Paper sizes: learn your ABCs

Paper size is something we don’t give that much thought to, most of the time at least. If you have a printer (and you’re not in the US), chances are it is an A4 model. If not, it’ll almost certainly be an A3 inkjet, perhaps even one that can print onto oversized A3 – probably…

Book binding tips, tricks, advice and secrets

I love what’s possible in digital design and production, but the truth is there’s something that digital products lack when compared with print. This missing quality is tactility, the effect of touch and physical behaviour as a part of the overall experience. Even in print this is all too often forgotten as a part of…

Print effects without ink?

How can you print without using ink, without applying some kind of colour to a surface? There are two processes that come to mind: embossing and die-cutting. They’re not generally options we get to play with as a rule, but that’s no reason not to look into the possibilities. Embossing can be done with print…

Paper Planes: Fly me to the moon…

Paper planes are a fun design exercise – and they’re even heading into space! Recently, purely for my own interests and obsessions, I’ve been putting together a new iPad magazine about longboards and longboarding. That’s very exciting, but there’s something special about working directly with real, tangible, non-virtual paper. Not just by putting ink on paper,…

Paper facts and recipes for discerning designers

Get hands-on with paper Graphic design processes are almost always about putting marks on surfaces, and those surfaces are almost always paper. We take this medium for granted, but do we really know much about it? We talk about ‘dead tree publishing’, reject the paperless office concept by consuming tons of the stuff, recycle it…

Flipback books: new direction or dead end?

We tend to take things such as book formats for granted, never really thinking about them as we read them and make content for them. There has been essentially no serious change, no innovation in the core standard design of books for centuries, unless you count the development of perfect binding and the paperback. Not…