Magazines for iPad

iPad Magazine Art Direction from Brad Colbow on Vimeo.

As I expressed on a previous post about e-zines, I’m really overwhelmed by the magazine applications that have been created for iPad. The video is very illustrative, the 3 magazines we saw in it are very solid and with very good editorial design on their print issues. Now, being able to read them on electronic devices was a whole challenge, iPad came in the right moment (not by luck I suppose) and we can see now how the magazines managed to evolve into e-zines.

I’m sure it wasn’t an easy task and the decisions may have been very important, because we are talking about new technology and also we know that iPad is all about interactivity, which printed magazines are really limited in that area.

As we saw on both GQ and TIME magazine they have what I’ll like to call “disunity”, I’m talking about that the fact that the guiding design concept changes and almost get loss once you play with the orientation of the iPad, this can be reflected in a bad way for the magazine, it is not user friendly, the user can get lost, can loose interest, can be confused whether or not his still on the same magazine. This “disunity” can evolve into a branding issue, where the user may don’t link together the magazine with its e-zine version.

I think that the magazines evolving into e-zines is actually a good thing, imagine all the pollution we can prevent. But I think Designers have a really hard work to do and need to compromise with the magazine, give it elements or/and parameters of design which brings interactivity without sacrificing the identity of the articles, for example when changing the orientation of the device.

I’m really looking forward to get to know how this e-zines for iPad are developed, I’ll like to learn how, to bring something to them, to make them more powerful, to stop the disunity.