Say
has anyone
seen my editor?
Modern
technology means having a production
centre 3,000 miles away should be simple.
Until the Internet connection fails, that is
By
Tony Sutton
It
’s 9.30 on a Saturday evening in early November. I
should be enjoying dinner with Jools; but, instead, I’m
in my studio feeling slightly nervous. I ’m on deadline,
producing a tabloid for a pal, Lesley Riddoch, who’s
3,000 miles away on Skye, a tiny island off the Scottish coast.
But a huge batch of electronic copy and photographs haven’t
arrived, I lost contact with Les two days ago, and I’m
increasingly convinced that the missing stuff ’s never
going to arrive …
Welcome to the wonderful world of Worldwoman, a “virtual”
newspaper written by women, for women around the world. Worldwoman
is an electronic paper that never sees a printing press but
is, instead, published in pdf format so that anyone with access
to electricity and a computer, can download the pages, read
them and – if they wish – print and circulate them.
But only if I can get these 12 damn tabloid pages produced
by Sunday evening …
-------------------
The
Worldwoman adventure began almost three years ago while I
was developing prototypes for the launch of Scotland ’s
broadsheet Sunday Herald in a converted bus garage in Glasgow.
Lesley Riddoch, along with editor Andrew Jaspan and consultant
Charles McGhee, constituted the “staff” of the paper.
Over dinner one evening, Les told me she was getting funding
for a new international paper that she hoped to launch in
a few months. Would I design it for her? For nothing? Sure,
that’s what pals are for …
Back home in Canada, it only took a few beers to persuade
another pal, Toronto type designer Nick Shinn, that Worldwoman
needed its own font. His contribution was a brand new font
– Worldwide – in a single weight.
Assembled for May Day 1999, the first edition of Worldwoman
appeared on the organization’s web- site for readers
to download. Now, two years later, Les had wondered if I’d
like to help her produce another issue to help generate cash
for a training program she had set up for female journalists
in Africa and the Middle East. That ’s why I’m here,
sweating. And cursing …
-------------------
Early the next morning, after sending ever more demented e-
mails to an unresponsive editor, I decided that – if
the paper was to hit the deadline that evening – I’d
better abavdon the page plan, forget the missing copy and
pictures and get creative. The first decisions were easy:
the paper was being dropped onto the website in single pages,
so page jumps made even less sense than usual. And Lesley
had told me earlier that I should highlight as many different
countries on the front page as possible, while leading with
the Afghanistan story. So the cover became an index –
anchored by the only decent picture I received ( thanks to
The Scotsman in Edinburgh).
The flow of pages was also an easy decision: news at the front
separated from features by a page of opinion, upon which I
had left space for an editorial column, although I had no
way of contacting the editor to ask her to write it. And typography
was a dream compared to the first issue: Nick Shinn had expanded
the single weight of Worldwide into a full range, so I chose
the bolder weights for news heads using a light version for
features. Contrasting sans faces came from his Brown family.
Main problem, apart from the missing stories, was that only
two photographs had arrived over the Internet. Rummaging through
a box of abandoned CDs helped resolve my dilemma. Amazingly,
I found a photograph of a Malaysian woman and child for a
story about midwives, while a wonderful low- res image of
the twin towers of the World Trade Center provided the perfect
photograph for a page of letters on the September 11 tragedy.
And a feature detailing why Icelandic women don’t take
their husbands ’names was admirably illustrated by art
from another previously abandoned CD.
Other news pages were handled by ignoring art altogether –
adapting “found ”art soon becomes gratutitous –
using white space, headlines, introductions and pullquotes
to counteract the grayness of the text. Feature pages were
a different problem. Most of the stories already had to be
trimmed to fit the pages, so art would need to be small and
understated, except for the last page with its story about
female circumcision in Uganda. By the time I got to this page,
it was late on Sunday evening, there was only this and one
other story, which was 1,500 words too long, left.Easy decision
… I spent a few minutes searching for an image of young
African women, manipulated it in Photoshop, wrote the headline,
found a strong pullquote and quickly built the page around
it.
After that it was plain sailing – make sure the page
numbers on the front page matched the stories inside, then
a final spellcheck, after which I converted the Quark files
into pdfs and zipped them to Jim Byrne, who runs the Worldwoman
website in Glasgow. Just one last detail remained to be cleared
up on Monday morning before I flew off to meet a paying client:
there was still a big hole on Page 7 awaiting an editorial
and I had no idea where Lesley was. I switched on computer
to find this message: “Ended up on Skye for weekend.
No plane off till this morning and BBC remote access system
collapsed, so no laptop. Any big PROBS?”
An hour later, the editorial was in place, the final page
shipped and I was halfway to the airport.
This year, Lesley Riddoch is planning more issues of Worldwoman
, but she’s promised to stay well away from small islands
on deadline days.
I hope.
This
article originally appeared in Design magazine, Spring
2002
