Daily Design Mag

RIP: How the Death of the Magazine Affects Designers

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Daniel in Design Trends

The below video from Time Inc. is a glimpse into the future of magazines: they will soon become interactive media outlets for people. Time is planning on porting all of their magazine properties to this new media. As soon as hardware manufacturers start cranking out powerful media tablets, and as soon as people begin to adopt them, we will begin to see a different world in how we view media because it will then be integrated all into one – music, movies and information all from one portal:

Its been rumored that several companies are going to be producing tablets large enough for proper media consumption – HP, Apple and Dell to name a few – yet at the same time are going to be both portable and easy to use compared to the tablet notebooks and netbooks that are coming out by the top manufacturers today. Nevertheless, the content for these devices will most likely be streamed over the internet so that there is one single standard.

But what does that mean for the future of design? Does it means that the people who create these will need to be even more technically savvy than today? Designers are pretty well prepared for it. The most important element is going to be the test of usability within the design of this new medium. But besides that, the web as a media outlet has been out of the bottle for years and most creative types already have the chops to step up to the plate.

Most media websites today use content management systems like Drupal or Wordpress because they are mostly publishing news stories, but with such a variety of content that would make up a digital magazine, the tablet format that the Wonder Factory created for Time’s demo was created on Adobe’s AIR platform for rich internet applications. AIR basically integrates many other Adobe products such as Flash and Flex all into one. So this format is going to be running as an internet application outside of a traditional web browser.

The thinking in Old Media is that this is the direction that they need to go in order to survive the onslaught of web media. It’s the only way they are going to be able to compete. Question is can web media compete with them?

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