Dawn, one of our talented designers, has been locked away for months working on our new identity. We asked her to design something stylish and boutique and we think she’s done a brilliant job.

The new logo will appear on our printed stationary, signage and website.

We love it and can’t wait to start using it.

What do you think? We really want to hear from you.

Ellen Brush’s family added: "Ellen Brush worked closely with Ellen McGonigal and Lisa Clarke for many years, and we knew them as colleagues who shared her vision for Axon's future. We are delighted that the company will pass to them and feel certain that Ellen's legacy is in safe hands."

For further information please contact ellen_mcgonigal@axonpublish.com

ACHICA – the members-only luxury lifestyle store – has chosen Axon to publish its new magazine, ACHICA Living. The magazine will be published on a quarterly basis and will be mailed to members.

Editorial Director, John Smigielski commented: ‘We are really pleased to have won this account. Axon has produced the M&S Home catalogue for the past 7 years and also works with B&Q, so has extensive experience of the interiors market. And for me personally, as the former Editor of 25 Beautiful Homes magazine, it is great once again to be involved in an interiors magazine.’

ACHICA Living will cover a mix of trends, shopping, advice, tours of members’ houses, food, art, travel and gardens. The magazine will be edited by Emily Peck (who also edits the company’s blog) and contributors will include established writers such as Fiona McCarthy, the London Editor ofVogue Living; Pip McCormac, the Lifestyle Editor of The Sunday Times Style; and Zia Allaway, the Editor of Beautiful Gardens.

Quentin Griffith, the co-founder of ACHICA says: ‘We're delighted to be working with Axon to publish ACHICA Living, both in print and with an online version, which will give our members a broader offering and provide inspirational ideas for their homes and lifestyle. The magazine is an extension of our online content, driving further engagement with our membership base.'

This management buyout will ensure continuity of the character, independence and success of the company which Paul Keers and Ellen Brush co-founded in 1994.

“The combination of the publishing and creative skills of Ellen McGonigal and Lisa Clarke echoes my own partnership with Ellen Brush, which sadly ended with her death last summer,” said Paul Keers. “I’m pleased to be able to leave Axon in such talented and capable hands.”

Ellen McGonigal and Lisa Clarke will continue their close involvement with Axon’s clients, and build upon the agency’s success of recent years across catalogue, magazine and digital projects. “We are thrilled to be able to take over the running and ownership of Axon,” they said. “Paul and Ellen have given us a solid foundation upon which we can build, and we are really looking forward to working with our talented team of designers and writers and leading this company into a second generation.”

Editors Notes

Axon Publishing is one of the UK’s most creative publishing agencies, with clients ranging from Marks & Spencer to Michelin, Lloydspharmacy, Jamie Oliver and NCT. Its award-winning work ranges from catalogues and customer magazines to staff publications, digital communications and apps. www.axonpublish.com

Paul Keers, Founding Director Following work on titles such as Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail and the Telegraph magazine, and the success of his book, A Gentleman’s Wardrobe, Paul was launch Editor of GQ magazine in this country. He then went on to edit the Style section of The Sunday Times before founding Axon with Ellen Brush. paul@keers.co.uk

For further information contact Ellen McGonigal, Managing Director, Axon Publishing Ellen_McGonigal@axonpublish.com

Is there about to be another seismic shift dictating the format of client publications?

For years, customer magazines have sought to echo their newsstand equivalents, from their writing and photography to their look and feel. Format - the physical proportions of a publication - is another of those touchpoints. It's often appropriate for a client publication to mirror the format of a relevant newsstand magazine.

But A4 magazines can often be printed more economically than newsstand formats, and mailed out in standard stationery, which appeals to cost-conscious clients. There's also a sound reason for some A4 publications; they fit within standard office storage systems. So B2B clients, notoriously resistant to the newsstand image, often commission A4 magazines.

Unfortunately, any Creative Director will tell you that A4 is a horrible format in which to work. The solution, for a while, was to cut down A4 into a better shape. This worked well, until Green issues came to the fore in the last decade, and clients became concerned about the waste of paper.

