Russell Davies

long live magazines

Went to an excellent conference on Friday; Magazines Are Dead! Long live the Magazine! (can you guess what it was about?). I learned loads most of which I'm sure is obvious to anyone who thinks about this stuff so I won't repeat it all.

But here are some the things that stuck out for me:

Paul Rennie rejoices in the title of Head of Context in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martin’s, but many may know him as the man who used to have a splendid shop on Lamb Conduit Street selling all sorts of brilliant posters and Festival of Britain stuff. Said shop is now in Folkestone and is well worth a visit.

He mentioned loads things that really struck me.

One was that between 1939 and 1950 the economic foundation of magazines was undermined by the war effort / recovery and there was very little advertising. And he mentioned that Orwell suggested that this meant a lot of innovative things could be done because of the lack of interference from advertisers. I think that's what he said, though I may have got it wrong. I've had a dig around and all I can find is one of his Tribune / As I Please pieces suggesting that you can't read a decent and independent book review because the newspapers are all in the thrall to the big money spent by publishers. (June 1944) And this, from April 1947:

"Recently I was talking to the editor of a newspaper with a very large circulation, who told me that it was now quite easy for his paper to live on its sales alone. This would probably continue to be true, he said, until the paper situation improved, which would mean reverting to pre-war bulk, at enormously greater expense. Until then, advertisements would be of only secondary importance as a source of revenue. If that is so—and I believe many papers could now exist without advertisements—is not this just the moment for an all-out drive against patent medicines?

Before the war it was never possible to attack patent medicines in a big way, because the Press, which would have had to make the exposure, lived partly off advertisements for them...."

So, that seems more about trying to be rid of snake-oil nonsense while no-one was dependent on the revenue, which isn't quite the same thing, but still has contemporary echoes. I'm going to have a dig round for more on this because I'd love to know how things like Picture Post survived with reduced advertising revenue. Was there state subsidy or was it all cover price? Because there are probably lessons to be learned for the magazine market now.

He also talked about how interesting Picture Post was in the war years, a startling mix of knitting patterns, bathing beauties and instructions on how to build molotov cocktails. This was due to the efforts of Tom Wintringham, veteran of the International Brigades, the only significant Marxist military expert of his time and inspiration for the Home Guard. He contributed many articles on irregular warfare to Picture Post and the Daily Mirror. Gives you a different image of the Home Guard doesn't it?

Mr Rennie also talked quite a lot about Architectural Review - about how the post-war paper shortages forced it to use different paper stocks in a single issue, which turned into a feature, characteristic of the magazine. And about the relationship between the leading edge architecture of the day and the photographers and architectural magazines. He suggested that there was an interesting research project in investigating whether the architecture was influenced and led by the way it looked in the pages of a magazine rather than in the real world. I bet you can say the same for contemporary technology designers.

Simon Esterson was up next and he was brilliant too. He also struck a really nice balance between discussing the economic/structural context and aesthetics. And showed a lot of magazines that you just wanted to rush out and buy. Like Twen from the 60s/70s. I'd never seen it before, but even with my blurry photo you can see how nice this spread is.

He also talked about Roland Schenk who designed many of Haymarket's trade titles and, starting with Campaign created a look that you see again and again in that sector. As per this issue of Account:

He also drew a link between George Lois who did all those famous covers for Esquire and Pearce Marchbank who did the same for Time Out. Both seemed to be creating the sort of arresting image that would act as an ad for the rest of the magazine, rather than just shouting at you about the contents. (I can't seem to find many examples online of Mr Marchbank's covers. Shame.)

He talked about the Architectural Review's Manplan issues, a creative triumph and commercial failure, which you can read about here and look at here, here and here.

And, he reminded us of the way that Q magazine reinvented the 'back of the book' when they launched. I haven't read Q for a thousand years, but I still remember the excitement of discovering that it didn't just tail off at the end, the reviews and listings and little features at the back had been paid attention to and were actually worth reading.

I'm going to leave the next two speakers for another post, because they too were excellent and I want to do them justice. And I'm not made of typing you know.

the year in pictures

One of the things that's still delightful about scouring the bloggiverse is the way it gives you a glimpse inside other professional lives. The things people think about, care about, pay attention to. It's good to see the world through other people's eyes, especially if they're enthusiastic eyes (I think I stretched that image too far.) One of my favourite recent finds has been The Year In Pictures (found, I think, via The Sartorialist); the thoughts and discoveries of James Danziger, who has his own art photography gallery. He writes about photography in a way that makes you want to know more. And he picks some really choice pieces out of YouTube.

best urban spaces deadline

The Best Urban Spaces project is coming along very nicely. So nicely, in fact, that we're going to set a deadline for the first set of images - the end of January. Dan has all the details here. But, basically, if you're like to contribute you need to get your picture in the pool by then. And, please, try and add some words about why it's a good space, or just a little detail about where it is etc. Then we can get Mr Goggin to start working his magic. Excellent. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all ends up.

