NYT: For New Yorker on iPad, Words Are the Thing

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The New York Times reports that of all of Condé Nast’s many splashy iPad magazine apps the relatively boring New Yorker is its most successful. It now boasts about 100,000 readers, 20,000 of whom bought annual subscriptions.

“…The figures are the highest of any iPad edition sold by Condé Nast, which also publishes Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and others on the Apple tablet… The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.”

This is part of the strategy that I’ve been advocating for in my various critiques of Condé’s approach to the iPad. In short, the best way to serve a reading audience is to focus on providing a terrific reading experience and to de-emphasize the showy, buggy and difficult-to-use extras that have become synonymous with the ‘iPad magazine app’ format. And in fact, I’m a regular user of The New Yorker app, especially while traveling, because it gives me reasonably unfettered access to the only thing I’m seriously interested in: the text.

None of which is to say, though, that The New Yorker app is anywhere close to perfect. First, it could use a code refresh as it crashes so frequently as to be unusable; in my recent experience all it takes to induce it to unexpectedly quit is to launch it and let it alone for five to ten seconds.

Second, selling 20,000 paid subscriptions is fantastic, but according to the Times as many as 75,000 of the app’s customers are, like myself, originally subscribers to the print edition. So in fact the majority of customers do not represent an expansion of the market at all. None of these numbers are to be sneezed at, of course, and even transitioning a print subscriber to the digital edition can be counted as a kind of win. But it strikes me that the whole lot of customers would be better served with an HTML5-powered app, rather than the current native app. That way, it would be significantly cheaper to service those 100,000 users and significantly easier to keep it from crashing so much.

Read the full Times article here.

Jump to this link

+

Don’t Forget, the Sunday Paper Is Still Great

The weather is hot but it’s beautiful out nevertheless, a great day to head to the beach or lounge on a shady lawn somewhere and enjoy the gorgeous lack of inertia that often characterizes summer Sundays. It used to be that I’d spend these days — every Sunday — reading the newspaper. Once upon a time, I had the luxury of declaring that Sundays were my time and mine alone, and as such it was therefore my prerogative to spend as much of the day as I liked doing something immensely enjoyable but also good for my brain.

These days I have a young family, and a startup — and, let’s face it, ubiquitous Internet access that makes printed paper seem obsolete — so I can’t recall the last time I indulged myself with the Sunday paper anymore.

But jeez, the Sunday paper is still great, still an amazing product of a long, long tradition of careful editorial packaging and art direction and just general purposefulness. If I could afford to spend a whole day with it again, I would, and for anyone who finds themselves with a Sunday to kill, I recommend picking up the Sunday edition of your local newspaper.

Yes, of course we can get news from so many different outlets now, and we can manipulate the delivery of news so it’s so much more convenient than the huge, intimidating tome that is the Sunday paper. But we can also, from time to time, take out a day to enjoy it. Maybe not every Sunday, but once in a while we can find a day to benefit from this still amazing weekly product that’s designed to reward a few hours of our undivided casual attention. I bet if you do this you’ll come across a story you probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and spot an ad for something you would’ve missed otherwise, and, maybe best of all, you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time surfing aimlessly the way you would have had you spent those hours on the Web. Hurry up and give it a shot, because sadly the Sunday paper is not going to be around for much longer.

Continue Reading …

+

The Modernist

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I spotted this book about the resurgence and evolution of the modernist aesthetic in graphic design and ordered it immediately. The description sounds like it was written just for me.

“Today’s designers and illustrators are synthesizing the best elements from past eras of graphic design to create a new visual language with a reduced and rational approach. The Modernist documents this uniquely contemporary, yet timeless aesthetic that is built upon the rediscovery and seamless melding of classical type elements and collage of the 1950s, the geometric patterns and graphic elements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the vector graphics and computer-aided montage of the 1990s.”

