Posts Tagged ‘newsletter’

Perspective Magazine Feb 09 Released!

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Another two days have passed and the time is ripe for yet another thinkMoult post. As the title suggests, the Perspective Magazine for February 2009 has been released today. (The actual date was meant to be Friday, but somebody forgot to tell people to collect it Friday morning – oh well, no harm done) … and as promised, here is a snapshot (click on the thumbnail for a larger resolution) of it. Sometime in the future I plan to allow people to download digital .pdfs of these magazines, but until then you’ll have to make do with snapshots. Well – enough blabbering, here it is!

perspective09

In slightly more unfortunate news, apparently my previous post about the importance of the design phase in Perspective has caused one of the editors in the team to be quite angry. I’m not quite certain what it’s about, but one of the reasons is about “talking about it online”, so I shall respect her views and will not disclose further information. In my efforts today to figure out what exactly went on during the Perspective meeting (apparently this one was a bit more eventful than the usual session), I came across an email my lead editor sent to all the other editors, urging them to be stricter on time management. Further enquiry showed that my lead editor also spent most of today’s session telling people off on deadlines and such. I applaud this action and sure hope design can be allocated more time, and hence become a more serious part of the creation process. Of course, this doesn’t just benefit me, it benefits everybody in the team, especially the editors as they know work will be handed in on time.

I apologize for any ignorance I might’ve displayed of the system – and I offer my suggestions to improve time management and incorporate designing more as beneficial and constructive criticism – not as bait for arguments or even personal attacks. To prevent further misunderstanding I have stopped comments (yes, you lazy lot can go back to using your feed readers and not bothering to comment) on the post, and hope to have this issue cleared up soon.

Perspective Nov 2008 Distributed

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

For those who remember the previews I gave of the first Perspective issue, I’m proud to announce that just a couple days ago the second issue of Perspective has been published and delivered, all waiting for distribution this coming Monday. Yet again, I haven’t got my camera out to take a picture of the published edition (always looks better in print!) but what I do have is more screenshotted thumbnails, just like last time.

This month’s issue features a happy yellow design, adorned with silhouetted acrobats on each page, as well as slightly modified first page. I actually had some ideas for a-pimpin style but schedule clashes prevented these from being realised this issue – perhaps the next issue might get some love? This issue was done with Adobe InDesign, as per request from somebody who dealt with the printers last time, but turns out that’s not what they want at all. I plan to take this into my own hands and organise the printers myself for the next issue.

The .pdf is not up for download due to some space issues I’d rather not provoke, but hopefully a proper photograph of the printed issues with good lighting will make up for it (in the unforeseeable future).

Ah, enough of the waffle and syrup, here there be previews! (Again, click on the image to get a higher resolution image)

Again, apart from the compulsory usage of InDesign, a great deal of open-source applications/projects were used in the creation of this magazine. Including The GIMP, Vim, OpenOffice and Gentoo Linux. Yet again, open-source has not failed to contribute!

Unfortunately, there will not be a December issue, but there will be one released sometime early January or so. I wonder what colour to do for the next one … green?

Perspective previews!

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Answers.com tells me:

October 13 is the Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{“th day of the year Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{” in the Gregorian calendar. There are Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{” days remainingExpression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{“.

Wow, looks like they’ve got some errors on their site.

Anyways, my magazine has been distributed today. I would upload it here (pdf) so you could download it but my webserver is running a bit low on space (it’s 70mb). However, what I do have is some thumbnail views I screenshotted from Okular. There are two pages missing but that’s because it just doesn’t fit on my screen. Click on the image for a higher res:

Yes, all design, arrangement, compiling, etc, done by me. Applications used were OpenOffice, Scribus, GIMP (all on Gentoo Linux). Articles were not done by me though. (Note: the pages are imposed, therefore they do not go in the format page 1, 2, 3, etc. They go assuming they will be folded into a book.)