It's much harder to hack newsprint than pixels, but it can be done. Day one's lunchtime diversion was provided Ben Terrett and Russell Davies of Newspaper Club, which can print small runs of personally designed newspapers. We designed one for the hack weekend.
Newspaper Club has decoupled newspapers from news, said co-founder Russell Davies. "People are still happy to pay for newspapers, they just aren't happy to pay for news. Its really hard to wave a blogpost at people - the physicality of newspapers is important." Newspaper Club has printed papers of wedding photos as souvenirs, an end of year album for a Finnish paintballing group and plenty of experiments.
Platform, one wing of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, published Ball of Chalk - rhyming slang for 'walk' - with street-level historic photographs of a route in London. Hold the paper up at certain points along the walk and you can 'sleeveface' a past view of the street. Augmented reality via newspaper.
Another early project by Berg in Milan asked conference delegates to scribble down good restaurants or clubs they'd found that night, and sketch out maps to recommend good bars. Berg compiled those the next day, and slowly built up a layered map of the city.
What has worked best so far? Davies and Terrett have established a few principles:
• Abandon pastiche. You don't have to recreate a newspaper, and the first ideas people think of are invariably jokes on a newspaper.
• Pictures work really well, especially double-page spreads. Newsprint can handle big images.
• Don't worry about filling space - big text looks great, and so do big diagrams.
• And there don't have to be lots of pages. Four, or eight, is enough.
Some designers are too precious with their layouts. Davies said the aesthetic is rather like Geocities - it doesn't matter how it looks, it's just very pleasing to have made.
Meanwhile, in food-related hack news, developers have been Soda Streaming the milk. Fizzy tea is next.
