Mr.
Matt
Spangler

Olympic pictograms and graphics over the year from the NY Times.

Catching up on the RSS over the holidays and saw this Berg Mag+ presentation commissioned by Bonnier Punlications at Gareth Kay’s site that shows a concept video exploring the future of digital magazine interfaces.

There is some great thinking here and I especially like the idea of completion being innate to how we prefer to experience content. I think many developments in recent products run counter to this but much of the successful entertainment and publishing products still provide a package with a beginning and end. After all, movies had one of their best year’s ever. This team is not the only ones thinking about this interface challenge. There are some others that are applying their thinking to practical application with the iPhone and websites.

I met today with an talented entrepreneur, the founder of Panelfly, who has been exploring this for the past year with his team and has launched his company in the hopes to be one of the leaders in this emerging space. Starting initially with a focus on comics, they have a patent pending technology that helps users easily navigate through large format story-driven print content (panels) that enhance the experience and play to the device strengths. They are well positioned to take advantage of this emerging area and I look forward to possibly working with their team to explore things further.

On the web, there are some forward thinking publishers looking at the future and applying it to their current interfaces in preparation for the pending device advancement.  My friend Harry and his team at moco loco have taken a similar approach to the interface described in this video with a site redesign that allows the user to choose either a horizontal or vertical scrolling view.  I see it as a site poised to leverage the newly Apple Tablet device that could likely be similar to the one shown in this video experiment.

I’m sure the Apple design team watched this video with interest in relation to the pending i(e.o.u.)Tablet launch and this is the first video I’ve seen that shows the clear opportunity for a tablet as a reading device for content that goes beyond the first gen eReader (kindle etc)

I was curious that there was no discussion or display of the use of video with this device and it seemed like a very static focused viewpoint that doesn’t seem to take full advantage of the medium and device opportunity. That ability to build a story with rich visuals and indeed, sound, will clearly be a place that “traditional” editorial groups such as magazines will be moving more towards and it seems through some of the early rumored meetings regarding the tablet that this is where Apple plans to put much of its focus.

On the other hand, you could argue, and I actually agree with, that the simplicity of this presentation and its lack of and in-depth analysis of video is a benefit for making the solution more clear and more applicable to the publishing company that hired them to create it. It says what is needs to say in a complete “package”…homage to the its own thesis.