After reading my WIRED Magazine iPad Edition, I am more excited for the potential to make the magazine brand stand out as the premium audience connection and interaction tool for all media and marketing purposes.

The current iPad magazine editions are probably overpriced and take no circulation strategy into consideration, but they do show the promise of high quality content and unlimited content portability.

I’m looking forward to having Adobe share some of the other tools involved in addition to CS5 for the making of this tablet edition.

Previous experiments to bring the magazine experience to the Web via a browser have resulted in a static experience. With new reading paradigms like the WIRED Reader, readers are able to experience the design fidelity of a print magazine married with the interactivity of digital.

via Introducing WIRED Magazine on iPad – Adobe Digital Publishing.

Development questions keep digital magazine app developers waiting on answers about flash for iPad magazines – http://bit.ly/d6RfhS

I’ve have learned over the past year that browsing with an iPhone is a unique experience. I do believe that the iPad tablet will make interacting with the web a completely fun and interactive experience.

The magazine iPad design landscape is wide open. The capabilities of reading a iPad magazine, downloaded from the iBook store “on demand newsstand” and having both stunning visuals and digital media capabilities inherent in the future of digital iPad magazines is excellent!

iPad Product Video from Nick O’Neill on Vimeo.

I’m excited to get the details on the SDK and how we can start watching for iPad magazine design inspiration to help other publishers leverage this new digital user interface.

See also
iPad Magazine Design

Who doesn’t like a good debate?  Since I work with many designers but am not a designer myself, I really appreciated the comments on both sides of the debate.  At issue; IKEA’s switch to a font that provided them better international brand consistency.

Some comment highlights from idsgn.org “After 50 years of the iconic Futura typeface, IKEA has made a switch to… Verdana?” via IKEA says goodbye to Futura: idsgn (a design blog).

doug Aug 26 2009 3:43 PM

What horrible timing to adopt a web-font in their branding. With typekit and similar and css3 support for better typography on the web coming soon, it seems silly to finally move to verdana. 10 years ago it may have made sense, but today they could just bide their time a little longer and get the typographic quality of real fonts on the web…

Sarah Aug 27 2009 4:43 AM

Okay, I just got the catalogue and I noticed a lot of differences… I’d say that the design is more reserved and conservative (less spreads of decked out apartments / shagadelic bedrooms / etc) but come on people, there is an AIDS epidemic in Africa, children are starving, and people are killing whales for crying out loud.

Ciacci Aug 27 2009 4:59 PM

Designers are way too opinionated.

I hate working with them.

My favorite:

Brian – Aug 26 2009 1:26 PM

Ikea should have kept Futura, altered it to match their needs, and called Furnitura.

DailyFinance and other news stories are putting more attention on this story:

While Ikea’s signature font, a customized version of Futura, was attractive and distinctive, it didn’t work in every language, and was unwieldy for many uses. Consequently, the company recently decided to switch to Verdana, a typeface that Microsoft distributes for free. The new font works across the globe, and translates into an endless array of alphabets. Unfortunately, it also infuriates many of Ikea’s customers. – DailyFinance

And now a petition has been started allowing the undersigned to declare, “We, the undersigned designers, consider this to be a mutilation of Ikea’s long admired design philosophy. It is sad this is happening, and it undermines Ikea’s design leadership. Please bring Ikea Sans/Serif back, or get a proper typeface instead of Verdana! “ http://www.petitiononline.com/IKEAVERD/petition.html

I’ll get the new IKEA catalogue soon, but, sadly, there will be one reason less to enjoy browsing it. As they say, it will be just business—nothing personal. – iancul

Visit Iancu Barbarasa’s blog for all the details – Ikea Post

Do you have passion for your font?

It’s been two years, so how much have we accomplished based on the possibilities?  Is this device too innovative to have been implemented over the past two years.  It certainly seemed like a device (as long as you don’t spill your drink) that would enhance social and commercial settings.

via YouTube – Microsoft Surface – The Possibilities.

Currently, the product website provides a strong list of partner websites.

Have you seen this surface computing platform in your neighborhood?

My recent post on graphics communication is supported by Farhad in reference to the print layout and design of Newspapers.  The author compares the Amazon Kindle and a print Newspaper.

But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you’re given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story.

via Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine .

This further support my passion for why the magazine is the perfect periodic print media channel.  News is too fluid to effectively be published daily in print.  But the summary of news and information is perfectly suited to the print magazine format.

Design is why the graphic communication in a magazine creates a brand. Web design is another channel and an equally important one.

We have continued the innovation in our own digital magazine solutions and will continue to help publishers use the digital edition as a tool.

Our writer Frederic Lardinois raised a very good question when PC Magazine went digital: why is PC Magazine putting time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine, instead of just focusing on improving its website? The answer probably comes down to one word: design. The best thing about magazines, to many of us, is their design. Probably the most successful tech magazine of this era is Wired, which is renowned for its design.

via The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? .

The emerging e-reader devices will indeed create a new readership pull on this new and popular medium.

There are some strong opinions on this issue, especially those that enjoy holding their print magazines. There is a time and a place for that experience.  There is a time and a place for digital.  And, there is value in both.

Print newspapers have learned many lessons in the new digital information age. Some print news industry leaders have also come to understand how the “Wisdom of Crowds” and social media networks will be critical to their future. Individuals, groups, and social platforms now facilitate story advancement and exposure. So we must understand how crowds will drive our published stories. But it will be how we design that determines or success in the last published mile to the readers.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004 Wikipedia – The Wisdom of Crowds

But to reach a mass audience, we still depend on a mass media channel. Magazine publishers own this niche. The periodic cycle afforded to magazines allows for the organization and graphic presentation of a proven popular or developing story.

Publishers must be more focused on the graphic presentation of the news than creating the news. The news will be created and promoted without you in the future. Have you ever seen the EPIC 2014 and update EPIC 2015 video by Making IT Happen UK? This 1990′s video is a ficticious prediction that provides insight about several corporate and technological events (Googlezon excluded) that have paralled reality.

In the year 2014 the New York times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned …What happened to the news? …and what is EPIC: Launch Video EPIC 2015

Understand as a publisher that your job is to design and present interesting information. Provide visual communication that makes any other news source or medium (including newspapers) pale in comparison to your presentation.

Magazine publishers must learn what newspapers have done right and wrong. Publishers must adapt their digital and web brands to functions as the online newspaper equivalent for their niche even if they focus their main revenue and media deliverable in print format.

We continue to watch and learn. We must adapt more quickly than those publishing mediums that don’t act quickly enough. We must understand both our readers and advertisers needs.

Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop, Is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday. And we should save trees in the end. So it’s enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, “Can anything save newspapers?”

Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? It just might.

via Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers | Video on TED.com.

We must not be so proud of our content that we decide it’s only available to the elderly, affulient, and elite -EPIC reference. We must be taught the value of web traffic and how long term dividends from SEO can greatly exceed the short term paid content wall.

We must learn that if we are designing truly great graphical information communications, the more people that we can expose to our creative work will always outproduce micro-payments results for individual access or short term subscription.

<< Yes this button! I have had to look for this “tweet button” or twitter badge several times.  I’m sure I’ll remember “TweetMeme” this time.  But in case someone else out there is looking for the “Tweet This Button” (my words) just head on over to http://tweetmeme.com.

The retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to retweet their content on twitter.

We have made our button really smart, with one simple piece of javascript we are clever enough to give you up to date tweet counts and shorten your title and link for the retweets. Best of all it will work on any web page, anywhere!

Compact Version also available.  via Button – TweetMeme.