Kasino don’t do digital

One of the best things about getting back from holidays is finding out which magazines have piled up on my desk over the last couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone who has sent magazines in – as ever, I’ll be doing my best to blog about as many as possible over the next few weeks.

The first one to catch my eye yesterday was the Kasino Creative Annual About The Internet. I’ve loved everything I’ve ever seen from them, and I’ve been following this latest project online since it started. The idea is to create something full of the things you can’t do online, taking a fresh approach to the familiar print vs digital debate.

One of my favourite things about Kasino is the way their sense of humour and design nouse comes through in the work they do. KCAATI carries that on with some nice touches like the fact that only 404 handmade copies were produced. And then there’s the shape of the thing itself, which with its rounded edges feels vaguely iPad-shaped (they call it a coffee-table-book-cum-analogue-tablet).

So far so good, but then it comes to the content itself and the smartness gets lost somewhere along the way. The first spread seems to open out into a mysterious word – ‘Pand’, only for it to reveal itself as the start and end of ‘Page not found’. I like the way it creates a feeling of loss and confusion, but it doesn’t follow up with a funny / clever / weird concept.

Instead the whole thing opens out into a series of images of things you can’t do on the internet. As you’d expect from Kasino they’re by turns funny, weird and gross, but it’s all just a bit too disconnected to mean anything.

But then maybe that’s the point. Maybe they’re tired of people wringing their hands and worrying about the death of print and they wanted to send the whole thing up. Maybe they started out interested in the idea of print in a digital world but got bored along the way and decided to print a picture of a monkey instead.

It is pretty funny after all.