Tomorrow is launch day. On the iPad. It is very very exciting. We have taken our first step towards our Mag+ vision by building a Popular Science digital magazine for the iPad. Popular Science+ is available now in the iTunes and tomorrow live for the (hopefully) lucky iPad owners. If you want to have a first preview of the magazine, check out Beta Lab at www.bonnier.com/betalab.
Mag+, Bonnier's digital magazine platform, is a project that began months ago in a collaboration between Bonnier's global R&D task force and BERG, a London-based design studio. It is now an ongoing project across all Bonnier titles in the U.S. and Europe to rethink the way magazines can be read on a new generation of full-color, touchscreen tablet devices.
It's been a fascinating journey with only 60 days available since Apple announced the iPad in San Francisco. We've had 6 editorial teams in 3 countries working together to re-imagine the form of magazines. The feedback from the Mag+ video was encouraging and since then we have been deconstructing tons of magazines, used more whiteboard space than any project before and building many many prototypes. We are really proud of what we have achieved together with the PopularScience+. And there is a lot more to come.
Our design vision has been to avoid what our friends at BERG call "a wrist screen running clock software" - we wanted to build the watch. It should feel like you are touching the actual magazine, using your natural body language - not looking through the screen and layers of buttons.
Magazines are a luxury that readers can lose themselves in. We have built a digital magazine for a device you can curl up with on the coach. It allows readers to lean back, away from the browser, and just focus on the bold images and rich storytelling. We wanted to build a linear story with a beginning and end. Because we believe that reduced complexity increases your immersion. And that the sense of completion is important.
Hope you will enjoy it. Please feedback your thoughts and ideas. And read more about our design principles and join the conversation about the future of the magazines at www.bonnier.com/betalab.
And don't forget to buy our digital magazine at iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popular-science/id364049283?mt=8
Best,
Sara
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Comments
Very nice! Just in case you you can still use some inspiration: Here's an iPad demo called "NextMag": http://www.nextmag.de/ . A bit closer to a print magazine but not bad either...
supergr00bi, April 19, 2010
Congrats. Steve himself calls Popular Science »King of the hill« amongst magazine apps on the ipad. That’s a pretty good review.
Steffen Bang Nielsen, April 9, 2010
Congratulations to Sara and the R&D team. Everyone there must be thrilled that version 1 is out the door. I stumbled upon the mag+ videos a yesterday and am totally enthralled with them. I love your design principles - keeping things simple is a lot harder than just adding buttons everywhere as you need them. Sorry if this is a silly question, but what file format are the magazines going to be in? Will it be possible for other publishers to use the same format or will it only be available for publishers Bonnier works with? I'd love to see home brew zines or other artists get ahold of the format and run with it. I'm not sure on the business model for that though. Is mag+ directly competing with Apple's book store?
Alan Tocheri, April 4, 2010
Congratulations! I've just finished looking through Popular Science+ on my iPad, and it is a compelling experience. One of the most memorable aspects of the editorial design is something very simple: the overlay of explanatory boxes on the feature on "The most advanced R/C car". One image, several sets of boxes. Looking forward to the next Mag+ title.
Jaan Orvet, April 4, 2010
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