Been working on a new wave of material for Monocle.com. Over the last week, we published a few features which relate to stories in issue 02. For each issue, we try to take a some stories online, twisting in a new direction, or providing further context. For instance, issue 02’s Andrea Lenardin Madden profile expands into a little feature about her collaboration with the Sprinkles cupcake empire.

So, related to our lead story on Norway, we were extremely privileged to be granted an interview with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. He doesn’t often do them, and proved to be an extremely engaging interviewee. Progressive, intelligent, diplomatic yet involved – everything a modern monarch should be.

Additionally, we’ll cover material which isn’t mentioned in the magazine. Regular readers here might enjoy the brief documentary on Swiss robot bricklayers – yes, really – in which we discuss mass customisation, digital fabrication and architecture, talking to the profs at DFAB, ETH Zürich.

Back to issue 02, where we created our ideal broadcaster (other than Monocle of course): the ‘Nordic News Network’. So, we got architect and designer Anders Nord to render a quick fly-through of the imaginary studio set, and we also quickly worked up an identity and soundtrack. Behold NNN.

See also our first infographic work – rather straightforward but clean, I think, and presenting new data on projected freshwater resources worldwide to 2050 (again, a link from the Norway story.)

Oh, and I hope you saw the lovely Kuntzel+Deygas work we posted up previously, such as these title sequences, music videos, character animations etc. There’s more there, and much more to come of course. We’re simultaneously working on reworking the site – and a million other things – particularly for subscriber-only material.

In other news, I managed to slip a QR code into our manga for issue 03 – fun! Sneak preview:

Hopefully a lot more of that kind of action to follow. Next week, off to Osaka and Tokyo with Tyler to explore this and more.