phablets were sold in 2012 in the US but projected 146 million in sales by 2016.
In the current market, most magazines
are creating iPad content first – then porting this over to the Android ecosystem (Microsoft Windows tablets comprise a tiny 2% marketshare, making Windows-specific content low-priority).
At first, iPad publishing was simply
a copy-and-paste deal, with most titles opting to create digital mirrors of existing content. But with developers becoming more comfortable creating for mobile, magazines have begun pushing the boundaries – and turning our conception of what content should look like on its head.
In the first round of mobile publishing,
when the iPad debuted in 2010, most magazines kept their basic format, but with a few extra skeuopmorphic elements. Skeuomorphic design was a hallmark of Apple design in the Jobs era; simply put, skeuopmorphism is the act of creating something that has no need of certain elements, but retaining those elements anyway. (The iPhone camera’s shutter click, the iBooks bookshelf, and the contacts address book icon are just a few examples of Apple’s skeuopmorphism.) Jobs’ argument for this style of design is simple: familiarity breeds comfort (although, as a few publications have seen, it also breeds contempt).
Design-wise, most magazines have moved from the familiar to the cutting edge – many
of the titles in the App Store and Newsstand no longer look like standard magazines. In most cases, covers remain the same as the print edition, but content utilises a number of features more commonly found in games, from video embeds, tilting to reveal and hide content, ecommerce storefronts within apps, and social media sharing.
Just how does a format like the magazine, which has been around in its current format for hundreds of years, adapt to something as quickly evolving as today’s digital market and variety of mobile platforms?
A good design case study is Self, a health and fitness Condé Nast title which has been quick to jump on the tablet bandwagon. Within a few issues of introducing its iPad edition, Self moved toward a slimmer, sleeker version of its tablet edition, forgoing traditional layouts in favour of fewer (yet more visually compelling) images in articles. Another feature that didn’t make the cut was an “On Self Now” ticker that ran across the bottom of the screen; although useful in terms of online tie-ins, the ticker distracted from the reading experience.
When it comes to mobile app-packaging,
perhaps the most unusual example is The Atlantic, one of the oldest magazines in the US, which debuted its app in August 2011 (the app was updated again this past August). Rather than focusing solely on the magazine’s content, The Atlantic has developed a cross-platform package, pulling together its website, blog, and magazine in one tidy little app. Visually,