booktwo.org

So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun.

The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book.

The idea is, it’s a book to last you the week, through SXSW. A one-time pad for the festival. Customisable. Personal. Travel and accommodation details. You’re probably going to need those a lot:

Maps of Austin – different scales, and several basic grid plans. Useful for scribbling directions on, as well as navigation.

Planning diary. Schedule. All the talks that are happening, alongside your maps and diary. (Yup, that’s what the XML was for.)

I’ve never been to Austin or Texas before, so I stuck Wikipedia’s entry on Austin in there, and the Lonely Planet chapter on Texas (which you can buy and download here – nice). I did get in touch with Lonely Planet to discuss licensing this properly, but we ran out of time. One of the reasons this book is not for sale.

Finally, I wanted to use the book as my notebook for the conference – trying to avoid carrying around a guidebook, and a programme, and a schedule, and notes. (Remember the DIY Classic Notebooks?) There are 70-odd blank pages at the back, together with some helpful suggestions on what to write if you get bored or distracted.

That’s it. Pulled together in a few hours at the last minute despite planning it for ages. HTML -> XML -> InDesign for the talks schedule. Simple PDF resizing for the LP section. Basic-as layout for the rest, with some running heads and page numbers to minimise endless searching. Printed 10 through Lulu – £5 a pop, plus £25 to expedite shipping (because I left it until the last possible moment). Arrived in 4 working days. Done.

More photos at Flickr. More thoughts at SXSW and after. Do drop me a line if you’re going to be around.

Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.)

→ The full photoset is here.

I wanted to test Lulu’s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort.

(It’s a seriously good way of practicing your InDesign scripting skills too, all you book design nerds and Start-with-XMLers.)

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

And yes, I’ll make one from your tweets, if you ask nicely and pay me a lot of money.

Update: Here’s the very hacky, very simple script I used to get all my tweets, as several people have requested. Use at your own risk. There’s almost certainly a better way.

The above image is from the Future of Web Apps conference which happened in London last week – unlike the Print Is Dead blog, however, I was there, and I know that Richard Moross of Moo’s next slide was “Oh no, it isn’t.”

Moo’s presentation was entitled “How we turn virtual stuff on the web into beautiful stuff in the real world” and explained how they’ve use the latest web technologies to redeply a 500-year-old industry: printing. Expect to see more of this – here and elsewhere…

[Photo courtesy of Pixelm's Flickr stream]