The new visions of digital magazines

by John Einar Sandvand on February 18, 2010 · 4 comments

Magazines like Wired,  Sports Illustrated,  Bonnier and VIV Mag are rushing to present their vision of how a magazine might look on iPad or other digital platforms. Here are six of the demos: Is this the future of digital publishing? And which demo do you like the best?

Driven by the introduction of  iPad, many publishers are now putting their best creative minds to think about how magazines can be published digitally in the best way. Publishers realize that just presenting a PDF version of their print magazine is no longer sufficient. Instead they need to find new and compelling ways of telling stories utilizing the opportunities presented by new technologies and platforms.

Here are some of the many demo videos that have been presented lately. More will be added later.

The first to present demo videos were Sports Illustrated and the Swedish media company Bonnier. Also Wired joined forces with Adobe in producing a prototype based on the platform agnostic Adobe Air. Adobe clearly hopes the prototype might be the basis for how other magazines can work on digital platforms as well.

Later a number of magazines have presented their visions for the future of digital magazines. They include VIV Mag, Interview Magazine and Marie Claire.

So what do you think? Is this the future of magazine publishing? Which of these demos do you like the best? Will users be willing to pay for magazines in these formats?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

The Sports Illustrated Demo


The Bonnier Demo


The VIV Demo


VIV Mag Featurette: A Digital Magazine Motion Cover and Feature for the iPad from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

The Marie Claire Demo

Interview Magazine Demo

For a good overview of the current status of e-readers and the publishing industry I recommend Mashable’s article “Can E-readers and Tablets Save the News?”

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  • http://www.shotgunlife.com Irwin Greenstein

    For advertisers, the most important thing is the search capability of these new platforms. The current digital publishing programs are dismal when it comes to search results. We’re the first online magazine in our category and we went with Joomla, which is awesome for search. It helps Shotgun Life achieve out click-through rate of about 880% higher than the average in the US as established by DoubleClick.

  • http://GraphicArtGuy.com Bill Blais

    I can’t wait to begin designing for this new publication platform!

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  • Per Helge Seglsten

    Yes these might be showing us the padpublished magazines of tomorrow. But I don’t think they are the padpublished magazines of this afternoon which probably is a better image of the timeline we’re talking about. Existing magazines will not be able to implement this kind of layouts with their existing production lines. To be able to make editions like this previous print magazines would have to stop print production imediately. And that will not happend. For a while magazines will publish both print and pad versions, and in the beginning the pad versions will probalby have the same layout as the print versions. But of course, competition between magazines and the internal want for innovation will change the digital layouts and incorporate more and more digital effects.

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