Are Digital Magazines Coming Soon? Mag+ Concept (HD Video)
E-readers may be a hot gift this year, but the devices are still very much underdeveloped. Most can only display text and images in black and white, and page load time pales in comparison to modern computers, hand-held devices, or (gasp) even paper-based books.
Though text-based articles are increasingly readable on many modern smartphones, magazine-type content, marked by expansive layouts mixing text and photography, has yet to find a viable digital format. So Mag+, a collaboration between designers at BERG and Bonnier R&D, publisher of Popular Science, imagines how magazines could work in digital form (check out the video after the break). The concept envisions content being displayed on a touchscreen tablet that lets the user fluidly move between text, image, and video, creating an interactive reading space that is more tactile than Web exploration. Regardless of whether the issue-based magazine format — which lends itself nicely to the integrative nature of Mag+ — will survive in the digital age, we hope more companies take a ‘page’ from the BERG and Bonnier project. Make e-readers less like browsers, and more like, well, smartbooks.
The articles run in scrolls, not pages, and are placed side-to-side in kind ofmountain range (as we call it internally). Magazines still arrive in issues: people like the sense of completion at the end of each.
You flip through by shifting focus. Tap the pictures on the left of the screen to flip through the mag, tap text on the right to dive in.
It is, we hope, like stepping into a space for quiet reading. It’s pleasant to have an uncluttered space. Let the Web be the Web. But you can heat up the words and pics to share, comment, and to dig into supplementary material.
The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience. We hope so. That gets tested in the next stage, and rolled into everything learned from this, and feedback from the world at large! Join the discussion at the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab.
Recently there have been digital magazine prototypes by Sports Illustrated, and by Wired. It’s fascinating to see the best features of all of these.
Many teams at Bonnier have been involved in Mag+. This is a synthesis of so much work, research, and ideas. But I want to say in particular it’s a pleasure to collaborate with our friends at R&D. And here at BERG let me call out some specific credits: Jack Schulze, Matt Jones, Campbell Orme and Timo Arnall. Thanks all!
(See also Bonnier R&D’s Mag+ page, where you can leave comments and contact Bonnier, and the thoughts of Kicker Studio — who will be expanding the concept to robust prototype over the next few months in San Francisco! BERG’s attention has now moved to the social and wider services around Mag+ – we’ll be mapping those out and concepting – and we’re looking forward to working with all the teams into 2010. Awesome.)
