Online > offline: we still love paper goods

Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)

It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design types larging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.

The exhibition covers the gamut of design: architecture, furniture, product, graphics, interactive and fashion. One of my favourite pieces was a bit of folly with a serious message: ‘Panda Eyes‘ a crowd of WWF Panda collecting tins, wired up to a camera in the sky to detect human movement and shift in sync as you walk around them. Its intention is to raise awareness of pandas’ plight in the wild. I think.

What I found interesting is that some of the graphic entries were really all about the relationship between online and print (and therefore arguably candidates for the interactive category). These three entries all had online generation in common: the articles, images, comment and opinion are all drawn from the crowd, using twitter, blogs and data to bring a concept to life.

Newspaper Club (which for some reason has a bit of an ugly website, but produces beautiful papers) allows anyone to create and print their own newspaper, without the need to be a multi-millionaire media mogul.

Here’s a particularly cool example that’s both useful and will please anyone who likes a bit of data visualisation loveliness. The Postcode Paper was an experiment from the Newspaper Club themselves that took information from data.gov.uk such as local services, crime stats and other useful stuff you need to know when you first move somewhere, like TFL transport links, and republished it in one handy, paper format.

(Photo credit: Newspaper Club)

It’s Nice That brings together the best of the creative industry in one place. As well as existing online, they also produce “a bi-annual printed publication, monthly talks and videocast, an online shop selling exclusive products as well as regular interviews and features with current practitioners.” I haven’t seen the print publication, but they feature some mighty nice stuff online.

And having recently received an extremely dull pre-conference magazine for SXSW, I can appreciate how something like The Incidental would be refreshingly interesting and bring the good stuff to your attention when wading through the programme at a conference. Essentially, it’s “a community-generated news pamphlet and website at international design events which offers debate, reviews, news updates and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about.”

This has given us some ideas for SXSW…