Over the past year, GOOD has grown from having a primary focus on magazine publishing to being a media mini-empire, with its hand in videos, blogging, event production, and a variety of other activities, both online and off. The company’s cornerstone project, GOOD magazine, is still going strong – and is published under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-ND).
One of my favorite elements of the magazine is its design, which is managed by creative director Casey Caplowe, who spoke recently at CC Salon LA about the advantages of using an open approach to creating and distributing content. The greatness of the magazine’s design is typified by a recurring feature called the GOOD Sheet, which presents large volumes of information in useful and beautiful graphical formats. The most recent GOOD Sheet is a collaboration with designer Atley Kasky called “The First 100 Days” and offers a sampling of decisions made by various US presidents in their first months in office.
Update (12/03/08): The GOOD Sheet came out of a relationship between GOOD and Starbucks, in which the latter agreed to distribute free weekly newsprint copies of the GOOD Sheet in its stores for eleven weeks. This means that for the eleven weeks prior to the US presidential election, Creative Commons-licensed media was being given away for free to hundreds of thousands of people in Starbucks stores. Pretty cool. This New York Times article describes the deal.
