The Crowd Without, Flax018, our most recent digital anthology, is now live and ready for download. http://tinyurl.com/mz7uo5
Packed with delicately written poetry, this anthology features new work by poets from around the North West, including Segun Lee-French, Polly Atkin, Ruth Allen, Chris Culshaw, Andrew McMillan and Jennifer Copley.
And it features a lovely bison on the cover, doesn’t get better than that.
Unless, you happen to be in or near Lancaster tonight at 7.30, in which case you can see the the lovely writers reading their work live, at the Auditorium at the Storey (formerly the Storey Institute). See you there.
cover for flax018
Well, perhaps a slight exaggeration, but I stumbled upon Steven Hall’s site while browsing around Cannongate’s new portal and their twitter posts. The Preston based writer of Raw Shark Texts (Cannongate, 2007) launched the site late last year.
It is wonderfully unusual in its set up and in the fact that he (or the designer) doesn’t try to force the fish idea through the entire site. Instead, we have an intriguing, but still utilitarian front page with pretty basic internal pages. So we can get around the site and read it easily, but still enjoy this pretty darn attractive opening page. There are little shark animations available, however. I’m also pretty happy with the idea that it is a text based idea. Why be too corporate when you really don’t have to? Why not have a little fun? And fun this is.
Martin
The designer
I’ve recently come across The Penguin Blog, suggested to me by one of other social media site I’ve found myself a member of recently. And its lovely. I don’t normally find web and blog design exciting, its something I do at Litfest with reluctance and with constant muttering of obscenities when I’m forced to mess with CSS and <div> tags. But, as with all things Penguin, this has taken a literary blog to a new level.
Penguin Blog 29 January 2009
You can’t go wrong with thier nice orange, but the subtlty of application is really nice, as is the type style. Very clean and simple.
But, its about content isn’t it. And the content is excellent. Anyone interested in publishing, from now matter which point, writer, designer, editor, publicist, will find it interesting. I am particulalry taken with Sale Manager Fiona Buckland’s peice on selling books in hard economic times and what it could mean for us, at Litfest and Flax. And my conclusion is that it is about value. What Penguin offered back in the 30s and today with its recent big ideas and similar ranges, is brilliant value. They look beautiful, they are interesting, they are accessible. And you don’t even have to talk about the cost. The are not “value for money”, just value.
All hail Penguin!
Martin the designer
Litfest
