A – Z of digital publishing: C

C is for Change

Sounds obvious but if you make the transition from print to online magazine publishing then you need to be prepared to change.

Having spent years designing print mags some habits are hard to break, the first thing to keep in mind is that every single person that views the finished magazine will see it diferently. Every monitor will display different, most peoples browsers will have different viewable window sizes, processors will handle the Flash work differently… you can’t control anything other than working to averages. Average monitor resolution, average colour settings or average screen size. Unlike a print mag that will have a run of thousands of identical products the web doesn’t offer that, and probably never will.

Change of work flow and production process is a given. Online magazines are in their nature a lot more fluid than a print mag, there is a lot of “back and forth” between writers and designers. They can be updated several times an issue once online and they can even see major changes half way through an issue if such an occasion is needed (like a major product launch).

If you’re used to web design or print than you’ll have to change the way you think about images, now at 150dpi, not 72, not 300. Text renders differently at different zoom levels.

An overall change in the design process, think multi layers, think animation, think video or sound. Change what used to be a 2 dimensional flat surface into an interactive multi layered hub of content.

There is a large amount of change to be undertaken, some will happen as soon as you start work, some changes won’t become apparent until you’re 20 issues in. Nonetheless a digital magazine has to be made in a slightly different way and the sooner those changes are embraced and indeed taken advantage of you’ll be knocking out some sweet pages in no time.

A – Z of Digital Publishing: B

B is for Broadband
Broadband in England sucks. Its just not upto speed (pun intended). Online magazines such as iGizmo, iMotor and Monkey need a decent broadband connection to make them an enjoyable read and I think that most people in the country don’t have that yet.

Getting any sort of official statistics on actual broadband speeds seems to be almost impossible since advertised rates are never the case when you’re actually at home ready to read the new issue of iG.
Since digizines are so fundamentally different from a website the file sizes of each individual page are way larger than that of a website, text isn’t rendered using HTML, its all image based. Pictures can be upto A3 size and at 150 dpi making for very large files, even without flash integration.

On iGizmo we try and keep each page under 1MB in size, and this is four times of what is actually recommend by Ceros. Anything over 1MB will slow down you browser massively and may even cause it to crash. The larger the file, obviously the longer it takes to load the longer it takes to load the more chance that people will bugger off rather than continue.

Broadband needs to improve, and quickly if digizines are going to be around for the future, the low bandwidth is one of the most limiting things in terms of design, with increased speeds we can drastically start doing more impressive and innovative things with the platform.

A – Z of Digital Publishing: A

A is for Advertising.
Lets get the boring shit out of the way first,  advertising – without it I wouldn’t have a magazine to design. Advertisers love the Ceros platform for two reasons. One, they can have rich media advertisements that they can embed auto play videos into them, they can build in Flash animations, small versions of computer games or puzzles, they can include massive amounts of info onto one page but spread over several layers, and most importantly they can get a potential customer involved in their ad on a level not possible in a print magazine.

The second reason advertisers love Ceros is because of the instant feedback. This is also one of the things that sets Ceros apart from (and in my opinion better than) other downloadble services such as Zinio. Ceros has a pretty good back end that consists of statistics for every button pushed, every video watched and more importantly for Mr Advertiser how many people have seen, interacted with, watched or click through from their advert.

This feedback has proved a massive selling point for ad teams and most of the time the feedback has been really good and in some cases exceptional. If an advertiser can see how effective their expenditure has been they are much more likely to invest at the start and continue as the product develops.

A is for Attitude.
Technology magazines and websites have a tendency to be dull boring works of crap. Colours are always grey or beige, fonts are normally a dull rip off of Helvetica and the pictures are normally the sort of thing that could push you into comma. With iGizmo I wanted to the opposite to a lot this, I wanted to give it a bit of attitude, or as I would often say “put some hair on its balls”. So my colour system is all based on RGB and utilises stupidly bright colours, all boxes have rounded corners to try and make it a bit softer, more approachable, headhsots of staff members are un directed so what you see is an accurate representation of the person. The fonts (Stainless by the way) is not the sort of thing you normally get in a tech mag, its way more lifestyle and easy going but makes a good companion against the harsh Glypha. The pictures we use and often bright and bubly, lots of reds that jump off page, lots of bright yellowy greens that slap you round the chops a bit and the throwing in of random silly things like a Batman came in a video, a stupid picture of a Terminator holding a mobile phone or a video review that gives Apple a load of shot for poor treatment of its customers.

All of these little things add up to the magazines, voice, its personality and its attitude and all are vitally important to they way its received by the public and by sceptics of the online platform.