22 PRINT 65.2 APRIL 2011 DIALOGUE STEVEN HELLER REIMAGINING THE MAGAZINE
Scott Dadich, the executive director of digital magazine development for Condé Nast, won three back-to-back National Magazine Awards for Design as well as SPD’s Magazine of the Year while creative director of Wired. He led the development of Wired’s iPad app, which was introduced in May 2010 and was downloaded nearly 100,000 times in its first month. Recently, he led the creation of The New Yorker Tablet Edition, which debuted at number 4 on iTunes’ Top Grossing apps. I met with him in September 2010 in Dublin where we were panelists on a Future of Publishing debate.
Scott Dadich, pictured Given the expense involved in producing a for tablet computers only have one retail here in his office in dynamic iPad app for a magazine, and outlet at the moment, iTunes, and there’s Times Square, is the that many once-profitable titles are now only one real tablet computer in the mar- creative vanguard for hanging on, why not just do iPad apps? ketplace. So, fi gure nearly 5 million iPads the digital editions of all Fair question. Much as radio didn’t dis- in existence, but more than 190 million Condé Nast titles. appear after the advent of television, I Americans read magazines. The econo- don’t believe magazines are going any- mies of scale won’t work yet, at least not where for awhile, if ever. They’ll evolve. for the kind of investment we’re used to Probably the most simple way to think of putting into a print magazine. So we le- a magazine is as a curated package of verage the editing and design process for ideas and reporting with compelling art print and add a digital edition that is de- and photography, all held together by livered to our app. We built the Wired highly crafted graphic design. It just so and The New Yorker iPad authoring pro- happens that—at the moment—the most cesses into the print workfl ow. Once we familiar way of delivering that package is have a robust marketplace with true com-
How do the demands of interactive and also pulling back a bit to provide context. print magazines differ? That way, the readers can literally see First and foremost is the question of nav- where stories and ads fi t up against and igation. The physicality of a printed around one another. That’s the role of magazine is one of its great features. You the “browse” function. have linear access, random access, and contextual awareness; that is, it’s very Anything else? easy to understand where you are, front, We have the content and UI layers in middle, or back. All of these are built in print, it’s just that the UI layer—the act to the package itself, and great graphic of fl ipping paper pages—is completely design only aids in the utility of these transparent. So, much as we do in the features. In a digital-reading environ- print edition of a magazine, we try to ment, we lose a lot of these navigation envision the best-use cases for the page cues; it’s easy to get disoriented and not in the interactive version. How will the understand “where” one is in the issue, reader engage with and consume the which is one of the great treats of a mag- content? What’s the best way to read a azine. It’s a discreet package of headline? Where should areas of interest information, unlike the Web, which is be staged? How should the photography sprawling. That’s why we spent the bet- and illustration integrate? And then we ter part of six months working with have to think about where one’s hands Adobe on the navigation model and UI fall. Are we placing buttons out of sight of the Digital Content Viewer being used when fi ngers interact with the screen? Is for Wired and The New Yorker. We set- it comfortable to use the dynamic con- tled on a dual-axis navigation system tent? Is it compelling? Wired's content as and included horizontal and vertical packaged for the digital progress indication, as well as fi ve diff er- What from the print magazine gets lost? viewer: the tablet TOC ent ways to move between pieces of We have lost the notion of a “spread” in (above); a slideshow content: swiping, direct linking, brows- this environment; designing for iPad— (above right); and a long ing, scrubbing, and an index. We were especially story openers—feels to me feature (next page). intent on “fl attening” the content. much more like book jacket or poster Imagine all of the content of a magazine design. We still have to deal with head- laid out end-to-end on the fl oor, and lines and subheads, captions and then imagine a camera moving from photographs, but we don’t have the tool page to page, up and down articles, but of natural juxtaposition that the gutter 26 PRINT 65.2 APRIL 2011 DIALOGUE
