DesignerMark Blog

Interactive digital magazines: the future of print?

Adobe has announced that it will be selling it’s newly developed platform for creating interactive digital media, Adobe Digital Viewer.

The system works with similar tools to InDesign CS5, by which I assume they mean one can export the core content and layout from InDesign to add interactivity in the Digital Viewer software.

A fantastic example of what can be achieved when it comes to interactivity is the launch edition of ‘Wired’ magazine for the iPad. The Adobe software was actually developed FOR and in conjunction with Wired’s publishers for this very edition.

Wired Digital is a very rich experience, with touch gestures to navigate the ‘pages’ – including articles with dynamic areas of changing content, embedded movie clips, audio and interactive advertising.

For example there is music playing in the background of an article about a music artist so you can listen to his latest tune whilst reading the article.

Product review articles can behave more like a mini website so that instead of scrolling through many pages of text, you simply click the picture of the next product you want to read about and the text changes on the same page without needing to scroll or move your field of view.

Adverts can get more information across in the same amount of space without overwhelming the area with too much text at once by having interactive ‘layers’ of content, revealed by a tap.

Another example of a great advert in ‘Wired’ is one in which you can ‘build’ a Lego car by swiping your finger sideways slowly. The stop frame animation cycles through the stages of the Lego being constructed!

Products can have 360º spinable photos, so users can ‘look around’ the product… not exactly a replacement for seeing something in the flesh, but a lot more engaging than a fixed view photograph.

From Adobe’s Press Release:-
“Readers are able to experience the design fidelity of a print magazine, with the dynamic interactivity of digital media.”

See the full Adobe Press Release here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201006/060110AdobeDigitalViewer.html

Personally I really do see this taking off, with one huge caveat… development cost.
The Wired magazine took 1 year for the designers to create. Admittedly this was largely due to the fact that it was all new and software was being co-developed to support and enable this way of doing things but even so, with this rich level of content its not going to be quick to get the maximum quality possible.

I think for smaller publications if the sights are set to a reasonable level there is no reason why this couldn’t work well though, but to do a whole 100 page magazine would be an immense amount of time and work, so it would be hard to make all of the content current at time of publication.

The other downside are the filesizes of the finished articles. The Wired edition weighs in at around 500mb which took a while to download and certainly cannot be obtained through 3G. It’s not a massive problem because they will tend to be downloaded through a home internet connection (either directly on the device or via a desktop/laptop computer) and synched to the iPad, but it might put some people with limited storage space off, and becomes something you won’t ‘keep’ forever.

So, is this the future of media? It has pros and cons (doesn’t everything) but I think and hope that we are going to see more and more of this exciting content emerging. Save the trees!!