The Digital Companion
The online journal to Offscreen Magazine — for all the things that don't fit into the magazine. We also regularly publish behind the scenes info about the making of Offscreen. Why not follow along and grab the RSS feed?
I’m very excited to launch several new Offscreen products today: Offscreen Wearables and Offscreen Paper Goods. You can preorder them now through the Offscreen website only, shipping of all items will start early July.
I’ve had the privilege to work with a lot of talent on these products, such as Eva-Lotta Lamm, Tim Boelaars, Justin Mezzell and Jared Chambers. My sincere thanks to all of them for making it possible!
Our shirts are printed in Germany on reliable American Apparel clothing. I’ve been thinking a lot about what brand of shirts to use. Frankly, I’m not the biggest fan of American Apparel as a brand, but their shirts have become a kind of standard in our industry — we know our size and we know what quality to expect. So for this first run, I went with AA.
The two inaugural posters are printed by the same printer that makes our magazine on similar, but slightly heavier, 100% recycled stock. In order to offer them at an affordable price that includes shipping, I’ve decided to fold them and ship them in steady envelopes instead poster rolls, which reduces shipping cost dramatically. Compare the current price ($19) to sending a large-size print from Germany to the US in a poster roll ($42).
I always loved the idea of venturing out and producing complementary products for Offscreen, and this is a first step into this direction. Depending on the success of these four new items, I will continue to work on more shirt and poster ideas. Feel free to get in touch if you have some great ideas you want to share.
As part of this announcement, I’m also launching a new Offscreen website. Although the look hasn’t changed much, the underlying code has. So if you’re experiencing any teething problems, please do let me know and I’ll have those fixed asap.
I hope you enjoy the new shirts and posters. I can’t wait to see them pop up in our community around the globe. Please send any feedback straight to me. Thanks!
Kai Brach
Founder/Publisher
Our “Desktop” series features 5 inspiring workspaces every week.
Photos via Simple Desks & Minimal Desks.
At Work With: Marius Bauer, Founder of Thrives
What did you do before you came to work today?
I have this thing to watch the sunrise. On a beautiful morning like today I take out my bike and go out of town for a few moments. I like that. It gets me off the screens I use for work and I have a few minutes to organise my day. After that I listened to my Soundcloud feed, took a shower and got ready for work.
Where is work for you?
When I read this question first I was about to say work is everywhere. Like Joe Gebbia used to say “once you realise that the world is broken” you can see work in everything, which I think is a great way to look at it. Physically, while I work on Thrives I usually work at home in Munich or in our offices in Vienna and Athens. If I work with my clients I am with them in their respective offices like Redmond for Microsoft or Shanghai for China Mobile.
What do you see when you look out the window?
Larry, my neighbour. Well, maybe friend. He’s a pigeon that lives outside my window and likes to scare the hell out of me in the morning. Other than that the wonderful patio with this gigantic tree and the balconies of our neighbours.
What are the first few apps you launch every day?
Thrives, Rdio, Flipboard, Mail, Photoshop, Illustrator, Podio and Asana. Oh Skype and Chrome of course. That´s basically it for the day.
What’s the most exciting thing that happened at work lately?
Since I started design work in 2003 it was always one of my dreams to design the default wallpaper for Windows. Last summer I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Microsoft on Windows 8. Seeing my work in every hardware store on millions of Notebooks and Tablets is still surreal. But awesome!
After this really exciting project I had a desperate moment. I realised one of my dreams that motivated me and which I spent 10 years of my time on just happened. Well, I fortunately was working on my own first app back then and most recently we just publicly launched Thrives — on Friday! Its an exciting week right now, we are very curios to see how people will use Thrives and to listen to their feedback!
What are you looking forward to this week?
Finally being able to find all the great things I posted on my social apps in the past and discover new things through the profiles, feed and search that we just launched with Thrives.
Something on the web that made you smile today:
Yes, foxes. I love foxes. And that really casual moment of this boy having fun with his dad.
Do you listen to anything while working?
Soundcloud and Rdio are my best friends when it comes to music. Though, today I am streaming the preview of the new Mount Kimbie on NPR
Your favourite item in the office:
My new XTable from Kibisi in Denmark. I was looking for a standing table for quite a while. This one is awesome. Just look at the handcrank to adjust the height!
Plans for the weekend?
To see the people that are important to me, and to look more into my plans to travel to Dijon this summer. I have only been to Paris yet and there’s this lovely place in the south of France called Le Flamant Rouge where we would like to go to at some point. Fortunately, Dijon is on the way there ;)
What are you going to do after answering this last question?
Drink some fresh lemonade and finish off the design for profiles on our mobile app for Thrives.
RKR Chair by Lagomorph Design.
At Work With: Nik Fletcher, Product Manager at Realmac Software
What did you do before you came to work today?