provides in print. The image diptych is a coming to iPad these days, and I think 50-plus features sitting on my desk right classic trope of magazine design, so may- we’re starting to see some standards now and improvements that are on track be it’s not a bad thing to try some new emerge in navigation. It’s gratifying to for implementation in the coming year. ways of presenting a story. see a lot of this experimentation build on and mimic the model we built: index/ We’re all excited about the potential of With so many tools in your kit, how does TOC and Store/Home buttons in the top the iPad to provide multiple entry points, this alter editing a magazine? left, scrubbing and page thumbnail pre- but what difficulties remain? We have a lot of new storytelling tools at views along the bottom of the HUD. Sharing is going to be tough, but not our disposal: video, audio, fl ipbooks, We’ve done quite a bit of qualitative and from a technical perspective. We’ve got 360ºs, panoramas, image pans, toggles, some quantitative research, and we’re to set the business rules around what slideshows, text slideshows, and hyper- using that feedback to improve our apps content we post online. What is free and linking, not to mention all of the on an issue-by-issue basis. The very fi rst what is paid and what is accessible at all? interactive engagements of the Web and issue of Wired had no persistent scroll We’ve got to get a viable subscription HTML5. So we often fi nd ourselves ask- indication, and readers told us they had model in place, one that will enable us to ing how to best add value to a story a hard time understanding when there make a business of publishing digital without cheapening the experience—just was content below the fold. So, in the magazines. We need to reduce the fi le because we can, does it mean we should? HUD, we’ve made that scroll indication sizes of our magazines, they’re just too And if so, how? We compare the weight persistent (and now we’ve made it a bit big for both the device hard disks and and expense of each interactive experi- more prominent). Because The New too large for a quick download. We’ve ence. A video can be nice, but unless it’s Yorker’s feature stories are quite lengthy, already made some signifi cant improve- really funny or compelling content, video we’re going to make that scroll indicator ments, but we’ve got a long way to go. tends to only get one or two viewings. actionable. That way the reader can grab Readers will start seeing smaller fi les But a fl ipbook—at a smaller fi le size—can the “thumb” and drag it up or down the this year. sometimes convey the same information stack, avoiding the ergonomically ineffi - in a more interesting and engaging fash- cient 32 vertical swipes needed to get Apple, once the savior of the design world, ion. We want to keep the fi nger moving, back to the top of a stack. In the content has become something of a dictatorial give the reader lots to do and see and layer, we’re including arrows and graphic power. Are you finding there is a limitation touch and read and watch, so there’s a cues in the design furniture that indicate with Apple’s monopoly? considerable eff ort involved in deciding where content lies in relation to the cur- Look, I love Apple products. I admire what goes where and in what amount. rent screen of residence. Our readers Apple’s ability to design and produce re- want to share articles on social media markable hardware and OS technologies; What have you done to address the habits and they want to clip content and stories, I really don’t think any other company is of a newly literate digital audience? so we’re currently building out the expe- even close in terms of industrial design We’re seeing many digital magazines rience models. I literally have a list of brilliance. I thought the OSX Lion an- 28 PRINT 65.2 APRIL 2011 DIALOGUE
EDITORS AND DESIGNERS VERY MUCH WANT TO CURATE“ AND PACKAGE CONTENT, WHETHER WE DO THAT ON PAPER OR A GLASS SCREEN.
