270 Dose magazine covers

Before GigPark I was lucky enough to be part of Dose, as the founding editor-in-chief. Helping to build, launch and run this Canadian media company was one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in. The team were incredible and CanWest gave us a lot of freedom to have fun and build a good product.

Here are a few stats about Dose:

Magazine, website and mobile platform launched on April 4th 2005
Approximately 70 staff bassed in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver
By May 2006 we had:
> 331K daily readers of our magazine
> One-in-ten 18-24 year olds read the magazine daily
> 200K monthly unique visitors to dose.ca
> 76% brand awareness amongst 18-34 year olds
Dose was closed on May 17th 2006

One of my favorite jobs at Dose was helping create the cover each day. We would come up with a few ideas in the morning news meeting and then at noon would huddle up and answer the following questions:

1. What subject are people talking about or could they be talking about today?
2. What is the one simple idea we want to communicate about this subject?
3. How can we express the idea in the most simple, powerful way?

Our creative director, deputy editors and culture editor were always at the noon meeting along with one guest contributor. Sometimes the meetings were a fun 15 minutes, and sometimes they were a difficult hour, but the results were something we were proud of more often than not. Maybe the most amazing thing was the fact that after the meeting the designers, editors, photographers and illustrators had only 7 short hours to execute the idea and create the cover.

Every single member of the Dose staff contributed to our covers, but these people were instrumental:

Jaspal Riyait, Creative Director
Duncan Clark, Deputy Editor
Ryan MacDonald, Deputy Editor
Basem Boshra, Deputy Editor
Ronit Novak, Photo Editor
Jordan MacInnis, Photo Editor
Celine Wong, Culture Editor
Teena Aujla, Associate Art Director
Daniel DeSouza, Designer

Here are a few of my favorite Dose covers. Click on them to view the full flickr set:
(I promise to put all 270 of them on flickr when I find the time)

Das Park Hotel

I think by now you are probably starting to get a feel for my taste in architecture ;).

I came across Das Park Hotel today via this blog. If you find yourself in Ottensheim – in the summer! – this place looks like a fun experiment.

I’d like to live here, for a little while

I’ve always respected people who take things to extremes. For example a friend of mine in London decorated his flat in a modernist hunting lodge theme – white floors, ceilings and walls + taxidermy + ultra modernist clear plastic furniture. It’s not the most traditionally inviting house but it is absolutely spectacular.

The Reversible Destiny Lofts by Arakawa and Madeline Gins (via Caterina) look like another living concept taken to the extreme:

Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.

Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist.

- quoted from a Newsweek article.

Spell with Flickr

Apologies if this is old – I found it for the first time today on Russell Davies excellent blog about account planning. Spell with Flickr is a cute little tool that lets you spell any word you like using randomly generated flickr photos. Fun.