It’s been a very busy few weeks in the studio due to the start of a new project, Phone Book, for Microsoft and Windows Phone. As I sit here typing, our Adana Letterpress machine is in the middle of printing book covers, Emily happily tending to it’s rollers, pressure settings and ink supply. We’ve also been spending time in the shadow of the Heidelberg at a Litho printers and we’ve been filming lots of time lapse stuff which will form part of a film we will make about the whole project.
So, what is the project? We were approached a few weeks back by MS to invent something to help phone developers turn off their screens when they start inventing. We spent quite a bit of time thinking, playing, talking with people that know lots about this stuff. We covered our studio wall in post it’s and made a few prototypes. And finally, well for this first stage, we came up with an idea based on sketching, not just in the physical sense, but more as a way of thinking.
It’s a sketch book that comes with some nice things to aid the sketching. Long concertina pages, a Windows Phone stencil and a cool paper prototyping pop up phone section in the back will hopefully get app developers designing, or at the very least, wrecking the pages.
One of the challenges was to make something that gets used, not just kept, because it looks too nice to ruin or mark. Yes, each one has been lovingly letterpressed and hand bound, but we’ve also chosen paper made for sketching, not glossy perfect paper you wouldn’t want to mark.
We are right in the middle of production, so expect more photos and videos soon. Here’s a link to the projects Flickr set.