nouncements were terrifi c indications Digital Content Viewer, the additions to point of view to tell stories and form that Apple is rowing in the same direc- InDesign CS5, and the navigational met- bonds with our readers and foster a long- tion as Condé Nast in terms of delivering aphor. Adobe’s offi ces are mere blocks term connection, which, in turn, allows compelling content to all of the screens away from Wired in San Francisco, so it us to form relationships with advertising in our lives. We’ve worked closely with was easy to work together every day. We partners. So, whether we do that on pa- them over the past year and half, and I’ve created a navigational paradigm, an au- per or a glass screen, it really doesn’t come to understand why they operate thoring and design standard, and new matter to us as creators, but digital au- the way they do. Their methods serve fi le format for digital magazines called thoring and production give us some new their interests and keep the quality of “.folio,” which we are working to bring to tools to work with. That means we still their products very high. Do I think com- all platforms and devices. value the power of fi nely crafted design, petition in the tablet marketplace will be from expertly drawn typefaces (commis- a good thing? Absolutely. Our customers And with The New Yorker? sioned with pixel-based displays in are best served by a variety of competing The New Yorker work was very similar in mind) to maximizing the color gamut in retail environments—diff erent ways to nature, as many of the same Adobe tech- an RGB photograph. We still make visual purchase and access our magazines—and nologists and designers worked closely decisions based on the opportunities of we need to know who those customers with David Remnick, Pam McCarthy, the medium. With these new tools, we’re are so we can maintain our already- myself, and The New Yorker editorial able to work around some of the design strong brand relationships. team. We faced new challenges and add- constraints of HTML on the Web, deliv- ed new features to the viewer. The very ering rich, beautiful content directly into I understand that Adobe has been a very same team that produces the print and the hands of our readers. That’s not to flexible partner in your development... online versions of the magazine are now say that everything should be a straight Wired (and Condé Nast) entered into a also producing The New Yorker Tablet translation, as evidenced by work such as strategic partnership with Adobe in mid- Edition every week for the iPad. the Will Ferrel short fi lms we produced 2009. Jeremy Clark, director of Adobe this past summer, or the David Hockney XDCE, and his team had just completed From a design and typography standpoint, animated cover of The New Yorker. work on The New York Times Reader 2.0 is it better now than in the Web 2.0 days? and were looking to align with a publish- Absolutely. Now, using the powerful ty- Is this technology the magazine's savior? er to create a new kind of digital pographic rendering engines and scripts I think it’s too soon to say, but there are a magazine experience for tablets and built into InDesign, we can author com- lot of indications that folks are pretty touch screens. Much as Stephen Johnson plete and compelling high-fi delity digital excited about what devices like the iPad and Kevin Kelly describe a notion of “si- design experiences without writing code. and tools like InDesign can do for our multaneous invention,” I had been Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got a long way industry and the magazines we produce. working on a prototype of a tablet ver- to go; HTML5 is nowhere near as power- As Nat Ives at Ad Age reported, Wired is sion of Wired at the exact time that ful as InDesign in terms of type fi delity. now the most successful digital maga- Jeremy and his team had begun their It simply doesn’t have the H&J algo- zine in the world. Clearly, consumers are explorations. The decision to partner rithms that CS5 does, but it’s getting responding very well to this kind of edi- was quite an easy one. better by the day and companies like torial experience. In fact, Wired is now The ambition of the project was two- Adobe have committed to solving some selling an incremental 30,000 copies of fold: one, design and develop a version of of those very challenges. We’ll be bring- the magazine a month, which is beyond Wired for a then-theoretical tablet com- ing paginated HTML body copy—with any of our wildest estimates. If you had puter; and two, design and develop the user-controlled type sizing—to The New told us in late 2008, with the economy tools that would allow an editorial design Yorker very soon, and that will be an in- and newsstand numbers collapsing team to author digital issues without the dustry fi rst. And at Adobe MAX in Los around us, that we’d be selling nearly 50 aid of an external technology team. That Angeles, CTO Kevin Lynch committed percent more magazines on the news- way, the lessons learned and tools used that there improvements would be com- stand, I would have called you crazy. And to produce the Wired app would be appli- mitted to Webkit. this is just the beginning; we have one cable to all of the magazines in our digital newsstand, one great device, and company and in the publishing industry Is it right to think of print and digital mag- no subscription model in place. It’s only as a whole. azines in the same way? going to get better, and if some industry The Adobe team—including designers In some ways, yes; in others, no. We, as projections are correct and there are Bruce Bell and Justin Van Slembrouck— editors and designers, very much want to nearly 50 million tablet computers in ex- helped us shape the vision of Wired on be able to curate and package content for istence by the end of 2011, we’re going to the iPad and we helped Adobe shape the our readers. We use editing, voice, and be in a very good position. ▪