Instead of rushing in and making a PDF page-turner, we’ve stepped back and made something that we feel is much more appropriate to the online medium. The content’s all there… it’s just reinvented and much more interactive – everything that an online mag should be, we feel. It’s also heaving with new video content that we commissioned especially (plus lots of curated video).

It’s a great compliment that the client has loved our photos and videos of the new Yaris so much that they are now being used extensively on the main www.toyota.co.uk website.

The URL for the online magazine is: magazine.toyota.co.uk.

Sunday’s solution will be a genuinely pioneering departure from other retail customer magazines, and will break a number of magazine conventions along the way. Sunday felt strongly that Boden’s unique brand meant that creating something extraordinary was essential.

The solution – to be launched this spring – is deeply rooted in the Boden brand DNA and will enable Boden, once again, to redefine the communications landscape. The publication will draw on social media – Facebook, Twitter and the web – to generate a crowd-sourced, co-created, publication called ‘A thousand little things’ – a collection of thoughts, ideas, inspiration and items contributed by well-known journalists, Boden staff and Boden customers. The publication will be produced bi-annually and will be sent to approximately 300,000 segmented customers.

A big thanks to all the team, both agency and client-side, and all our contributors. A great night had by all… albeit resulting in a couple of hangovers today.

If you would like to find out more about the magazine, see the Portfolio section of the  Sunday website.

The magazine, which we’re relaunching as Modus, will be published 10 times a year. Modus will enhance RICS’ reputation as the pre-eminent professional body for surveying by combining thought-leadership content and practical advice to stimulate and shape debate.

Ian Fussey, RICS Head of Member Communications, said, “We are looking to maximise the potential of the magazine as a vital communication channel for the membership. Sunday showed us they understood the challenges we face and came up with an incredibly strong proposition that exceeded the brief on every level.”

Toby (our MD) said: “We’re tremendously excited about working with RICS on this project. The magazine will feature big name writers with provocative viewpoints and look like nothing else in its sector. It plays to our strengths as an agency, supplying excellent creative solutions within a strong integrated communications framework.”

Watch this space…

Each year, leading UK mag Creative Review’s Illustration Annual showcases the very best work by illustrators. And we’re chuffed to bits that this year they’ve included one of our stories from Today Tomorrow, the customer magazine that we publish for Toyota.

The story entitled “A Day In The Life… 2109-Style” looked ahead 100 years to a typical day-in-the-life. The piece weaves together the technological innovations that we could be using on a day to day basis – some from Toyota, some from other companies.

We went for a comic-strip approach, and persuaded the quite fantastic Tavis Coburn to create the look. 

Tavis Coburn’s site is: www.taviscoburn.com

It’s always exciting when a magazine breaks the mould. Fantastic Man did it three years ago when designer Jop van Bennekom and journalist Gert Jonkers set out to reinvent ‘the gentleman’s style journal’. The title’s minimalist design and fresh take on fashion photography – a knowing, arch style – had an immediate effect on the rest of the men’s magazine market.

Its sister publication, the recently launched The Gentlewoman, looks set to have the same impact.

Ok, it shares the format of most other women’s magazines, but here the similarities end. The cover has a black and white portrait of Phoebe Philo (Creative Director at Céline) framed within a ‘nude’ colour background; the masthead is all lowercase Futura (expect another revival of this 20’s font shortly) and the paper has a highly tactile mottled texture. And, bar furniture and one discreet coverline, that’s it.

Inside, the design style is deceptively simple – understated, elegant, open, orderly and effortlessly authoritative. Colour is used sparingly – it’s largely black and white, but with the odd dash of block colour to mark out key stories and the three editorial sections. Imagery is challenging and used in challenging ways: tall and small models with heads cropped star in one of the main fashion stories; a series of abstract marine shots introduce a feature on ocean swimmer Lynne Cox; six pages of the backs of heads hold together a feature on ‘up-dos’… The text paper is gloss – conventional, maybe, but it contrasts nicely with the cover and an uncoated reference section in the centre.

The magazine’s editor in chief, Penny Martin, says the magazine is ‘about modernity and women that are just fantastic.’ It ditches celebrity for ‘women who live extraordinary lives’. What a breath of fresh air.

From its cover style to editorial platform, The Gentlewoman provides a stark contrast to any other women’s title. It’s dared to be different and deserves to succeed.

There are a few questions that are notoriously difficult to answer. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” obviously tops the list of puzzlers, but it’s closely followed by that age-old conundrum, “How do you illustrate a subject like outcome-based commissioning?”

We produce Ethos magazine on behalf of services company Serco; it’s designed to further the debate on the future of public and private service. In the most recent issue, the FT’s Alex Barker wrote an article on outcome-based commissioning (OBC), which is essentially where the government pays for results (outcomes) in public services, rather than prescribes the process. This idea could apply to anything from welfare to work schemes and street cleaning contracts to leisure centres and healthcare.

Our art director, Ian Dutnall, asked a fantastic illustrator called Gavin Potenza to come up with a striking and creative visual to accompany the article. The resulting illustration borrows from the world of information graphics, but avoids getting too flashy or obscure. We like it because we think it successfully and subtly depicts a tricky concept. It gets across the connection between the UK Parliament and its goals, and uses fluid lines to imply the freedom of innovation that OBC encourages.

To read the article, go to www.ethosjournal.com, and for more of Gavin’s great ideas, check out his website: www.gavinpotenza.com