Mark Porter

Last night the EDO and BSME collaborated on a panel discussion about digital publishing platforms, and – inevitably – the ipad in particular. When you get a bunch of editors, publishers or art directors in a room these days the desparate hope that this device is going to save our businesses is palpable, and last night was no exception.

To summarise the presentations… Jon Hill, my counterpart at the Times, spoke about his journey from print to digital, the familiar frustrations and his hopes for the future of online design. Kate Creasey, editor of cosmopolitan.co.uk gave an inisght into what young women want (from online magazines at least), which seems to be short-form content and shopping, and on a Blackberry please, not an iphone. William Owen of made by many cast himself as “the sceptic” and pretty convincingly suggested that the edited experience is irrelevant online (and touched on a few of the problems with apps which are less discussed — issues with linking & sharing, and the need for seamless always-on high-speed data networks to make the devices fully functional). And David Rowan, editor of UK Wired, slickly suggested that the print dinosaurs in the room had better reskill quickly if they want to avoid the dole queue, and then showed the Wired ipad video thats been doing the rounds.

I find myself in a conversation about the ipad at least once a day. There’s no doubt it promises to be an exciting device, and I want one for sure. But the assumption that any Apple release is going to change the game, and the desperate desire on the part of print-lovers to cling on to anything that looks as if it might support the kind of editing and art direction we’re familiar with in a digital environment mean that it’s sometimes hard to keep some perspective.

The debate seems to be condensing into two camps.

On one side is the vision represented by the Wired and Sports illustrated videos. This suggests that we can keep our magazine security blankets — self-contained issues, spreads and pages and controllable flatplans, high-end design & imagery and good old-fashioned editing — but add in some video and games and gizmos for advertisers. This is what magazine publishers (and Adobe who own the editorial production software market) would like to see. David Rowan described it as a “high-value curated product”.

But William Owen described it as a “top-down linear experience” of the sort that the web has managed to escape from, and the alternative view is that people are perfectly happy with web browser experiences, and may enjoy the portability and the informality of the ipad, but are not craving print-like magazines with minimal motion, sound and 3D thrown in.

In the simplest terms, if magazine readers can be persuaded to consume their favourite glossy on an ipad, then at least you save your print and distribution bills. But carrying the production values of a big glossy into a moving/3D/audio world would mean Hollywood-style editorial budgets which could eat up all the savings. So should we just see the ipad as an inflated iphone and confine oursleves to producing good-looking RSS readers?

My view is that the ipad (and the rush of other touch-screen slates & tablets which will follow it) will change the game, beacuse larger high-resolution screens and the touch-screen interface will take things to another level. But the real question is whether we can produce (and can afford to produce) products which are qualitatively superior to the web browser experience, while preserving the interactivity that makes the web so compelling. If we can, then maybe we can expect people to pay for them, and have some fun designing them. Fingers crossed.