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Print design often follows a complex design and editorial workflow process – with the end goal of generating compelling and informative magazines, newspapers, catalogues and product guides.

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So you want to start a magazine. How far do you think R1500 will take you? Quite far, it seems, as Sean O'Toole brings you a true story about the impossible.

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For many people, relaxation means to refrain from engaging in any strenuous activity, whether physical or intellectual. Often people just want to switch off after a hard day’s work, and they will do that by watching television or movies, playing computer games, surfing the internet, Facebooking, etc. Avoiding any effort like the plague, relaxation has come to be equated with mental and physical passivity.

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Sarah Britten brings you the lowdown on what might have been the best Loeries yet. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was the half a glass of Sauvignon Blanc I’d sipped in the VIP area earlier that evening.

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While the production industry has always been a service industry, in the past it has required a certain level of capital expenditure to enter into the rarefied world of commercials production. While this has kept the numbers of players few and the pickings ripe, it is changing at an alarming rate. As the reasons for this are numerous, I would like to highlight three by way of illustration.

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Flexible working environments are fast becoming the global norm, but adland is still missing out, writes Herman Manson.

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Wired Magazine's classic 1996 interview with Steve Jobs has always stood out as one the most interesting tech titan interviews of all time. Being that NeXT Computer had failed to reach the masses, Steve Jobs wasn't interested in talking about the desktop computer anymore. No, he had an all-new vision that revolved around WebObjects: The Next Great Thing.

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Billionaires are not as rare as they used to be. When one sits on the stairs next to you at Design Indaba (he came in late and could not find a seat) the rebel in you smirks. A less reputable part wonders what he would be willing to pay you for your seat. Mark Shuttleworth has no airs, and the slight English accent he is developing doesn’t detract from his Ayobaness.

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Recently I spent a few days in the desert, completely removed from technology and deprived of any communication with the outside world; the experience was a lot more unsettling than I would like to admit. I realised just how reliant I have become on technology.

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If South African Tourism’s flagship publication for the 2010 World Cup were a person, it would be a colourful sort: a well-travelled favourite uncle full of uncensored stories to delight the imagination.

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I miss TV. It’s been such a long time since I watched it: you know, the kind where there is the news and then the weather and a sitcom and then maybe a drama, your favourite, the one you watch every week. I don’t watch TV like that anymore, mainly because I spend so much time online and I don’t have a set of my own.

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UK design and art collective Troika wowed the crowd at the Design Indaba in Cape Town with its cheeky computer programme, Newton Virus, which allows gravity to take effect upon unwitting desktops – without damaging any files. The programme has been around for a while now, though Troika explained they are currently working on a new version after Apple recently intercepted them.

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In the same week that Cape Town and its surrounds was still reeling from a record 90 veld and forest fires in one day, the city played host to over 2000 well dressed and fashionable creative types. Coming from near and far, they converged on the 'mother city' to attend the Design Indaba Conference and Expo 2009.

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Some day robots will live among us as carers and lovers. Will humans be capable of accepting their affection? I can’t define a robot, but I know one when I see one.” This is how Joseph Engelberger, the person recognised for having pioneered the discipline which today we call Robotics, answered when asked to define a robot.

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Do you remember Sea Monkeys? How is it that the mail order ads posted in the back of Marvel and DC comic books during the 70s and 80s left such a lasting impression on anyone who saw them? The Sea Monkeys ad made the most absurd claims. Sales took an upswing when comic book illustrator Joe Orlando added his illustrations showing a family of cute humanoid creatures with aquatic habits, posing outside their castle home. The copy promises instant life: sea monkeys hatch immediately on contact with water from the eggs that you receive in your sea monkey ‘kit’.

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If you thought global warming was frightening, Web 2.0 now brings us the prospect of collapsing geography. Oh crap.

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New technology has irreversibly altered the way we earn our daily bread. For many the workplace now exists in cyberspace, in the information cloud that evolved out of the humble desktop. My Aunt Enid had a menacing way about her. On being introduced to anybody beyond the age of 18, the age at which society expects one to be gainfully employed or at the very least have an idea what one is going to do for the rest of one’s life, she would ask not: ‘How do you do?’ but ‘So what do you actually do?’

 

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Computing as we know it has expanded. It has left the confines of the desktop and has morphed into a realm where information exists almost as an independent force. Is it a portent of the information explosion prophesied by supporters of The Singularity, or is it a unique opportunity for us to interact, teach and collaborate with one another and with the machines that we are so dependent on?

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Somewhere, between our vain attempts to feed our endless hunger, rest enough, capture the beauty that surrounds us, illuminate a darkening sky and bring about world peace and the much-larger-than-us reality of an awesome, yet unforgiving matrix of noughts and ones, there lies the possibility of a compromise. A medium to translate the binary language of the universe on our behalf.