JonMack

Re: Sunburn

Yeah I did, Sam's gonna send it out to me Monday. Thanks for letting me know though man, was nice to meet you. Cool putting faces to forum names! First time I've been on a big big ride like that, but it was awesome.

:$

Couldn't have put it better myself. Awesome day, awesome atmosphere, and I'm sunburnt to f**k! Good times!!

Theres lot's of interesting stuff here, some good ideas, some bad ideas, and generally a lot of comments, which is always good. Regarding Lukes comments, my magazine is available at http://revmag.co.uk if you want to have a look at it. I worked on it for about 4 months and although I had the layout sorted within a few weeks I was constantly chopping and changing it until I produced something I was happy with. If you want to see a high quality version feel free to drop me a PM and I can send you over a link to one. Giving yourself a deadline of August is very hard, I don't know who you have working on the project with you, but I can say from experience, trying to do it all yourself is very hard work. I ended up resorting to other peoples articles and photographs because I didn't have the time to get out and get that kinda stuff done, I imagine you will be getting people to write up articles and do photography for you which is fine, as long as they do it properly, as many others have said, the last thing people want to see in a professional magazine is blurry photos or badly written copy. I proof read my work over and over again and I'm sure it still has some mistakes in, but I did the best I could. Something you really need to make sure you get right is making sure the magazine is consistent. No one wants to see 60 different page layouts so you need to try and bring some kind of coherence into it. When I designed mine I had 6 master layouts, and then the page layouts were generally done at random, although due to the masters, each page had certain elements in which were the same, the headers were always in the same place, page numbers, etc. It just generally makes the magazine easier to read. Make sure you do your research, I look through magazines now and I think, damn it, if I had done X feature here, or put Y element here it would have made it look so much more professional. Buy other magazines, lots of them, from cycling magazines to music magazines to graphics magazines and everything in between, you really need to check out a lot of the marketplace to see what other people are doing, and what kind of things people like. I can't stress enough how much I regret not doing proper research on this project. I kind of agree with certain people saying articles go out of date quickly, and that everything should be online, blah blah blah. This is kind of true, I know of a magazine called One (http://believeinone.com) which is an online/print based magazine, they do previews of the mag before it goes to print, they then print it, and a month later release it for download. The magazine is full of adverts, which is to be expected, but also has decent articles in it. I suggest you download some to have a look at the layout and the kinda things they do. I found myself adding in music and film reviews too. I think this is good as it allows people to have a break from the constant stream of trials based information. I very much doubt you could fill 60 pages with purely trials based articles, assuming 1/3rd is ads it would still be hard to fill 40 pages monthly, so something like a 4 page section with a "what's on your headphones" kinda thing could be cool. Another thing Ride do is the top five questions section, where they get a pro/upcoming rider and interview them asking them simple questions and then getting their top five answers, it just helps break the magazine down into more manageable sections. Ride has the ability to get a few pages on news in the BMX world and new products coming out soon, this kinda thing isnt gonna be able to happen with a trials magazine as the marketplace is so small. Also if you do do an upcoming products section, please get the photos taken properly, the last thing I wanna see is some kinda shitty angle full page blurry camera phone picture of someones cranks. If the picture only fills 1/6th of the page, then have it that way. With some things such as full size photographs, it's fine to make them slightly bigger, I myself was printing pictures from a 6MP D50 as A2 posters, because the viewing distance was such that you wouldnt notice artifacts in the images. Make sure you look into viewing distances of magazines and see just how big you can blow things up. You probably need to get 30 or so people to hold a magazine at a comfortable position for them and then measure the distance from their eyes to the magazine, so as to get a decent amount of results so you know where you stand when it comes to enlarging. Once you chose a format, stick to it, I have 3 issues of BTM sat next to me currently, and 2 of them are one size, one is another size, this is so stupid, it may be fine to change the format after 3 years, but every 3 issues isn't very professional, as you can see from my critique on the Onza website, I take professionalism very seriously. Also BTM generally looks like an amateur magazine, if you want this thing to sell in shops, you need to make sure it's of a standard were it looks good against the other mags it's going to be placed next to. I know it's the only trials specific magazine out there currently, but what's gonna make people want to pick it up compared to something like Ride, Dig, Document or Sidewalk. I regularly look through those magazines in a shop just because the sports interest me, and if there was a trials magazine next to MBUK, someone might be tempted to pick it up and give it a read. The identity is very important, it took me nearly 3 months of work just to come up with a final logo, I was still adding in finishing touches about a week before the hand in date, once you get a decent name (not Tuck, please) get a decent identity sorted, and stick to it. Magazines like MBUK and MBR all have nice abbreviated names, BTM worked because it was simple, maybe you could re-use it, or at least think about it, because it was generally considered to be an alright trials magazine, from a design point of view it sucked, but thats something that can be rectified. I think I've gone into a bit too much detail here, if you want to contact me then feel free, my email address is jon@jonmack.co.uk and you can find my telephone number on my website if you find that easier. If you need any help with designs, layouts, concepts or photography feel free to give me a shout, I have just finished a degree in graphic design and after releasing a magazine I'm always up for doing more. I hope this has been of some use to you. Cheers, Jon EDIT: Something I didn't go into was advertising, purely because I don't know anything about it. This post is probably full of professional flaws but these are things I found out while designing my mag.

Sucks, I moved from Newport a week ago, been there for the last 2 years with a bike and had no one to ride with. Sorry dude, massive Bristol scene though!

Come take pics with Mark Charlie and I, I wont be riding much.

Well as far as I can remember we've all been saying the new MacBooks will be out in June anyway.

Jimmy Eat World - Here It Goes

Good work on failing at the end there, don't think you quite got the Joke. Err... how does she have these Pictures? I would have thought someone who works at an Apple Store would know a bit more than you, but apparently Not. Must we all now bow down to You?

