‘Project’, New iPad Magazine

New iPad-only magazine from Richard Branson’s Virgin Publishing. Interesting, but given that it’s iPad-only, I expected better on-screen typography and navigation.

Update: After spending more time with the premiere issue, I’m pretty sure they’re using the same InDesign-based Adobe production tools that Wired and other Condé Nast magazines are using. But why? The appeal of these tools for print magazines is that they hook into their current production workflows. But I doubt that’s optimal for a new digital-only magazine like Project. Again, the typography (and type rendering) are poor in Project. And I find the navigation to be frustrating. You swipe left-right to page between different articles, and up-down to “scroll” between the pages of a multipage article. But frequently — not just in Project but also in other iPad magazines using this format, like Wired — I find myself on page N (where N is greater than 1) of an article, and accidentally going left or right when I wanted to go down to the next page of the current article. Then, when I go back to the article I never meant to leave, I’m back on the first page of that article, not the page I was reading when I inadvertently swiped to a different article. I find it to be a frustrating reading experience.

★ Wednesday, 1 December 2010