Mad Scientist Magazine and iPad Ap Design

we began the project by researching current magazines on the newstands, and looking about how they employ the grid, hierarchy, and composition throughout their magazine. i chose a magazine called worth, an upscale financial magazine obviously geared towards business and market types. i chose the magazine not only because i thought the layouts were aesthetically pleasing, but because i thought the layouts also reflected the subject matter conceptually. the environment was controlled and compartmentalized, but inside the active area of the magazine the layouts were open, well spaced and ordered. this reflected a peace or calm within a fixed system... therefore reflecting the logic and security of the information provided in the magazine.

my own magazine needed to reflect the "culture" of the mad scientist; an import from viscom 2. because the mad scientist created, bombastic, and colorful images in the mind, i wanted the magazine to carry that energy in the spreads.

the first way to present that feeling was the dimension of the spreads. i chose an exceptionally large format (each spread was a combined 20 X 14 inches). in your hands, the spreads are a little overwhelming and unwieldy. having such a large page size also allowed me the space to really use dynamic imagery, which i especially used to my advantage in the opening spread. the viewer is greeted with a frankly unsettling image of a madman.

because a requirement of the assignment was to incorporate infographs created in viscom 2 in our spreads, i chose to adopt the treatment of the graphs for the way i handled the images. the images were cropped and fractured into triangles and accented with a bright green stripe. the strong angles created by these shapes created dynamic leading lines in the composition which directs the readers eye through each spread.

as we developed the magazine layouts, another dimension was added to the project. we now needed to develop and adapt the magazine spreads to the ipad. as technology expands and print dies out, magazines have begun to move towards tablet computing, especially the ipad. downloaded as an ap, the magazine can expand its content to include videos, sound bytes, and user interactivity, as well as provide a mobile, direct link to the online marketplace for advertisers.

the assignment was to allow our magazines to inform how we developed the ipad interface for the article. the article i chose was a countdown. this naturally allowed for a compartmentalized format. i then chose to take those triangle shapes created in the images of the print spreads, and use them as frames for each of the information compartments. the user could then navigate freely between each compartment of the article, and pull up information on a real life mad scientist and swipe through to provide additional content such as infographs, or even a video clip of a film representation of a mad scientist.

thoughts on designing for the ipad

with the movement of print into the hand-held computing arena, one of the first things that struck me was (oddly enough) the possibility for advertising. devices such as the ipad bridge the gap between print ads and the marketplace, allowing the user to directly link to online stores through the ad. this creates a valuable asset to the advertiser, which then provides the fledgling online magazine market a steady base of income in a digital "free-is-expected" world.

the exciting part about the ipad is that it allows the traditional print format to remain relatively intact. that's why when watching an ad for esquire's new ipad ap, i was a little disappointed that so much of the navigation relies on the old scrolling web windows. one of the nice things about print is having the sum of the information on a page presented as a whole (in my opinion). rather than a digital magazine, these scrolling windows make the format just feel like a new web page.

when time magazine released their ipad ap, the first thing i noticed was the impact of seeing video of major news events, but presented in a well photographed, high quality fashion. in the web world, so much video and imagery is presented at baseline quality in a often much too small format. i'm excited to see the digital world handed to the minds who have traditionally given us top-shelf design standards and culturally iconic photographs.

TYPE 2: axial systems

TYPE 2: design quote research

In How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul published in 2001, Adrian Shaughnessy discusses questions many young graphic designers have about the culture, business, and ethos of graphic design in an effort to help guide designers into meaningful careers. In it, he talks about the problem many designers have in the workplace having to compromise their design standards for the sake of the project or client. He writes, “Integrity in design is a bit like obesity in ballet dancers—you don’t often see it”. Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer and writer based in London, regularly contributing to Eye, Creative Review, and Design Week, as well as working as an editor and design consultant.