had more than 3 readers so I could send some more love back.

MagCloud publisher invitations

For those folks who have requested MagCloud publisher invitations, thanks! Just wanted to let everyone know that we've received a few ;-), and are churning through them as quickly as we can. We're not running a secret MagCloud Idol competition with a panel of judges, so if you haven't heard back yet there is no need to worry that we've deemed you unworthy. We're simply trying to ramp up reliably and predictably; we're accepting invite requests somewhat randomly to try to sample many different types of publishers, with a bias toward first-come, first-get.

For all our new Beta users, publishers and non-publishers, thank you on behalf of the MagCloud team. Never have I seen such supportive bug reports :-). Can't tell you how much that helps as we're stomping the bugs.

If you have an existing account and want to use an invitation to upgrade it to have publisher capabilities: when you click on the accept invitation link, look for the link highlighted below.

POD goes Mag | photostream

POD goes Mag | photostream:

I guess that a lot of people are about to find out that producing issue one is fun. Producing issue two is easier and a bit less fun. Producing issues four and on is plain hard work. But somebody will make a success of it. And good luck to them.

Oh, so true. Giving anyone access to magazine printing and distribution services does not mean anyone can make a living publishing magazines. There was at one time a similar giddiness about AdSense ("wow! I can make money from my blog!") and eBay ("wow! I can make money selling my junk!"). Only a small percentage of people ultimately figure out how to make a living from the new opportunity.

However the rest of us still benefit, though perhaps in more incremental ways, from the more efficient marketplace that results. Personally I can't wait, assuming MagCloud can take hold, to see the opportunities that emerge for independent designers, illustrators, writers, photographers et al. (Pixish provides an early glimpse of that future, I think.)