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The iPad: one step forward, two steps back?
The commonplace view within magazine publishing is that the iPad is going to save the industry. Will it? And in the process, will the iPad become a force of reaction, enclosing a free, open and infinitely connected internet within a landscape of small fences and high walls – the tallest being the ones around the iTunes store?
I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.
What sparked them off was a couple of conversations with @bobbyc and @malbonster against the background of a loud hum of optimistic speculation buzzing up from the magazine industry on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see it here, at Conde Nast, busy iPadding up with Wired and GQ; here, with Sports Illustrated (you’re not allowed to watch the swimwear section**); and here’s Interview on iPad, a magazine of pages on a screen (see four below from the iPhone app), with a little video thrown in.
It’s like going back to 1990 in the days of the CD ROM and the ‘electronic magazine’. So what is it about the iPad that sets editorial lips aquiver?
I think there’s five key things:
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SXSW countdown: one day!
At long last… tomorrow morning we’re off to Austin!
Stu and Antonica, Made by Many’s de facto cat herders, are limbering up even as we speak to corral the lot of us from Heathrow to Dallas Ft Worth on to Austin. Assuming no one offends Homeland Security on the way in (you know who you are…), we should all be ensconced in our Texan digs by tomorrow evening.
Our departure is big news for our website, as it means our super-dynamic, sex-on-Twittter-toast* SXSW special homepage will be live. We’re kind of excited about this page. As well as all our latest tweets and links to our Twitter accounts, it shows off the latest Made by Many blog post and the most recent addition to our Flickr account. It offers a smooth user experience, too, as everything updates dynamically and in real time.
The page will be live the whole time we’re away, which means you can keep (non-creepy, please) tabs on us and get a sense of what the SXSW experience is like. You’re also heartily invited to @ or DM us with suggestions, feedback, jokes etc while we’re gone — this is, after all, a conversation.
For those who missed the earlier posts on this project, we took this page as an opportunity to open up our creative process and design in public. Here’s the first vision of the page. We followed this with a post on the idea’s evolution before whipping the curtain back for the big reveal.
Thanks very much to everyone who offered feedback on this work — and of course, if you want to do so now, you are more than welcome.
So on that note… have a great week and, um, watch this space!
*not my words but damn do I love ‘em
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SXSW countdown: one week
And lo, ready to roll a full week before we take off for Texas, here it is — our Twitter-powered SXSW people-tracker:
For those who haven’t been following the posts and discussions around this project, here’s the story…
Just about all of Made by Many is heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW interactive. Several weeks ago, we decided to build something onto our website to bring our SXSW experience to life for the people who aren’t going to be there with us. We thought this project would also be the perfect occasion to throw the doors open on our creative process and actually share the journey we go through as we work an idea through to a final execution.
This series of posts started with shots of our original approach. We then showed how this idea was refined a few different ways. The third and final instalment in this design journey is above.
The idea for the page is very simple: all of our most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.
The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected our personality nor the event we’re going too.
So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white. The page will be darkest when the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops.
As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog posts, even twitpics. You’ll be able to see more tweets from each person by clicking on their avatar or simply going through to their Twitter stream.
The idea for the page is very simple: all of most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected the personality of us or of the event we’re going too.So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white.We imagine that the page will be dark red whilst the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting virtually non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops tweeting.As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog post, even twitpics. You can see more tweets from each person by clicking their avatar or simply going through to their twitter stream.We like the sketchy style and the playful execution. We also think the design has some dynamism to it, that it tells a story and carries your eye through that story fairly easily. All in, we think this is really close to who we are.
This whole ‘designing in public’ thing felt a little strange at points (sort of like being naked in front of a lot of people, I reckon) but we got some interesting feedback here and on other blogs, which was cool. And it’s practice for us to be more open in the future — something we are really committed to doing.
Our SXSW special will be live on Made by Many as of Thursday 11 March.
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Introducing Made by Many’s Posterous
At Made by Many, we love playing with – or at least trying out – a lot of the new apps and sites that make their appearance on the web. Now admittedly Posterous isn’t *new*, but we’ve been giving it a go off and on, with the aim of deciding how best to use it, and how best we can use it in a way that is different from what we write here. The result: we’ve decided to make it a visual repository of the stuff we see, like, read or otherwise discuss about the web. We envision it as a sort of Oddbreak for geeks. So if you’ve got some time on your hands and you can’t be bothered reading long blog posts, just head to the Made by Many Posterous! You may want to add it to your bookmarks too.
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SXSW countdown: two weeks, one day
We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.
As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.
Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:
This was our first attempt in Photoshop. Each person gets a panel that shows their avatar and latest tweet. We’ve colour-coded the boxes to show recency, with the freshest content (hot colours) at the top, and the stale content (cold colours) at the bottom.
However, we wanted the page to update in real time, which would mean people and their panels moving around the screen. We figured that was going to get far too busy and complicated… Onwards!
Here’s the next stop on the journey:
Here we’ve brought in a bit of alpha-order to give everyone a spot on the page and keep them there. This solved the busy problem, but when the coloured panels are shown in a non-spectrum order, it looks confusing. We trimmed the colour back to what you see here but found that they meant less.
Standing back a bit, we worried that this design was actually a bit boring and unemotional… just not MxM enough. Next!
Finding the right conversational note:
Here we’ve started to play around with something that’s a bit more conversational and has more personality. There’s still more work to go, but we think this could be fun. Now we’re moving in the right direction.
We agreed this design and we’re taking it forward even as we speak.We’ll preview this project again next week, but in the meanwhile, feel free to tell us what you think.
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Going to SXSW? Come for a drink first
We’re inviting all SXSW-bound Londoners for a drink on Monday 8 March.
Freelancers, agency folk, designers, planners, developers and general rabble-rousers… all are welcome. In fact, even if you’re not actually based in or near London, if you’re going to be in the neighbourhood and you’re headed to Texas soon after, please stop by!
Top 3 reasons to come to Made by Many’s pre-SXSW meet-up:
- Knowledge is power. If you’re a first-timer, this is your chance to corner some people who have gone before and get the skinny on SXSW.
- It’s cool to know people. If you’re headed over on a solo mission or don’t know that many other attendees, this is a prime opportunity to make some connections beforehand.
- It’s Monday — what else are you doing?!
We’ve got some space at Two Floors in Kingly Street and we’ll be there from 6:00pm. Depending on how big a crowd we’re expecting, we might just book out the whole of the first floor, so if you are coming, please let us know (comment on this post, DM or @madebymany us).
Please feel free to share this post and invitation with anyone who might be interested.
Photo by sidewalk flying used under a Creative Commons Licence.
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SXSW countdown: three weeks, two days
Plans are still afoot — and are growing more evolved by the day — for our big trip Southwest.
As mentioned the other week, we’re working on a little project to bring our Texan adventure to life for the people back here — our friends, clients and industry colleagues. Our primary aim is to put together something that shows off what we’re up to at SXSW, and does it in real time.
Here’s one of our initial sketches. We think it’s a fun idea, but we also think it might be a slightly formal execution.
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SXSW’ward, ho!
Big news, little doggies…
Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest! Read full post
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Buzzing around Made by Many: January 2010
This post is a sort of modified version of my ‘Stuff that’s floating around the office’ posts that I used to do earlier. With our increased use of Twitter, I realised that all of us at Made by Many were tweeting interesting links individually rather than sending them around the office. So I’ve turned to Twitter to aggregate some of the best links as fodder for this refreshed series of posts. They’ll probably reveal what a diverse bunch we are – and we like to think our diversity is reflected in our work!
1. Star Wars Action Figures Doing What They Do Best: At Made by Many, some of us have a bit of an obsession with Star Wars, and that includes someone like me who isn’t a great fan of the movie series but is immensely amused by the entertainment that comes from objects based on them, like the Lego Death Star (only £274.99) and this website.
2. Unhappy Hipsters: Why do people look so sad in Dwell magazines? This is one of the most creative things I’ve seen lately! So much for picture-perfect homes. We live in the REAL world, people!
3. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post: You know what they’re like – they end with sentences that do this:
Excerpt:
This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn’t quite fit the topic.
4. MagCloud: Publish your own printed magazine. Can this help to revive the dying art of print journalism?
5. LG Unveils Flexible Electronic Newspaper: It’s a newspaper. It’s electronic. And it bends!
6. Simply Noise: Some people NEED noise. For reasons like enhancing privacy, going to sleep, blocking distractions, masking tinnitus, configuring audio equipment, and soothing migraines, among others. No, I didn’t make those up myself.
7. Where Does My Money Go?: You’re a taxpayer. (If you aren’t, kindly proceed to the next item in this list as this will not be of use to you). Don’t you want to know where your money goes, in an understandable way? For the layman (i.e anyone who isn’t a chartered accountant who wants to entertain himself by digging into the details where they are likely to find worms), this data visualization is a rather useful glance at what’s happening to their hard-earned bits-of-paper-with-Queen-Elizabeth’s-head-printed-on-them.
8. Inbox Zero: Merlin Mann is writing a book about ‘how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life’, and these photos are related to that. I think.
