319 of 1000 – A Closer Look

Yesterday I found a big envelope from the UK in my mailbox. My copy of «Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008» arrived at last. Some weeks ago I wrote a post on the tabloid-sized newspaper project of Ben Terret and Russell Davies, who are also known as the «Really Interesting Group», based on the pictures and impressions of it spread all over the web. But I promissed to have a closer look at this interesting publication myself. And currently I'm happy about any chance to procrastinate instead of working on the culture-theoretical part of my bachelor thesis!

As you might have read in this or one of the hundred other blogs which wrote articles on the project, the idea of this «newspaper» was not really to be one. Ben and Russell collected contents from blogs and tweets of friends and people they were interestend in and tried to translate these digital contents into a printed product without harming the nature of the particular medium in an unjustifiable way. So they decided not to correct any mistakes, not to submit the contents to the dictation of the layout by shortening and only to use the original low-resolution image materials. The result was published in an edition of 1000 hand-numbered copies and was sent for free to design-related blogs and everyone who ordered his copy fast enough. I got the number 319. ;)

As Ben wrote in his own blog in an article on the creation of TOFHWOTI2008, he based the layout on a grid of five columns and decided to use just one font – it's Plantin – for the continuous texts in the entire publication. That's what Ben calls «reducing enemies».

Having a look at some of the spreads reveals that the designers created some additional guidelines to obtain the look-and-feel of a newspaper. There is this small title bar at the top of every page and red-bordered boxes identify the source of the particular contents. It also strikes the eye that they try to react on the subject of each text by variegating the font used in the headlines. Also the diversity of sizes contributes to a more dynamic impression of the pages.

The real potential of the tabloid format becomes apparent on the one hand where the contents flood the entire whitespace becoming a texture as a consequence of their sequential character – as it can be seen on the pages which document the Tweets of people Ben and Russell follow on Twitter. On the other hand the format offers the opportunity to experiment with extremely large-sized headlines and whitespace or to work with giant images.

But now we'll have a look at several close-ups. There a lot of nice visual moments to find and the creators obviously had a lot fun on this self-chosen kind of playground. The diversity of contents – blog posts, Flickr sets, Tweets etc. – leads to an exciting variety within the layout guidelines.

As regards content the personal dimensions communicated through the texts and images as well as through the aspect of selection done by Ben and Russell make this publication a very special kind of a review of the year 2008. It documents personal views on incidents which influenced different people's life. The mixture of personal thoughts and reactions on public topics like financial meltdown abolishes the borders between reporting and experiencing. So this project confronts the traditional idea of the newspaper as a medium of neutrality and authenticity with the subjectivity of the new ways of publishing which arose from the internet in the last decade.

To come to an end: «Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008» is a consequently well designed publication and it's a fun to page through it – especially if you are web2.0-affine. Maybe there would have been more possibilities to less do a newspaper, to really make a statement about the way our perception of everyday life and all its incidents has changed. With all these new ways of communication we designers also have to get over the one or other established idea without forgetting its qualities.