Working for clients, and allying communications to branding, means that many issues other than newsstand association can influence a publication's format. We had a client once who wanted a magazine square, to match their branding. Perfectly feasible, and rather stylish; but it was the custom-made square envelopes in which to mail it out that broke the budget.

And mailing is often a concern with publications. When the Post Office introduced Pricing in Proportion, size suddenly became an issue of real financial concern for any mailed-out communication. Clients wanted their publications "handbag-sized", come what may; with the result that Harrods once circulated a Food Special, which had simply been reduced in size - so much that the copy was smaller than 6pt, and virtually unreadable. Where was their sense of proportion? It demonstrated how simply shrinking an existing layout was not a solution - and how well the Reader's Digest is designed.

But now, there is another physical format nudging at our creative and commercial consciousness - and that is the iPad.

There's already one magazine which matches the iPad proportions - Tap!, from Future. Not surprisingly, it's a magazine about apps.

There's no question that the proportions of the tablet are fast becoming an identifiable format of our age, in the same resonant way as the proportions of a credit card, a CD jewel case, a chequebook or a vinyl record sleeve. To physically associate yourself with a contemporary icon like the iPad can clearly hold value for some brands.

But there's a more significant reason for printing in that format. As many translations from print to iPad have proven, it's perfectly feasible to successfully redesign the pages of a magazine or catalogue for the proportions of the tablet. Yet the costs of that redesign and development would be significantly reduced if the print publisher started with a layout that was iPad sized.

If, in the future, publications are actually launched in both print and tablet versions, will we see more magazines and catalogues echoing that physical size as they are created simultaneously for both formats? How ironic it would be if the device which has so influenced our online reading had an impact on our physical reading too.

Originally posted on the APA Blog

(image the iNotePad)

Axon’s Babychange app for NCT has appeared in The App List of the world’s best apps, published by The Sunday Times.

Put together by a team of experienced app reviewers and aided by experts in specialist fields such as fashion and culture, The App List covers the best apps from beauty, finance, literature and travel through to productivity and problem solvers.

Featured in the Family & Children section, reviewer Andy Robertson explains how the NCT app “locates your nearest babychanging facility while you are out and about. It uses GPS to track your location, then places pins on a Google Map indicating the nearest changing rooms. The data comes from users, who can identify and rate the best places to change and feed your baby in their area.”

In November, Axon’s NCT app won the Best Mobile Solution award at the APA International Content Marketing Awards 2011. The judges said, "This is brilliant and simple. It's one of those ideas you wish you'd thought of, and it embraces all the capabilities of the platform."

The second Sunday Times App List was published on Sunday 29^th January, in print, online and on tablet apps. Those with access can see the List at http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/theapplist

Axon’s NCT Babychange app can be downloaded free via http://www.nct.org.uk/about-nct/nct-babychange-app

It's unusual for the design of a members' magazine to create publishing ripples. But the new issue of the Penn State University alumni magazine,The Penn Stater, does just that. It's a black-on-black cover, with the words "Penn State" fallen from the masthead to the foot of the page - and only the words "Our Darkest Days" are legible in white. (See above)

Penn State University has been embroiled in a sex abuse scandal, which has seen their legendary football coach fired and the university president removed. This has been a traumatic scandal for the university, and the cover, as well as the content, of their alumni magazine reflects it.

Of course, the design itself is not completely original - one thinks of this black-on-black New Yorker cover following 9/11. But acknowledging their "darkest days" as a print cover story like this is striking. For how many clients would have been tempted to ignore this kind of issue in their own communications? How many financial institutions, for example, would acknowledge a corporate scandal in their customer magazine? Historically, they've been more concerned to try and stress that it's business as usual.

When your bank has been bailed out, your car has been recalled or your university involved in a scandal, that's the one thing everyone seems to talk about. Except, historically, the institution itself.

Institutions and brands have been notorious for keeping unfortunate events out of their own publications. In their own media, whose content they controlled, they felt able to ignore the elephant in the room.

But the conversations which were once held in the pub are now held in public. And when the jokes are made on Twitter, and the comments are made in blogs, everyone can see that elephant.

