Some happy news to report today: Steven Cann has joined the staff of "In The Grid" (i.e. me) as the designer of the magazine version of our publication. Steven is a full-time designer in Melbourne, Australia, whose day job is at the slackerific Lonely Planet publishing company; he also plays in a band called Alaisha, which according to him is "a band that tries to revisit the sounds of the early '90s -- My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, The Catherine Wheel, etc." (And a little trivia for you, by the way; that according to my old college roommate, The Catherine Wheel is the best band on the planet to listen to when you're coming down off an acid trip. But he wasn't in the best frame of mind when declaring this, so take that as you will.) Interestingly, Steven is yet to even be a resident in SL, and in fact started reading this blog for the same reason I started reading SL blogs last spring; because he's been on the cusp of joining for a little while now, and has been reading blogs to get that final push either one way or the other. Looks like he'll be joining up, then; and as soon as he does, I'll do a little interview and photo shoot with him in the grid, to give all of you a little more proper introduction.

For those of you who are curious as to what Steven will bring to ITG's magazine version, here are reprints of some of the sample pages he sent me, when first inquiring about the position to begin with; I hope you'll agree with me that it's a bold interpretation of ITG's usual design scheme, something that will hopefully add a little spark to the magazine and differentiate it even further from this daily online blog. Anyway, I welcome Steven to the "team," so to speak, and thank him highly for this volunteer position he's taken on.

And speaking of which, I get asked on a pretty regular basis if ITG is hiring; and the sad fact is that, with this publication generating a grand total per month right now of about twenty bucks in revenue, I can't nearly afford to bring anyone else on, which after all was the whole inspiration for launching this as a one-person operation to begin with. I'm always thrilled to hear from people like Steven, though, who are interested in dong a little volunteer work; I'm always happy to consider such proposals, although I'll warn you that I heavily favor people who already have RL experience in the publishing industry. Especially wanted are guest writers, interested in putting together a roughly 1,000-word combination of personal essay and traditional journalism; dynamic web programmers (PHP, MySQL, etc) who would like to get involved with a rather large future project for this website (think Upcoming.org); and photographers who would be interested in doing regular photo essays and the like.

Of course, there's an exception to all this as well; that anyone who might be interested in selling ads for ITG would of course get a 25-percent commission on all sales, which I know is higher than average so hopefully might attract a couple of you out there. It'd be really nice if by the end of this winter, this publication was making several hundred dollars a month in revenue; I'd be happy to financially reward anyone who can come in and make that happen. In all cases, please just drop me a line at inthegrid [at] gmail.com to express an interest.