It’s been years I’ve read an issue of Wired cover to cover, but with the release of the iPad app, the time had come to revisit an old favourite. From the point of view of a print designer, with years of magazine experience under my belt, what a pleasure it was to explore this new magazine format. Whereas the Popular Science iPad app certainly looked the part of ‘magazine of the future’, I found it cumbersome to navigate, and I lost interest quickly. Wired’s app sits in a sweet spot between traditional print magazine and multimedia experience — with goodies like 360º images that are rotated based on user input, integrated video, and well-placed audio, it all feels… right.
Wired uses what I believe will become the presentation form for tablet-based magazines — swipe horizontally to change stories, swipe vertically to navigate within a story. It feels like a natural melding of a print publication and a web site. Typography is very strong, as we’ve come to expect from the design team, but one minor quibble is that it looks like only one article uses hanging punctuation. I’m definitely a fan of that in typesetting, but make it a consistent thing.
In several points in the mag, a deceptively simple single-page layout is used — to excellent effect. An image portal changes as different caption info is selected (or, vice versa, with different caption portals for a single image). A well thought out use of user input to keep everything on one page. And while this is something that’s pretty much impossible to do in print, there was a quality to the experience that still felt comfortably print-like.
Wired has successfully demonstrated that an electronic magazine for tablet devices is not only possible, but makes for an enjoyable read. I hunkered down with a cup of tea and really dug into the magazine. Something that just doesn’t happen on the web. Perhaps that’s why the first iPad issue includes an article comparing information retention from a long read vs. hyperlinked bits of text.
On the subject of hyperlinking, I’m happy to report that it’s used to pretty good effect. Hyperlinks from the front matter’s ‘Release Notes’ to the referenced articles was great, but I longed for some kind of mechanism to act like a ‘back’ button, so that I could return to the Notes and keep reading, if I wanted. There were also a couple of times where I accidentally hit the navigation that brought me ‘home’ to the cover, and a ‘back’ would serve well there as well.
There were occasions that I wished for a bookmark feature; a longer article that I wanted to come back to, and some sections I wanted to share with my wife. Sure, I can always scrub through the thumbnail version of the magazine, but bookmarks would be very welcome. And in the same vein, I was surprised that there was no ‘search’ function. This would make another useful addition to the electronic reading experience. And a final minor quibble: there’s a word puzzle with a clever reveal function (including ‘are you sure you want to see the answer?’). But I wished for a way to complete the puzzle within the mag either by drawing on top, or typing in my solution.
An advantage of the digital magazine is that the underlying application can be updated an improved in ways that print never could. I look forward to the updates as the design and programming team implements new features, and I’m eager to read the next issue. Of particular interest is how subsequent issues will be downloaded. Will they become available within the app, or will they be separate downloads. In any event I now have an icon for Wired on my iPad. I think it will stay there for a while.
