Although newspapers are struggling to work out what to do about the decline of the printed sheet, the death of print doesn’t seem to be anywhere near happening. The rise of self-publishing and print-on-demand services like Lulu and MagCloud are probably the everlasting afterlife of traditional publishing models. Less risk, less waste.
Despite Amazon’s Kindle 2 , the popularity of Classics, the iPhone eBook reader and Amazon releasing a Kindle reader for the iPhone, it is still pleasant to touch and smell a paper book or magazine and there are some things only paper can still do, like folding.
Onlab have collaborated with illustrator Tobias Krafczyk to create a special Intersections supplement for Domus magazine.
The march issue discusses the mechanisms, strengths, frailties and possible scenarios on the eve of Web 3.0.
For us, the tools, services and problems of the new or other internet are commonplace and part every day life - both at work and in private. From personal experience we know that the Web is a powerful medium, but it is not the only one.
To contrast with the discourse about the impact of the web, we decided to produce an Intersections that only the printed form of a magazine could create and a possibility for tactile interaction by the reader.
The result is in the above video – the reader must fold all the pages of the magazine in to turn the somewhat Cubist looking shards of image into “Miss Web 2.0”.
It’s a nice idea and a clever take on the issue, but I can’t help feeling there are similarities to cinemas installing seat-rumblers or 3D glasses in an attempt to halt the rise of TV in the 40s and 50s.
It also reminds me of Mad magazine’s famous Fold-Ins, which isn’t a bad thing at all.