Ran a couple of kilometres, made breakfast for my wife, and fed our two cats.
Where is work for you?
Realmac HQ in sunny Brighton, England.
What do you see when you look out the window?
I’ve got a desk in our back room which faces onto a residential complex, but honestly the buildings aren’t that tall and I can mostly see the sky.
What are the first few apps you launch every day?
I’m normally pretty quick to pick up my iPhone in the morning and my ride in on the bus means the first hour of my day is spent catching up on overnight news and emails.
In order of use this morning: 1) Instagram — I’ll let iOS Mail download its messages in the background as I check my feed. Images are much easier to process first-thing in the morning. 2) Mail — I don’t use any fancy mail apps. Mail works really well for me. Whilst I try to avoid reading too much mail before I leave the house (the bus ride to work gives me plenty of time to process everything) I will take a look over the emails and respond to anything that’s pressing. 3) Reeder — RSS for things. I subscribe to very few feeds, and go out of my way to constantly prune subscriptions to their bare minimum, so it‘s easy to catch up on news.
What’s the most exciting thing that happened at work lately?
We’ve actually got a lot going on at the moment: a big project of mine is really (like, really) close to wrapping up and seeing the finalised illustrations for that project appear has been particularly exciting. Oh, and we’ve just announced Analog Camera!
What are you looking forward to this week?
Getting some big projects wrapped up. I’ve been working on one of these projects for over a year, and it’s incredibly close to wrapping up.
Something on the web that made you smile today:
Do you listen to anything while working?
A mixture of movie soundtracks, classical music, and favourite bands. I’m really enjoying the EP from a relatively new British Band, Eliza and the Bear, right now.
Your favourite item in the office:
I don’t know about “favourite” item, but the shortlist is: our office espresso machine, and the gigantic vinyl toy for this as-yet-unannounced project. It’s about a metre tall, and about that wide.
Plans for the weekend?
Things have been pretty mad at work this week, and I haven’t even thought about weekend plans. Thanks for the reminder that I should probably do some errands, go for a run, and play some Xbox. ;)
What are you going to do after answering this last question?
Make some tea, wrap up some app localisations, and check what I’ve missed whilst writing these answers. Thanks for chatting. :)
Nik is a Product Manager at Realmac Software.
Facet Mugs by Vespoe.
Our “Desktop” series features 5 inspiring workspaces every week.
Photos via Simple Desks & Minimal Desks.
Beech Filing Trays by Manufactum.
Letters to the editor
Hello Kai,
Hope you are all doing very well.
Last year I got a surprise of my life, Offscreen Magazine. I found the first issue in an art and design book shop in Clerkenwell, London. At that moment paying £8 for the mag was not easy while this tiny amount of money once fed me for nearly a week. So actually I didn’t buy it at first.
However the elegantly taken cover photograph called me in my dreams continually even I had no idea what it was about. I knew I needed to buy it asap. I went back to the book shop a couple of days after and found it at corner of the bookshelf. I fell in love with it immediately. It was not only because of the beautiful look, but also the people and their stories reminded me something I used to do/have. (Now I am more than happy that I made a correct decision especially when many people moan that they missed the first issue.)
More than 10 years ago, an era when there were tables with backgrounds, Java Applet water reflections were everywhere, CSS was only for decorating text and hyperlinks, Macromedia ruled the animation world with Flash and Blackberry was only known as a fruit. I graduated from uni with a degree of digital design. I learnt how to construct a website day and night. When I was in high school, I built several websites for my own interest. I used to love web design so much! However I was disappointed with the reality in this field — no fixed deadlines like print media, people didn’t respect it enough. So I dropped out and became an editorial designer since I always collected beautiful and informative magazines. I do a very good job at balancing text and pictures together nicely. But when I have been getting better and better at InDesign and the user-interface of Dreamweaver seemed to be more and more unfamiliar, I thought I would be labeled as an editorial designer for my whole life and would never have any chance to code again.
Interestingly the web design field has moved in a different direction in the last few years: more intelligent, more creative and more fun. It makes me want to do some web design work. I was very lucky that I got the opportunity to have some web design training courses and do some web design work recently. It allows me to understand the stories in your magazine a bit more. But they always inspire and encourage me to practise more. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this magazine! As an editorial designer I can tell your efforts of managing nearly everything of this magazine yourself is uncountable; as a still-learning-very-junior-level web person I feel this magazine links this community in a brighter and stronger way and makes me feel I am not alone at doing this. Now I started to develop a better relationship with web design and hope I won’t give up on it again.
In a few words, thanks for bringing us such a great publication! Look forward to seeing more content either online or in print.
I wish you all the best,
Ting-Kai C.
Can a week start off better than this? No. Definitely not.
Of course, published with kind permission by Ting-Kai.
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