Typophile

Adapting a blog to print

Pat Armstrong

Hi all,

I've been approached by a friend to design a print version of a blog he kept as part of an art/research project on the culture/dynamics of his suburb a while back.

The idea is to not produce a finished, bound book, but to display a stacks of individual pages (up to 200) on a long bench in a gallery space, for people to collect, assemble, and take home their own copy.

(Here are some photos from a previous showing of the project, in which the blog was just copied, unstyled, into an MS Word doc)

Does anyone know of any similar projects (insofar as adapting online content to print)? I haven't sat down to plan this out properly, but issues of how to deal with hyperlinks, post metadata, comments etc immediately come to mind.

Also, does anyone know if it might be possible to convince a book printer to deliver stacks of unbound pages instead of finished bound copies?

PublishingMojo

A book printer is, more or less by definition, a printer whose equipment and workflow are optimized so pages collate sequentially. A book printer can do what you want, but it won't save you any time or money.

If you're printing 1000 or fewer of each page, and the pages don't require high-quality color or subtle halftones, any reliable copy shop can do the job.

If you want the pages to look like keepsakes rather than lecture notes, specify an off-white sheet with a soft finish instead of the copy shop's default paper.

Trying to replicate the hyperlinks on the printed page seems contrary to the spirit of the enterprise. Is the original blog still accessible somewhere, so folks can have the full-on interactive experience if they like what they read on paper? If so, you can ignore the hyperlinks and give them the URL of the blog, maybe as a footer on the printed pages.

Michael Duggan

http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2009/01/things-our-friends...

you might find this interesting

Pat Armstrong

Thanks for the tips guys. "Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet" looks quite interesting – pity it's all sold out!

The friend in question, it turns out, has essentially unlimited access to a two-colour RISO machine, and likes the aesthetic, so it looks like everything will be produced on that. It's a small-ish (sub-1000) run.

Michael Duggan

seems like a new trend

http://www.theprintedblog.com

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL