History of the Paper Dog Press

by Andrew "Kosmo" Spies


Paper Dog Press has a relatively short, but interesting history. P.D.P. started off as an idea myself and friends had for a website, the original idea was to create a site for people to come to and rant and rave till their little hearts no longer could. We originally planned to call it "Angry Cow" but after some research we discovered the name was already taken. This was very devastating as it required three weeks and many beers to reach this name.

So in our dismay we decide to can the idea all together, it was a couple months later when I was contacted by a friend to try this idea again. Again it failed, in the meantime I had started a group on Facebook (The SA Design Network), which was dedicated to design in the South Africa, the group was well met, but failed to grow consistently as I was new to this idea of publishing news and was making many mistakes. To make matters worse the members of the group didn't seem keen on participation with the group. This was the proverbial last nail in the coffin.

This coupled with my inborn desire to one day run my own magazine, spawned the idea for a local community newspaper, "The Dog-art". This little newspaper also never made the light of day, it was intended to be a community newspaper which would be distributed freely, however this proved to be a very expensive idea. We lacked advertisers and we decided to go online. The name of our little ezine/online newspaper, has its own special story but we will elaborate on this later. Paper Dog Press is an associate of Oddlife Designs, a branding and graphic design firm, situated in Pretoria, South Africa.

We write these columns because we are fascinated with and love art and design. We are trying to enlighten the world about the fantastic art and artists living and working in South Africa, our home. Art from other parts of the world doesn't go unnoticed here at the Paper Dog Press, and so we will also try to inject some worldly offerings into our posts from time to time.