Today, I received the latest edition of The Drawbridge. If you are familiar with this publication, then I imagine you'll stop reading now because you know how good it is and there won't be any point!For those of you who haven't seen it, do try to see a copy as it really is a fantastic piece of work both from a content and design point of view.
I tried to describe what kind of publication it is but desperately struggled, so I've taken the cheats way out and lifted the following copy from the website: "The Drawbridge is an independent quarterly delivering thought, wit and reflection through words, photography and drawing. It is in turn critically nonsensical and radically serious. With each issue, authors and artists cast an unflinching look at a selected theme. The surprising combination of views and insights pays honest tribute to the progressive reader"
Contributors have included such luminaries as John Berger, J.G. Ballard, Tariq Ali, Umberto Eco, Tony Benn and the list goes on... The publication is edited by the lovely Bigna Pfenninger. It is widely available in creative/literary booksellers and I was in Tate Modern last week and noticed it's available in the bookshop there.
The Drawbridge takes the form of a full-colour newspaper and it is well written, superbly designed and fantastically printed. In particular the images used throughout are of the very highest quality. Design is by Creative Director, Stephen Coates who explores and experiments with the newspaper format with dramatic effect - the way that illustration and photography are combined makes the two media truly complimentary.
Cynics reading this may just think that I'm waxing lyrical about this job just because it's printed on our paper ...however I hope those people who actually know me will realise that whether or not this job was printed on our paper that I would still think this was a lovely piece of work anyway!
The Drawbridge is printed on our Redeem 100% Recycled 70gsm. The size is 288x396mm Portrait and it is a 24pp self cover, saddle stitched with two wires. Up until issue 13, it was a full "broadsheet" size of 578x395mm, 12pp self cover and unstitched (which is a format that I personally preferred). Print is by Push.
Which folds out to reveal this A3 size invitation...
Design is by Thompson Brand Partners based in Leeds. Creative directors Ian Thompson and Phil Dean worked on the project. 
The job was recently written about in an article about 3D paper projects in Grafik magazine, from which I've lifted this quote from Ian Thompson "The budget was rubbish, of course, so we set ourselves the challenge of making this happen with one sheet of paper only. The solution was a single, folded piece of paper which had a pop-up building inside which could be viewed from inside and out - no gluing, just folds and a couple of cuts"
At this time, I had a colleague called Gary Nightingale based in Leeds, working with me at Fenner Paper and he was actually the person that dealt with this project. He now works for himself under the name Packaging Formats (
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