Not only that, but the cover features a drop-dead gorgeous collage illustration from the incredible Dan Mountford.

The Modernist

The terrific design inspiration blog Grain Edit has some snapshots of the book itself, too. You can read more about the book at the publisher’s site. Or buy it from Amazon and I get a little kickback.

Jump to this link

+

A Word About Unsolicited Redesigns

The Internet gives designers a soapbox like they’ve never had before, and that’s a wonderful thing. One of the most entertaining uses for these soapboxes is the unsolicited redesign, a kind of public demonstration of talent in which a designer overhauls a well-known Web site or digital product and shares it with the world at large. There is no invitation required or expected, and the same goes for credentials — anybody can undertake a creative reworking of any Web site, regardless of their experience or professional status. The only real qualification is whether they can produce something that they can substantively argue for as an improvement over the original. If the redesign is full of good ideas, well-executed and persuasively reasoned, the world beats a path to your door.

In the past week I’ve been asked numerous times to respond to one such unsolicited redesign that’s achieved not insubstantial notice within design and technology circles — a reworking of a site that I was closely associated with for some time. It’s a redesign that contains some genuinely good ideas and is executed professionally. But the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worst of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site.

I’m purposefully not identifying this person or the project or providing a link back to the redesign itself, mostly because I think it’s counter-productive to continue to reward this effort with more unwarranted attention. To me, it felt less like constructive criticism than link-baiting, and so I have tried to avoid making any public comment.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

Continue Reading …

+

Super-Heroes Are Faking It

Every super-hero movie requires a significant suspension of disbelief, but in 1978 when director Richard Donner brought “Superman” to the silver screen he infused the movie with considerable believability by imagining the Man of Steel’s Metropolis as a thinly-veiled version of late-twentieth century New York City. When the character defied gravity and soared over his adopted city, what laid below him was that uniquely beautiful, earthbound constellation of lights that is the Manhattan skyline — even including, during one sequence, the Statue of Liberty. In his secret identity of Clark Kent he clumsily made his way through the unmistakable congestion of midtown Manhattan to report to work at the real-life headquarters of The Daily News, which stood in for the fictional Daily Planet. Arch-nemesis Lex Luthor’s underground lair was an abandoned wing of the iconic Grand Central Terminal. Superman apprehended a burglar scaling the famous Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street. And so on.

Of course it’s not necessary to film absurdist fantasies — and super-hero movies are nothing if not that — in real locations, but imparting some sense of reality in these films can add so much, as they did for Donner. It’s fine to watch a super-human character negotiating an unreal world, but it’s more thrilling, more engaging, more entertaining to watch a super-human character negotiating a world that looks something like the world we know — the real world.

Continue Reading …

+

Box Office Mojo Takes Apart Numbers for Sarah Palin Movie “The Undefeated”

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

After “The Undefeated,” the recently released documentary about Sarah Palin, ran for its second weekend in theaters, its promoters applied considerable spin to its box office performance. Box Office Mojo takes a closer look:

“To put these numbers into further perspective: The Undefeated’s ten theaters on opening weekend yielded 159 showings. Using the current average ticket price of US$7.86, that means the movie played to an estimated 52 people per average showing or at about one-fifth to one-quarter capacity. In the movie’s second weekend, which had 211 showings, the per-showing average attendance dropped to 15.”

Read the full analysis at Box Office Mojo.

Jump to this link

+

The Wayback Machine for Apps

Mobile and tablet apps change all the time, but there is no public record of the way an app’s user interface evolves with each new revision. What we need is a version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for apps, but unfortunately because of the siloed nature of this class of software, it’s not possible to simply deploy bots to create one for us.

It occurred to me that one viable alternative would be to crowdsource something similar to the Wayback Machine by creating an app that would let any user upload screen grabs to a central archive on the Web. That sounds much more manual than the Internet Archive’s approach, l know, but in fact I think it could actually be fairly well automated.

Continue Reading …

+