Rare

lindsey // 16 Mar 10 // Events Technology

Wired Tablet App: The Future of Magazines?

There has been a skepticism from designers on the rebirth of the print magazine in a digital format. How do you maintain the design quality of print in a digital interface? What is the role of a print designer in this new world? What does it look like to put living content in a static layout?

The goal of the Wired creative team, working with Adobe, is to maintain the rich visual features of print––custom typography, stunning photography, complex infographics––while providing the convenience, functionality, and interactivity of a digital product. At a SXSW panel, Scott Dadich, Creative Director of Wired, and Jeremy Clark, Senior Design Manager at Adobe, discussed the reinvention of Wired monthly magazine into a digital, tablet-based application.

Traditionally, magazine content is repurposed to HTML by a separate development team, losing much of the design integrity and context in the process. Text is reflowed, pullquotes and design elements are abandoned, and photographs are taken out of context and relegated to a slideshow or thumbnail. Beyond that, readers have a shallower level of engagement with web content, spending minutes with the content instead of becoming deeply connected to the product and brand––as they are when engaging with a printed publication.

The glimpse into Wired’s new tablet format, still in development, shows a greater picture of design as content––merging fidelity and flexibility. A main goal, and one that has kept many print designers from fully embracing web-based content, is maintaining typography standards on the web. Exchange, for instance, one of a few custom typeface designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for print publications, has been carefully constructed to allow for maximum legibility, to reduce eye fatigue, and to fit more characters on a page (for you design nerds, it employs 10,000 kerning pairs as compared to Georgia’s zero). Typography is central to any design, and it’s one of the most important considerations in employing this new digital technology.

So, how does this thing work? The application is being designed for walk up usability and “revolution through evolution”––an attempt to move forward quickly while not alienating the creators and end users. It works on a dual-axis navigation system, where articles are scrolled left to right and content is read top to bottom. Additionally, it’s important to the creators that users maintain a sense of place, so they’ve included navigation tools like scrollers and pagination views to make the information intuitive and efficient.

And it looks really slick. The example issue they’ve created uses the same design elements, photos, illustrations, and complex typography as the print version, but employs really cool interactivity. From slideshows of additional photography and exclusive “mini features” to interactive elements like rotating products, audio, video, and animation, a whole new world has opened up on the static page. Social media is also a feature, opening up conversation on hot topics and an ability to save and send content. Advertising plays a huge roll as well, allowing for (optional) interaction with the ads, drilling down in content instead of drilling out to the web. Back issues will also be accessible, providing a stickiness and shelf-life lacking in printed magazine archives.

Another great concept is the creators’ idea of “One Author.” The same team of designers (of which there are 400 at Conde Nast) and editors (1,100) who work on the printed magazine also work on the digital version, using InDesign and InCopy along with a shared database. The app runs on Adobe Air. While Dadich allows that workload for designers is increased by 10-50% (sort of a sobering statistic), he notes that it beats turning over everything to a new staff.

Personally, I’m still a die-hard for the print format, but it’s impossible to deny that the magazine industry, as well as the print journalism community, need to embrace new technology in order to survive. Value needs to be put back into the subscription model. If the Wired tablet app is any indication, it may indeed be possible to create beautiful design in a digital world.