map all dog-eared pages: west end chronicles

I'm a big fan of books like this; books where history, geography, anecdotes and odd facts bump together into a mash of stuff you wish you remembered when you were walking about. Because then you could pass an address and say something knowledgeable, historical and amusing about it. I can only ever remember one such address: 54 Berners Street. (And if you don't know about the Berners Street Hoax - have a look, it's genius.) So, I thought that maybe building a map of these things might help:

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page 10 : William Douglas, fourth Duke Of Queensbury, better known as 'Old Q' who lived at the turn of the eightenth century in a large property that stood between Old Burlington Street and Saville Row...had other, more disconcerting eccentricities, like consuming a supper of roast poulet and lime punch every midnight, and then being woken at three in the morning to take a meal of veal cutlet.

page 13 : At 1 Seamore Place, later razed to extend Curzon Street west, lived the colourful Alfred de Rothschild, who liked nothing more than to stage circuses at home with himself as ringmaster, cracking a long whip. He had his servants well-trained. When a guest once asked for milk in his tea a powdered flunky responded in a flash: 'Jersey, Hereford or Shorthorn, sir?'

page 26 : The Dorchester was the first setting for Foyle's literary luncheons. In their early days these featured the novelist DH Lawrence, the actor Charlie Chaplin and the Ethiopian ruler, Haile Selassie. When Sir John Gilbey of the gin distillers spoke for one and a half hours, causing a guest to fall asleep, William Foyle, the bookstore's owner, approached the sleeping gentleman and hit him on the head with his gavel, only to be told by the awakened guest: 'hit me harder, I can still hear him'.

page 29 : In 1935 (the Grosvenor House Hotel) was the setting for a most unusual event, an aromatic dinner held by a strange new organisation - the Smell Society - founded by the eccentric lawyer Ambrose Appelbe, who later represented Mandy Rice-Davies. Applebe hoped to refresh London nostrils with sheets of paper impregnated with the smells of the seaside and create new words to describe the smell of things such as roast turkey and tar.

page 126 : The Blakes moved half a mile to Green Street (now Orange Street) by Leicester Square. And it was while living there in the summer of 1783 that Blake witnessed a rare phenomenon - a fiery blue meteorite with an orange tail that shot over the London skies. It lit up much of London and inspired a number of his paintings as well as the line in the poem 'Tyger'. 'When the stars threw down their spears/ And water'd heaven with their tears.'

page 226 : Soho, fittingly, was home to Britain's first espresso coffee bar: Moka, at 29 Frith Street. Behind the venture was a Scotsman, Maurice Ross, who bought Britain's first Gaggia machine from Pino Riservato, a travelling salesman specialising in dental equipment who was so concerned at the poor quality of coffee on offer in Britain he acquired the UK concession for the machine...
... the cult US writer William S. Burroughs, subjected the Moka to what he called 'para-psychic bombardment' - sessions of recordings and pictures. 'Now to close in on The Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there. The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy haired wife and slack jawed son, the snarling counter man. I have them and they know it.'

page 230 : In the 1960s De Hems became popular with music business people, for it was said that the bottom three places in the charts could be bought in the pub's Oyster Bar.

unsure

I saw this today, plastered on a couple of buildings in Finsbury Square. No idea what it's about, but I can imagine this image coming in handy for many presentations. Please help yourselves.

reskilling for an age of things

After the toy-hacking workshop I realised how awful I am at soldering. Not that I expected to be good, I haven't done it since I was 12, but I want to be good at soldering, and I'm not entirely sure why. Obviously it's partly because I like all that MAKE magazine stuff and I feel like if I'm good at soldering those people will like me. And it's equally obviously partly mid-life crisis re-connect with my Dad stuff. (He's an engineer.)

But I think it's something else too.

I suspect it's my unconscious telling me that I'm not equipped for the world  we're going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That's an increasingly abstract and useless thing. Because, however the future turns out it seems like a knowledge of the thinginess of things is going to be important.

We might be living in an age of thingy abundance with 3D printers, self-replicating spimes, fablabs on every corner and some kind of ebay/etsy service offering short-run custom manufacturing with versatile African factories. We'll make all our own things, and remake them a little later into a lamp. Understanding the logic, feel and physics of things will be as useful and rewarding as cooking.

Or we might be living in an age of thing scarcity where the carbon-cost of producing new objects is too high to feasible most of the time. You won't get a new radio / washing machine / pair of socks when you want one, you'll have to repair the one you have. (Anne and I always talk of this as the 'retreat to high ground' scenario.) Obviously soldering etc will be handy then too.

And, as ever, the future will probably be some combination of both those scenarios, plus some other scarily unpredictable things.

But that's probably why we're also feeling the urge to grow vegetables on our little balcony, and the need to be able to sew, cook, put shelves up, change a tyre, stuff we've never really thought about before. It's not just a disconnection from craft-skills, and a recognition that tinkering with things is both satisfying and effective, it's an evolutionary response. It's my brain telling me it doesn't know the right things. And my DNA telling me I don't know the right things to pass on to Arthur.

