Jeremy attended — and participated in — last week’s “Edit 2010” magazine publishing event in Warsaw, and includes a nice round-up of what was covered, especially on the Adobe digital tools front.
Pictured, an earlier issue of Gym Class Magazine that was on display as part of a magazine exhibition. Make sure to pick up the latest issue!
Vogue UK for iPad has just been released, and as much as I’d like to get it so I can review here, I’m just not willing to pay the $7 asking price. Here then is a video that teases the issue that was “ninety four years in the making,” and I’m sure we can expect some impressions from Jeremy over at MagCulture soon enough.
And speaking of Jeremy, do take a look at his recent post covering this past week’s big title releases on iPad (New York Magazine, Wired UK, and Eureka). I’m late on my reviews of Wired UK and Eureka, but will try to have something up over the weekend (and I do pretty much agree with Jeremy’s views).
Let me also mention that I’m very open to getting some review copies of iPad magazines (download codes) to cover here — it’s getting expensive for me to properly review everything I’d like to cover.
Over at Magtastic Blogsplosion, Andrew goes over a few examples of magazines that have been produced using blog content — mentioned are of course Michael Bojkowski’s Lineread and Jeremy Leslie’s magCulture.com/PAPER (pictured). Although not mentioned, It’s Nice That is another great example of this — and hey, issue 4 just came out.
It’s certainly a proposition that makes sense — as Andrew lays out, with print-on-demand services taking care of printing and distribution, all a budding magazine creator needs these days are the words and the design, and a good blog can take care of the former (with a bit of reformatting, expansion, etc.) It’s definitely something that comes to mind when I think of SNOW Magazine, and what I could do to expand on the site.
Today finally marked the release of Wired‘s October issue on iPad — as I noted yesterday, it’s later than usual — and I of course have a few things to say. First off, they again go ahead with their trick of making you update the app to get the new issue instead of just using notifications, something I’m assuming is to help them rank again on charts when a new issue comes out. Are they (Conde Nast) going to be doing that with the New Yorker as well, on a weekly basis? Oh, and in the “what’s new” notes they include “issue size improvements” as a feature — the issue download was around 290MB, compared to the 400-500MB of past issues.
But what I really want bring up this time is the question of orientation. It’s a topic Jeremy has been bringing up a lot on MagCulture — most recently in his review of the New Yorker — and it comes down to the hard fact that supporting both of the iPad’s orientations means having to design your magazine twice, which means more work for the design staff.
Since the release of its first issue on iPad, to its credit, Wired has been having some fun with the dual orientation layouts, often using completely different photos to illustrate the same story, like in the example above. That’s all fine and dandy, and it can be a neat little “easter egg” to discover, but I’ve been noticing quite a few errors creeping up in text as well, as it relates to orientation changes.
In the example above, the “FACE-OFF” sidebar, the intro text refers to the chart “below” in both instances. That’s correct when in landscape mode, but not in portrait mode. In some cases, they’re just plain wrong no matter what orientation, which could be a remnant of text referring to the print layout, but that’s not something that should be creeping in the digital edition. As an example, the text in the “Safe House” article (below) refers to the pod shown “below,” even though in both cases it appears in different spots (above, and to the left).
This may be nitpicking, but for me it amounts to having the wrong caption under an image. When I was reading the “Safe House” article in portrait mode and hit on the mention of the “pod shown below,” my immediate reaction was to swipe down to the next page.
But another point to bring up is how all of these double layouts are affecting the text formatting. It’s an important point: Since you have to keep the same amount of text no matter the orientation, it can result in some forced constraints. Look at the text below, the second line of the paragraph — the tracking on it is horrendous. The text is fine if you’re reading in landscape mode.
I’m not sure if I’m siding with Jeremy just yet though. Even though I tend to read in portrait more, I do like having the option, and I do often find that the layout in landscape mode is a tad more attractive (but I do realize this is just subjective). But more care has to be done for it to work properly, or else depending on the orientation you pick, you’re going to end up with a different — and possibly subpar — reading experience.
Let me end with an ad from the issue that I rather liked. I don’t know if the same ad appears in the print edition, but it obviously works very well when seen on an iPad. It’s also in keeping with the theme of this post: You only get it in portrait mode, with the landscape version featuring a different image.
A few months ago, Jeremy Leslie over on his MagCulture blog posted a detailed — and crowdsourced — map of London’s best magazine stores. At the time I thought it was a terrific idea, and wanted to create something similar for Tokyo. Sure, I already have a few I know, but the best way for this to work is if I can get as many contributions as possible.
So please, let me know what your favorites are — either by leaving a comment or by emailing me. I’ll compile the results, and create a proper map on Google Maps, just like Jeremy did for London.