Newspaper Club has been making print sexy since 2009, and here are five projects to prove it — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

When Newspaper Club was started in 2009 by three friends who worked in digital media, print was having somewhat of an identity crisis. The entire world seemed to be moving online, and print was seen as a dying format. However, they noticed “that it was easier to read long-form content on paper than on a screen, so they looked into printing their own newspaper,” Newspaper Club’s CEO Anne Ward tells us. “They found that the newspaper industry was inaccessible to newcomers with a lot of specialised printing guidelines and high minimum order quantities. The goal of Newspaper Club was to break down those barriers and open up newspaper printing to a wider audience – whether that be printing one copy of something or thousands.”

Today, Newspaper Club helps both individuals and companies of all shapes and sizes to print their own newspapers. With three sizes on offer – mini, tabloid and broadsheet – Newspaper Club uses its impeccable printing techniques and mindful practices to make printing newspapers easier than ever. “We’ve printed close to 30 million newspapers for customers around the world, from big brands like Crocs, Vitra and Spotify to freelance photographers and designers to students and small business owners… so over the years we’ve learned a lot about what people need,” says Ward.

Print is definitely having its moment, and Newspaper Club knows this. They’ve been busier than ever helping individual creatives and companies bring their dream newspapers to life. And as Ward says, creativity in print is thriving. As an example, we’ve handpicked five projects that showcase not only the limitless possibilities of print, but also what Newspaper Club does best, and how they do it.

Dishoom: From Bombay with Love

When Dishoom debuted a new menu inspired by their travels to Bombay, India, the team decided to create a zine to celebrate the launch and for it to also function as a kind of travelogue, crystallising their memories and takeaways. In itself, the zine is a fountain of stories – it “includes a guide to Bombay from our Co-founder Kavi, new recipes from Chef Rishi, original artwork by Manuja Waldia, a photo essay on the storied ‘Gable’s’ restaurant by our friend Simin Patel (Bombaywalla) and the best spots in Bombay to grab Pau Bhaji as chosen by our dear friends. The zine is a love letter to the city that continually inspires us,” says Senior Designer Samuel Sutton.

The zine, as Sutton says, was intentionally designed to fall a “little outside our usual brand language. So much of Dishoom's design is about creating warmth and nostalgia for a particular time and place. With this zine, we wanted to showcase our love for the city of Bombay as we find it today. The zine is designed almost as a standalone fanzine rather than a piece of Dishoom branded content.For an elegant and classic editorial feel, the team leaned on Big Caslon as the primary typeface, offset by handwritten notes and scanned ephemera that lend the zine a “personal, scrapbook-type feel.” Dishoom chose Newspaper Club to bring the zine to life, opting for their ‘mini’ format, so it would be easy for diners to hold and sift through. “We wanted the traditional print process because we wanted the feel, the smell, the muted colours, the occasional misalignment. Charm and nostalgia are very important for our brand, and traditional newsprint brings both in buckets,” says Sutton. A print run of around 2000 zines was distributed at supper clubs hosted to launch the new menu, and displayed on host desks at Dishoom’s cafes to share with guests. “Newspaper Club allowed us to get that authentic newsprint result with all the charm we wanted but at a size, quantity, turnaround and price point that can be difficult to find for newsprint production,” says Sutton. “For what was a fairly small run for a small series of events, we got a super premium product.”

The Vocal Civilian

The power of typography is undeniable. Throughout history, this medium has catalysed and informed change – and this thought was at the heart of ‘CHARACTERS: Type in Action,’ an exhibition held at the Museum of Design Atlanta that explored how letterforms have shaped social movements, from women’s suffrage to civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights. The team behind the exhibition – Vocal Type and the experiential design studio Cilivization – decided to extend the message beyond the gallery through a broadsheet, The Vocal Civilian, printed by Newspaper Club.

With text by Kaleena Sales and design by Mark Baker-Sanchez, the newspaper is a collectable piece of print. It was not merely an afterthought, but an integral part of the way the exhibition was planned. “Newsprint has long been a tool for activism, spreading messages that challenge dominant narratives. For Characters, we wanted something tangible that lived beyond the exhibition. The Vocal Civilian expanded the storytelling, offering a deeper look at the histories and figures in the show while serving as an educational resource,” say the teams behind the exhibition and newsprint. “In an era of constant breaking news, print offers a necessary counterbalance – providing deeper context and a break from digital overload. Its permanence allows for reflection in a way digital formats often don’t.” 

The Vocal Civilian, with fittingly bold typography, draws your attention at once but doesn’t feel overwhelming. Its stark, structured layouts balance readability with impact, while the design “feels both historic and contemporary, with pull quotes and varied typography breaking up longer content – creating moments of brevity for easy skimming.” As such, the project was a huge success, with teachers, professors and librarians requesting for copies, so much so, that the print run was “gone by the exhibition’s end,” say the teams. The newspaper, printed in impeccable quality, added another layer to the exhibition – an important one. “It added interactivity and permanence,” say the teams. “Visitors could take the newspaper home, revisit the stories and share them. A newspaper lingers – it sits on desks, gets pinned to walls and is rediscovered over time. The newspaper extended the exhibition beyond the museum, keeping the conversation going.”