(video is an example of poor soldering skills, it's a kit from Maplin that's supposed to be a scrolling message. I screwed up somewhere and it's random scrolling patterns instead, which are quite pretty.)

rung tones

My phone's looking nicely aged now, and I've been trying to equip it with appropriate sounds, or at least sounds that I like. And I've been trying to make some of my own. I'd been veering towards trying to use more natural sounds. I've always been struck by the crossing signal sounds in Amsterdam. They sound like a woodpecker, like there's something inside the traffic light hammering on it, and I like that. (That's probably how it works). And I once saw a Japanese train guard using two large, quite resonant blocks of wood to signal departure, instead of a whistle. I was trying to avoid more digital swoops and bleeps and get something more organic. What a pathetic hippy.

And it really wasn't working.

The sounds were nice coming out of the laptop but they didn't work in context. They were too pallid and natural to be useful as alerts. It was like a fire engine trying to get people out of the way by plucking on a mandolin. I couldn't hear them if the phone was in my pocket, and if it was on my desk they were drowned out by the vibrating. I wish I'd read Chris's notes on The Design Of Future Things first, because it's clear I was pursuing the Don Norman Natural Sounds Fallacy:

"p59: Natural Interaction

Although simple tones and flashes of white or colored light are the easiest ways for designers to add signals to our devices, they are also the least natural, least informative, and most irritating of means. A better way to design the future things of everyday life is to use richer, more informative, less intrusive signals: natural signals. Use rich, complex, natural lights and sounds…

Like what? This is one of the most irritating passages. The only example is ‘the sound of boiling water’, which is trite, as it’s actually water boiling in a kettle. If you start using ‘natural’ notifications, they aren’t natural to the task in hand, and are therefore a learnt association. This is just how it has to be for intangible interactions. Even the most natural – a ringing bell of a phone call – is a learnt sound, from over a century of use. Notifications are a Hard Problem, given the palette of interactions we can use and the design constraints."

He's completely right. This is a really hard problem. You don't hear a gently knocked woodblock in a crowded cafe because a) you're not tuned to that sort of sound as an alert and b) it's not sonically distinctive in that environment. It just melts into the ambience. The sweet spot is un-natural enough to be ear-catching but subtle enough not to be jarring or embarrassing. And, learnt association is really powerful and useful here, as this Nextel example illustrates (bottom of the article) (via Intentional Audio).

I tried experimenting with almost all of these, really interesting sounds, made by some of my favourite sound people. And, again, they didn't work. Too subtle to be noticed unless they were loud. Or too jarring to be socially acceptable. This, for instance, is a lovely noise. Gentle, organic (ish, in that it's a bell). But it's drowned out by vibration and in a noisy environment you don't hear the bell striking, it just sounds like a high whine. And this, even more organic noise has much the same problems.

I guess as technology learns to be social it's also got to learn to be polite. And the best way for a sound to be polite is for you to be able to hear it, but no-one else. And you can't do that with volume, you have to create something that's personal and relevant to the listener - something they're attuned to, like the way you can hear your own name through a drone of conversation.

So, I thought a good thing would be to use sounds that meant something in particular to me. I stole/edited/made this (which is my favourite guitar noise ever) and found this (which is everyone's favourite robot noise). This seems to work well. I'm tuned to these noises so I notice them at a lower volume than I would a preloaded alert. Which means they're less intrusive to everyone else. And I notice them because they're musical, they feature change and tension and release, but incredibly compressed into a short period of time and a narrow tonal range.

I suppose, as we start to create more devices that are designed to hover at the edge of our attention music could have more of a role to play in 'ambient alerting'. We don't have to learn the musical cues for 'be anxious' or 'be excited' or 'calm down' or 'he's a baddy' - we've been trained in them by lifetimes of movies etc. It's more comprehensible than flashing lights.

I'm glad I tried making sounds though. When you've got all these digital tools in your laptop you're often tempted to think you can do anything. It reminded me that you can't just diletante your way into some things. Some things are just hard. It makes you realise how clever all these people are.

taking the plunge

A couple of summers ago Arthur and I went swimming at Parliament Hill Lido and saw some excellent photos of lidos and swimming by Ruth Corney. She just wrote to tell me that's she's got a new show on about the lido, bathing pools and general environs of Hampstead Heath. Fantastic looking stuff again (that's one above). The show finishes on January 27th so hurry along. Details here.

light blogging

We went to see the Anthony McCall show at the Serpentine today (as suggested by Ted). Absolutely lovely. My silly picture, obviously, doesn't do it justice.

beards and magazines

I owe you a proper update on the 'going to conferences about things I don't know about' plan. But here are a couple of the more unexpected things that popped up, and that are approaching soon. You may be interested.

The first is a one-day conference on magazine design at St Bride LIbrary on the 25th of January, looks to be very good value at £60.

The second is an evening of dicussion about facial hair at the ICA on the 29th. I feel the need to remain unshaven until at least then.