It's true that alumni are very special groups, because they can never really rescind their relationship with the "brand" of the university they attended. You can change your bank or your car - but you can't take a university off your CV. And most people wouldn't want to change that connection, whatever the contemporary circumstance might be. The original relationship is that strong.

Perhaps that's why Penn State feel they can and should share their issues with their audience. And to make it their cover story, in such a striking way, is bold. Yet it only reinforces the idea that nowadays, acknowledgment and involvement are key elements in engaging any strong relationship between brands and audiences. If the relationship is strong, it anticipates such engagement - and without such engagement, the relationship will never be strong.

Originally posted on the APA blog.

Last week, another new digital communication was announced, whose content is assembled on the basis of a person's other online activity. There are several now, which draw upon Twitter feeds one follows, articles one "likes" or sources to which one subscribes, in order to aggregate "relevant" content. This one, I read, is "using personalisation and behavioural targeting to filter content",  "tracking the information users are reading frequently", in order to ensure that the content is "relevant".

Which simply raises the question of whether people's past content consumption really should dictate what they encounter in the future - whether people know what they are going to need to read.

Steve Jobs of Apple was notoriously dismissive of customers effectively determining for themselves what they will get. "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want'. But that's not my approach," he declared.

"Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." Could there be a better definition of a good editor, planning content ahead of publication?

I have been voluble in my criticism of publications which claim they are turning over their content to their audience. There are magazines which say they are being "edited" by readers, or even "edited" by Facebook fans. Of course, they are not really; readers are usually simply helping with a list of options whose relevance, feasibility and legality have to be determined by a professional editor. The claim to be "edited" by readers simply erodes the value of the job of editor.

For readers are not creatives. It is our job, in editorial content, to predict what will be relevant to particular readers, in five minutes time, five weeks or even, with some publications, five months from now. We start each "issue" (whatever form that now takes) afresh; and new ideas may have to replace old regulars if their relevance wanes. Or as they say on financial investment ads, past performance is no indication of the future.

Which is where, of course, this idea of tracking past and frequent use to determine relevant content simply falls down.

Sometimes, what we need is an editor - or a salesman - to put unexpected things in front of us, to explain why we need to consider a thing we had never previously considered, and why it will be relevant to us.

I hope we all remember the magnificent pitch which Don Draper made, in an episode of Mad Men, for the Kodak slide carousel. Instead of promoting its technological wizardry, its efficiency or its storage capabilities, Don pitched it as a time machine. "It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again...to a place where we know we are loved."

What people would buy, what was relevant to those consumers, was not a slide carousel, not an innovative product of its day, but an emotion - nostalgia. It took a creative to see that what was relevant to those consumers was something which the consumers, or indeed Kodak, could not have predicted.

Or, as Steve Jobs concluded, "Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."

Originally posted on the APA Blog

I've been intrigued by a recent post in which influential US social media guru Avinash Kaushik proposes a new set of metrics to measure success in social media.

It comes down to four aspects: conversation rate (number of audience comments per post); amplification rate (retweets per tweet); applause rate (number of "likes" or "+1s"; and economic value (conversion into spend).

Now, Kaushik's post is about measurement; the opportunities which social media provide for accurate and immediate assessment of success. But what struck me is that, even though we may not have had the means of measuring our publishing successes so easily in the past, those are actually the objectives which our content has always had. They're as valid for digital publications, and indeed for print, as they are for social media.

Conversation - isn't that the number of readers who respond to a call to action, plus the to-and-fro of a letters page or online forum?

Amplification - isn't that "pass-on", the way in which a good publication's readership always exceeds its circulation?

Applause - the growth in readership, the letters and e-mails of appreciation from customers?

And of course, economic value - not just the tracked items which sell because they are mentioned in a publication, but the longer-term financial benefits which editorial engagement can achieve.

In other words, the "new" social media metrics are actually a reflection of the ways in which publishing agencies have always measured success for clients, across all of the platforms on which we engage with customers. Those objectives are in our professional DNA, and underpin our experience. And while there may be new ways of measuring engagement with clients, it's still the content which we create, whether for social media, digital publications or print, which will best achieve it.

Originally posted in the APA Blog

(Photo: miriam via flickr.com)