The Spectacle

The Spectacle – printed by Newspaper Club – is a biannual journal produced by Cubitts, the British spectacle-maker. The publication delves into cultural, historical, and artistic themes, and features a mix of essays, interviews, photography, and commissioned artwork. In a sense, The Spectacle is a creative avenue for Cubitts to delve into their admiration and curiosity for art, design, architecture, and craftsmanship – both within spectacle-making and beyond. For example, its latest issue (Issue 11) “focuses on how design changes behaviour, and the search for a happy marriage between designer and user, each shaped by the other, in a beautiful symbiotic ballet. In our ramble through design stories, we look at door handles and book covers, consider the urban grid of a town, tell a tale of two ashtrays, and celebrate the power of the nearly-but-not-quite-useless,” Head of Brand Charlotte Humphries tells us.

Inspired by traditional newspapers – the similarities felt in the traditional masthead and editor’s letter – the design of The Spectacle takes cues from Cubitt’s larger brand world. “The design of The Spectacle is informed, in part, by our design system and also by the content that sits within it,” says Humphries. “As with our wider brand, The Spectacle reflects our design language around font and layout – so that the reader seamlessly moves between our printed and digital environments. But we work with a different illustrator for each issue so that we bring a different soul to our precise layout structure each time.”

Printed in Newspaper Club’s ‘mini’ format for ease of use, the journal goes out with every single Cubitts order, and lives within its stores. Working with Newspaper Club was an easy choice for Cubitts. “Each issue is printed in over 20,000 units,” says Humphries. “Newspaper Club offers us the creative flexibility to print at this volume at an affordable price – and maintain the level of quality that we are looking for.”

Julia Stotz

The work of food photographer Julia Stotz has appeared in many heavy-hitting publications, such as The New York Times, Bon Appetit and Eater. Her delectable work is often shown online, so creating a physical portfolio she and her clients could hold and sift through felt important to Stotz. Having tried many formats, none of which quite fit the bill, she decided to print her portfolio using Newspaper Club’s ‘mini’ format. “I wanted to have something fresh and brand new for client meetings that no one had seen before,” she says.

Her work comes alive beautifully through the mini newspaper, the richness of the colours retained. “Newspaper Club has such great colour quality that is rich and vivid,” says Stotz. Upon sharing her portfolio with her clients, she found they were drawn to the colour-scapes and diptychs.

The comfortable size of the mini newspaper came in handy, too. “The newspaper was a perfect fit for how I wanted to display my work,” says Stotz. “I love how light and easy the mini format is to keep in my bag and hand out.”

The Brawl Street Journal

The Brawl Street Journal, a fictional photo essay by designer Craig Ward, propels us back in time to the late ’90s, and imagines a trading floor spat on Wall Street gone awry. It’s a scene of chaos and panic, with suited men pulling and pushing each other in a moment of utter mayhem – all created using Midjourney and Photoshop. “I should start by saying that I’m not anti-capitalist – in fact the entire creative industry requires it to exist – but I do acknowledge the inequalities and problems that have arisen from it,” Ward tells us.

“With that in mind, I was really just trying to commentate on the toxic culture of putting profit before people, the negative consequences of that, and wanted to frame it in the context of the (historically) stressful, macho environment of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, where things can occasionally boil over. I really like the visual tension between the imagery of these smartly-dressed finance bros and the mosh-pit energy of a bare-knuckle pit fight, and I do find in finance there can be this stampede mentality – when a stock starts to dip it can trigger a mass sell-off really quickly and I liked the idea of a small scuffle escalating into a mass brawl.”

To create the imagery, Ward looked back on grainy ’90s reportage photography, and aimed to emulate that feel. He also referred to Robert Longo’s ‘Men In The Cities’ series, which tried “to juxtapose the idea of violence with smartly-dressed office workers,” he adds. “As grim as it is, I also looked at some of the aftermath imagery around 9/11 and tried to echo some of that chaos – people running through the streets; wreckage in the trading floor environment, etc. I remember the imagery around that event vividly (I was in university at the time), and it felt like an aberration, seeing that kind of chaos against the backdrop of New York's financial district.”

Ward chose to print the project in Newspaper Club’s ‘mini’ format (“It’s handy, compact, easy to carry around – important for giveaways – and I like the feel of it”) to hand out at presentations. “I like having little leave-behinds to hand out when I do portfolio showings or talks, etc, and I was inspired by Erik Kessels’ series of short run books over the years. I printed 250, of which I have a handful left. Given the context and title, it also felt like the project had to be on newsprint.” As to his experience working with Newspaper Club? “Fast and fuss-free, as ever, no hiccups at all really!”