When we decided to go ahead with And Now It’s In Print, our motivations were many. We wanted to promote some great talent. We wanted to design something interesting. We wanted to show that print is still amazing. We wanted to prove that gatekeeping matters. We wanted to have fun.

I don’t think any of us had “I want to learn something about the way people communicate today” on our lists.

I’m a former magazine art director and newspaper designer. I’m used to laying out dozens of pages a day, and hundreds of pages in a week. Yet there were spreads inAnd Now It’s In Print that took days each. That would be simply unacceptable in a newsroom or studio environment, and in a project where we were all volunteering our nights and weekends it was astounding.

But the reasons for it became rather obvious after a short time, and I believe they came down to two factors.

• We were unable to edit copy due to our respect for what people had graciously allowed us to reprint.
• Many articles were written using non-traditional structures.

The first factor is a designer’s nightmare. Without an editor who can cut a word here and a paragraph there, design for the printed page becomes less about aesthetics and more about physics. It becomes an exercise in working out how can you fit all of the elements neatly onto the page. That’s a recipe for aesthetic compromise, something designers working in their spare time simply don’t want to make room for.

We left widows and orphans all over the place in our columns, because we didn’t have any other options. Without editors and sub-editors who could make judgements on which words could be trimmed and which phrases could be subtly re-cast we had no other choice but to let the words fall where they did naturally. We tried to fix things as much as we could, but the fact is we are not as happy with the body typography as we thought we would be. I actually lost sleep over this.

The second factor was the big surprise. Not a lot of people realise that before I became a designer, I studied journalism. Since then, even as a designer, I have been surrounded by professional wordsmiths. I had forgotten that there are rules to professional writing because I had been around professional writers for so long.

The rules that mattered to us as designers were the unspoken rules about structure –– especially as it relates to illustration. In newspaper and magazine writing, the copy of an article might rarely refer to an included photograph or illustration, but more generally it will not. The image will be captioned, so as to give the reader an understanding of what the image is referring to, and the article will assume the reader has seen the image and the caption. For designers this means there’s a great deal of flexibility as to placement of those images.

Not so with blog posts, however.

Blog posts are written in a stream-of-thought manner, where words and images co-mingle in the same paragraph, and where the author knows exactly when the reader will see the images in relation to the words. (For an example, see the original articles in And Now It’s In Print by Luke Ryan, Andrew McDonald, and Dan Hill.)

They’re not structured like pieces that were written for print at all. They’re more like television scripts, or entertaining presentations where the speaker has prepared some expertly-timed slides. Timing and placement of images in reference to the idea they illustrate is everything.

This then, is why And Now It’s In Print has some unusual and rather convoluted design tropes. Lines and arrows run from words to images, scale is thrown out the window, and some pages are frankly hard work. It’s like David Carson’s Ray-Gun, except we weren’t trying to be wilfully annoying.

Knowing what we do now will mean that we’re likely to approach the next edition (should there be one) somewhat differently. Having a skilled editor on-board –– and permission from authors to edit their work –– is crucial.

So to all the editors and sub-editors I’ve ever rubbed the wrong way throughout my career, I wish to apologise. Unreservedly. I now realise how good you made my work look, rather than the other way around.

This first appeared on Ross’ blog.

The Vine ran some pics from the launch and an interview.

StyleLines ran an early piece.

Lifelounge said nice things about us.

Budaeli.com mentioned us in passing, which was nice.

Start Up Blog called us “One of My Favourite Startups this year. The World Over.”

And Hannah Koelmeyer took some wonderful images at the launch, which are available on her Flickr.

All in all, we couldn’t have hoped for it to go better.

As long as I can remember, I’ve worked in a world where the conventional wisdom has been that print is dying. If you listen to a lot of pundits (mostly online pundits, naturally) you’ll hear that print is already dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.

The big stories in media for the past decade have been the collapse and decay of the formerly glorious print empires and the rise of a succession of online juggernauts. Everyone who works in the print media watched the final series of The Wire and recognised the glib refrain ‘we must do more with less’. We’ve heard it for over a decade.

But the strange thing is that while the traditional methods of producing newspapers and magazines might be going the way of the fax machine, print is very much alive. At the recent South By South West Interactive conference in Austin, Texas I was pleasantly surprised to see that in the very heart of the online world, people are finding ways to keep print alive and thriving. New web-to-print technologies are making print cheaper to create and distribute. Crowdsourcing and online collaboration are combining to give editors access to a pool of talent that the media barons of the past could have only dreamed of.

As if to prove this very point, in May a group of people got together and created 48 Hour Magazine in, you guessed it, 48 hours. The time between when they released the theme of the magazine to their thousands of hopeful contributors until the moment they finished designing and put it up on the online distribution system MagCloud was two days. Talk about doing more with less.

There are projects like this taking place all over the world, and there are businesses popping up to support these projects and to evangelise print. Newspaper Club is a website in the United Kingdom that provides you with all the tools you need to produce 500 copies of a 12-page newspaper. Why do they do it? Because they love ink on paper.

And you know what? I think we all do. I think that in some sense, we miss the touch of paper, the smudge of ink, and most of all we miss the days when information was something we could touch. I’m confident that we’ll be able to get ink on our fingertips for a long time to come.

Ross Floate’s latest project is as co-publisher of a newspaper of content originally created for the web entitled And Now It’s In Print.

You’re probably thinking ‘Hey, bloggers are citizen journalists; why don’t they act like journalists?”

Well, most bloggers are unpaid or woefully underpaid. Unlike most journalists, they’re not in a mad panic to provide a certain number of centimeters of copy to their editor by deadline in order to keep their job and regular paycheque. Bloggers are instead often motivated by influence and respect.

This means that instead of firing off an email blast or faxing off dozens of press releases, you need to carefully craft individual messages to each blogger. This message needs to display respect for the medium, for the individual blogger, and evidence that you (as the person seeking the blogger’s help) have read their blog and can demonstrate that what you’re promoting will actually be of assistance to the blog’s audience.

If this sounds like work, well it is. But the product you’re trying to promote is worth it, right? Put in the hard yards, treat your gatekeepers with the respect they deserve, and then maybe they’ll help you talk with their audience.

We work with a number of brands and other organisations to help them tailor their communications to a changing media environment. Please contact us to find out how we can tailor a communications plan for your campaign.

The book also features selected photography by Ross Floate.

It’s impressive, no doubt. But that was during SXSWi, the biggest gathering of geeks in the world. Are people still checking in? Yes they are. Take a look at this real-time visualisation of checkins in Austin Texas, and see for yourself.

We’ve worked with her on a number of projects – most notably the most recent Amy Gillett Foundation annual report – and have been struck by her eye for portraiture and her tireless work ethic.

Beyond her work in portraiture and reportage, Michelle is also building a reputation as a stand-out architectural photographer. We worked with her when were were promoting Analogue in 2009, and were impressed with the results.

Check out her new website, and talk to us if you’d like to have her work on your next project.