I would have said he's definitely announcing it then, bearing in mind all the hype/banners up. I mean these banners: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06...t_pre_wwdc.html Apparently 10.5.4 is gonna be launched next week, along with news of 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is also going to be the first 100% intel OS X build.

What, WWDC next week? (9th-13th June)

I think him expecting £900 is a bit rich, £800 is better, but as youre a mate he might take £700 Changing harddrive is piece of piss, I've done 2 or 3, its literally a #0 screwdriver and a T6 torx driver. So simple. I used a guide on macfixit or ifixit or something like that, but it's pretty simple.

Above This Fire - Invisible Ink Their album is metal-core-ish but these demos are melodic hardcore and f**king sick! Well into them.

Speak to Nick, he works for the Apple Store, might be able to help you out a bit.

QFT I honestly spent less than 2 minutes on the site, and was sick. The pictures are all horrible, the navigation is disgusting, it's generally badly designed and is also very search engine unfriendly. None of your content can be indexed by search engines as it's a flash based site and the index page isn't valid XHTML. You dont even have any meta tags! How do you expect people to find your site? All I can say is congratulations on wasting a nice amount of money that could have gone to a decent developer, you just completely f**ked yourselves over. Oh and free hit counter, very professional! I personally would have used something like Google analytics. Mmmmmm tables, brings back memories of 1998! Christ, I didn't realise that there was more shit on there... About: Ask your web designers to look into legibility and basic typography skills, 10-12 words per line is generally considered the most pleasant for reading, also with large bodies of text you need to adjust the leading (line spacing) so it becomes easier to read. Obviously this would be simple if it was CSS/XHTML based, but as it's flash based, that requires going back to the developers to ask them to sort that out. The navigation is also very poor, rather than having previous and next arrows, some kind of scrolling box would probably better, maybe two columns, one for the staff and one for the introduction? News: Blank page, very professional Products: The two levels of navigation are horrible, also the text on the right hand side loses all formatting, and as such isn't punctuated properly, spaces after a full stop is generally considered to be the norm, you should probably look into getting that rectified. The pictures all have sharp edges and aren't really rendered properly, they need some kind of anti-aliasing. Also dropping a third navigation into the mixer doesnt help things at all. Also the "To be updated soon" isn't really very useful, is there no way they could set that menu to only show the active elements, in brake pads there are only 2 products but 5 boxes, useful! Dealers: That map animation doesnt quite look right to me. Also no instructions leave the user thinking for a few seconds, what am I supposed to do with this thing, some kind of "please click on your country for dealer information" may be useful. I liked when I clicked on Europe, no dealers came up, very useful. I didn't check any of the other continents but I assumed they would be the same. History: "The ONZA product history pages are updated this very moment, please return later" Something not quite right about this sentence, you should probably ask your designers to look into basic grammatical skills. Team: Ooh, very nice, a popup, with the address http://www.e-calibre.co.uk/onza/team.html Looking very professional! How about hosting it in your own domain, or even working it into the current site, also giving instructions for a user to type an address isn't very user friendly, especially when the site doesnt even work. Tell your designers that SWF files can actually be embedded into other SWF files in Flash, if they need a manual I believe O'Reilly do a good book, the link is here http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510589/ if they need it. Media: Neither photos or videos work, and the largest your wallpapers go is 1280x1024, now I'm a graphic/web designer, so I'm used to a large screen, so I've been using a 1680x1050 monitor for the last 3.5 years. However as 20" monitors are now starting to become commonplace, you really should look into designing backgrounds for that size monitor, at least. I'd probably offer them at the following resolutions 2560x1600 / 1920x1200 / 1680x1050 / 1600x1200 / 1440x900 / 1280x1024 / 1280x800 / 1152x864 / 1024x768 as they're considered standard these days. I also can't find any way of contacting you if I have a query regarding the site or products, I see a nice big link to the site developer, but I'm pretty sure they're not interested in my questions about the warranty on frames and parts. As you've now officially "launched" this site, and it's had over 3000 visitors from what the counter is telling me (I have a feeling this is bullshit), I would have thought it would be ready to go, but apparently not. You should have probably looked into rectifying some of these problems before putting your site into the public domain. I hope you find this feedback to be constructive, and not abusive. As a recent university graduate these are all things I would expect to be finished before I allowed the final product to be put online, you wouldn't put a frame out without proper testing and feedback, or a complete bike out missing vital components, so why put out your website? I know you're known for having a shit website, but for many people this is the first place they will go for information, when they go on there and can't even find out where to buy your bikes from, i'd say you're not really helping newcomers into the sport. A major part of your brand re-launch should be your website, so please try to get it right, or the onza bashing you've become used to over the last 5 years will probably start to make a comeback. There seems to be an overall lack of professionalism across the whole site, I would try to get it rectified asap. All the best, Jon

Photographing trials riders (including MANY sponsored riders) at an event with at least 4 other photographers who can give you tips IRL on how to get better > BBQ Every time.

It was yesterday (Wednesday) and I forgot to post a thread but happy belated bday, even though I wished it to you at midnight yest.

1. Are you aware of the rebranding? Nope 2. Are you aware of Aviva? Nope 3. What do you think Aviva operates as? I would imagine some kinda bank/insurance company.

Never saw this, all I can say is You have awesome taste in music

Haha f**k you

Haha awesome. Weird though, but as Si said,

Not really, but I get where you're coming from. Kinda.. but not, if you know what i mean? I want the swallows on my shoulder blades/collar bone type area, then the banner hanging between their mouths.

Errm... I just want swallows, holding a banner, and maybe some roses thrown in there too. It's to go across the top of my chest.