9. The Nerd Venn Diagram: Are you a geek, dork or dweeb? (via Laughing Squid). I always liked Venn diagrams in school.
10. Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0: A designer re-imagines the Microsoft Office logos. Worth a quick look, for some design entertainment.
11. Next Nature: Because this is a beautiful-looking blog that has an ambitious task. What exactly does it mean, I hear you ask:
Next nature is the nature caused by human culture. That may sound like a contradiction, but really, it isn’t. Our technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. This means we have to re-investigate our notion of nature.
12. Sleep Talkin’ Man: Because it is HILARIOUS. And we like laughing here at Made by Many. It increases our life span.
13. Amanda Wachob Tattoo: If you’re considering a tattoo, you may want to look at her work. (We’re a bit rad like that).
14. The Feltron Annual Report: Most of you have probably seen this already, but for those who haven’t, I’m sure you’ll find the intricate details of Nicholas Feltron’s life interesting. OK I’m kidding – it’s visualized in a very detailed way as well.
15. Slam Ball: Words cannot describe this new sport that seems to have been created by combining basketball with the trampoline.
That’s all for now, folks!
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Old media vs. new media…and then some
Old Media vs. New MediaView more documents from Bart De Waele.Bart De Waele from Netlash made this presentation on old vs. new media recently. You can see the whole thing for yourself, but I wanted to mention a few things that stood out for me:
The comparison of old vs. new media to Jesus vs. the jester. Some people are trying to be the Next Big Thing when all they really need to do is light a few small fires. Making people laugh is sometimes an ability that is highly underrated. It doesn’t HAVE to be an Avatar. A Juno will do quite well.
The power of real-time search and the shift from algorithm-based to social-powered search. More and more, I see friends asking for advice on Facebook about things they’re considering buying, so I agree with this.
The power of digital curation. When it comes to news, we don’t want to search for the news, we want the news to come to us – one of the many reasons why people use Twitter. Twitter hasn’t perfected the art yet, and Google News and others offer no way of serving up just what we’re looking for – I still wade through a lot of trash to get to the news that interests me. There’s a big role for digital curators in the future, as Bart says. Piers Fawkes at PSFK wrote a good post about what the future of blogs may be, and received an overwhelming response affirming the role of digital curators. However, Peter Rojas, publisher of Gizmodo and Engadget, made an interesting point when he said:
…….when I thought about what I wanted to do after Engadget I realized that there was something really interesting happening with the web — it was becoming more social, more dynamic, and more real-time, and I wanted to try and build a gadget site built around those ideas rather than one predicated on a team of editors cranking out posts.
I think FriendFeed went some way towards this, but it didn’t quite crack the code. I want to see things that interesting people (like some of the people I follow on Twitter) read and share on the web, but I don’t want to see comments of a personal nature they make to other friends (which includes personal stuff they share on Twitter, for example). With Google Reader I can ‘follow’ some people who choose to share their items with me, but I find that a lot of those items are from sites that are in my feed reader anyway. There’s a problem of duplication there, in other words. I think I’m describing a purely news-oriented Twitter – a sort of Google, FriendFeed and Twitter mash-up, where you follow people you want to, and get the content they’re into, on a real-time basis.
Another interesting comment from the PSFK post was:
It is endlessly frustrating to find a post that you put hours of loving care into get 1800 page views, and then throwing up a timewaster on LED encrusted eyelashes gets a hundred times that because of the power of DIGG.
There is nothing wrong with the medium of blogs, the problem is how the for-profit sites monetize it. That is why I think Fast Company and Atlantic are doing such a good job, they are bringing the discipline and editing of good magazines into the blog world and, I think, with their professionalism, will eat our lunch.
Now that is something that media outlets need to decide for themselves. Professionalism is a good thing. If the problem is the big supermarkets eating the small independent corner-shop, or the Fast Companies of this world eating smaller blogs, then the situation is the same as it was when globalization happened in South Asian countries like India years ago – some Mom and Pop shops died, but some didn’t. Sites like Unchained Guide are proof of the fact that there are plenty of independent boutiques that I personally would much rather patronise than H&M or Topshop in the UK, for example. Besides, if your blog is good, or popular (which is arguably more more important, from a monetization point of view), you may even get bought by a conglomerate, like Mashable is rumoured to be by AOL (whether or not the $15-25 million valuation is justified is a different issue altogether).
It’s called creating a niche for yourself.
I submit, however, that it IS irritating when sites like Digg give silly posts undue attention – I’m skeptical of the kind of people that use services like Digg in the first place. Taking this a bit further though, it would be useful to have a Digg-type vote up/vote down functionality on the mash-up service I described above.
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