You are currently browsing the archive for the Buzzwords category.
(Image by the Clippy Image Generator)
The design-related Blogotweetspheroid has been bubbling with bile at new venture Ready-Media, a creation of Satan and his minions well-known designers/typographers Roger Black, Eduado Danilo, Sam Berlow, Robb Rice and David Berlow.
I’ve not commented until now, as I’ve been trying to get my head around the controversy. Here’s how it looks to me, and you might not like it.
The Wired iPad app seems to be the first one that people are really taking seriously, following Popular Science‘s early foray into the arena.
The major sticking points against it so far seem to be based around its size (500mb), the fact that it’s made up of flat, exported PNGs, and how you aren’t sure when to scroll down, and when not, all of which are eminently fixable.
Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects (who design news websites, among other things) however has spotted what he feels are more fundamental issues with the design. Over on the IA blog, he takes a much closer look at the grid and typography of the thing, and in doing so ends up in a fascinating conversation with the font designer of much of Wired‘s content, Jonathan Hoefler, and the creative director of NYT Online, Khoi Vinh.
What you get is a fascinating masterclass in some current design thinking (and disagreements) over designing for the iPad, and for screens in general. Essential reading, basically.
As mentioned elsewhere, things have been quiet here due to unforeseen volcanic inconvenience, and entirely foreseen wedding exuberance. I’m now in Dublin, waiting, waiting for the air to clear. Meantime, some catch up.
New York magazine’s Approval Matrix becomes TV show
More signs that visual media are getting desperate for ideas. Next up: Time Out Theater Listings: The Movie!, and a Radiohead album based on Loot
ProPublica/NYT magazine investigations tie-in wins another award
Not ‘The Future Of Journalism’, but one of them
Jeremy’s guest-posting at It’s Nice That
He’s going to share five magazines that “push the boundaries of what a magazine can be”. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen
A peek inside the new Businessweek
If nothing else, Bloomberg knows how to build up expectations
World’s biggest-circulation magazine gets Latino spinoff
Unless you count Watchtower, that is
Technology as introduced by PopSci magazine
Love that first-ever colour facsimile cover – today it’d probably be done by Esquire
The Lady puts Tracy Emin on the cover
One of those stories I had to check the date of first, to make sure it wasn’t April 1st
BBC looking for magazine partner
Partnerships to help bring more balance to the industry
Yahoo! produces style guide
Containing, one assumes, more online savvy than the AP guide
NYT’s Sunday magazine from 1910
Every week, another century-old story. Lovely contextualization from the archives
I rather like this cover
It’s not new, but it certainly grabs you. I just found it on the ever-superlative Nas Capas
HyPad links
The Six iPad Principles of Mag+
Still lauded as the best interface so far
A mag app roundup
This week’s hits and misses from Exact Editions
(or should the title be “HyPed?”)
Some early thoughts about the iPad:
- It’s surprisingly cheap. I don’t know for sure, but the price does suggest that it’s following the games console model: make a loss on the machine, make your money on the games (or in this case, the apps), and try to dominate the market. The appstore has been hugely successful for them, so that would make sense. And unless Amazon can drop the Kindle to $99, e-ink will soon be sent back to the lab, to work on a proper colour screen.
- It’s what we expected. Back to the video game analogy, the dual-screen Nintendo DS forced publishers to rethink the fundamentals of the game-playing experience. This doesn’t take us anywhere we didn’t expect to go, which is onto giant iPhones. That said, it’s easy to overlook how much multi-touch has already revolutionised interface design.
- 3G+WiFi+easily stealable+limited capacity = The inexorable rise of The Cloud. No bad thing, as long as it never goes down.
- Mid-level software publishers will struggle – $9.99 seems to be a top price limit for most iPhone apps. No reason to think the iPad will be different, particularly as it runs most iPhone apps.
- No word on subscription models for publications yet. Bit early perhaps, but it will need to come, and soon.
- If I were a peripheral manufacturer, the first thing I’d make is a rubber keyboard with force feedback and a strap around the back, to slip over that touchscreen keyboard. Even Jobs couldn’t type straight on it in the demo. Shouldn’t be too difficult, and will be an instant winner.
- The second thing I’d make is a Bluetooth-enabled pair of spectacles with a mini monitor overlay, and a Bluetooth-enabled glove (containing mini gyroscopes and acting as a mouse), to do the tapping and viewing without needing the pad in front of me. It would also have the benefit of making me think that Minority Report had finally come true. Now where did I leave those precogs?
- A flurry of new CSS templates should make most websites nicely compatible, without too much fuss. Magazines take note: you don’t need to spend thousands on consultants, just get one good designer and choose a nice template. Unless of course you’d like me to consult for you, in which case, I’m worth every penny.
- By choosing the ePub format, Apple has made their book reader compatible with Google Books (or easily adaptable to be compatible, depending on how they choose to play with the DRM). Smart move, and cuts off Google at the pass. Note: InDesign also has an ePub option – some magazines may want to choose this route to sell straightforward copies of their print edition in the iBookstore.
- Still no Flash compatibility and no multi-tasking. That limits some of the fun that can be had. They’ll come later, though.
- Expect more than a few web-based online stores to appear soon, to avoid having to be locked into developing an app that won’t work on another device. If I were working on that magazine industry Skiff thing, I’d scrap the hardware plan and focus on a cross-platform solution.
- If my laptop gives up the ghost, and Adobe releases a CS4 patch to make it compatible, then I’ll need a good reason not to replace it with one of these.
- It’s not the future of media, but it’s probably one bit of it.
- No, Europe-based friends, I can’t bring you one over.
- They will sell a *lot* in the first few months.
Google Books has been slowly adding to its magazine offerings, presumably preparing for the day when it starts to charge for content.
However, we’ve had to make do with press releases and blogosphere watchlists to find out when they might add anything interesting. No longer, as they now have a page dedicated to all of the (mostly obscure) magazines they have (occasionally poorly) scanned!
One of my favourite things about Google Books is their word clouds, where all of the text is automatically scanned for word frequency, and the more commonly used words appear in larger type. Sadly, right now there aren’t any clouds for the entire archives of any magazine, only issue-by-issue (any coders like to cobble together a fix for that?).
Above is Men’s Health from January 2006. Below is Women’s Health from the same month. followed by the December 2004 edition of Black Belt. Still burning that Bruce Lee flame.
Photo by Telstar Logistics. Available through a by-nc Creative Commons licence
Since they told us the web had been upgraded to 2.0, the media buzzphrase has been “User-Generated Content”.
It is, apparently, both the saviour and the death of mainstream media. Actually, it’s a meaningless phrase, a catch-all applied to very different and often contradictory ideas – most of them not new at all.
Here’s a breakdown of what people actually mean by UGC in magazines.
Read the rest of this entry »
This website focuses on developments
in the magazine industry around
the world.
It is written by
Andrew Losowsky,
a writer and editor based in the USA. He has so far edited two books about magazines, and
has ideas for
many more.
He writes about magazines for The Wall Street Journal and others, and
is co-curator of
the Colophon international magazine biennale. He also runs
Stack America.
The rest of the time, he creates experiences.
