just an asterisk

I recently came across this project from Bonnier.  It’s a rather intense magazine prototype (that doesn’t exist yet), realized in response to a thought experiment on the future – What about magazines is so great that we’d want to preserve it when we go digital?  Well one answer is embedded below.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Part of the video that I find particularly interesting is the conversation around the magazine cover.  When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Rolling Stone and I’d read it cover to cover.  However, it was the cover art that drew me into each volume, enticing me with (admittedly half-naked) beautiful shots of my favorite stars and short, but catchy taglines.  Here is a link to one of those covers.

I think the issue is larger than just magazines.  We’ve started a fantastic conversion from paper to e-whatever.  However, we’ve forgotten some of our favorite parts – the things that made us read in the first place.  As much as we’d love to pretend, it’s not all about the text.  There is a reason that artists have labored on the surrounding graphics for centuries.

Right now, I’m reading 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne.  It’s a surprisingly easy read, filled with adventure and lovely science.  The kindle version I’m reading has been cleaned of all images and I can’t help feeling like I’m missing out on half of the experience.  Take a look at this cover (left) of the original book in 1871.  I love the little sea explorers in the bottom left corner and the varied beasts battling it out.  This image was not in my version and I’m glad I went to Wikipedia to find it.

In the end, my thoughts haven’t changed much since I reviewed the kindle for the first time.  The graphics and layouts are the next step.  For the web, we have CSS (cascading style sheets), a method of organizing pieces of HTML (that’s the web language) into a magazine like format.  I apply a “float left” to the image above and the text magically wraps around it.  This can be understood by nearly every browser in the world.  Why can’t we do this for e-books and e-magazines?  We could apply CSS to the dull text of our digital texts and include images without developing anything new?

Anyway, them’s my thoughts.  I’d love to hear what others have to say.  Enjoy the video!

~ab

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 6:03 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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