TAKEAWAY: Books do it. Magazines do it. Newspapers do it, too: the tabletizing of content puts “the look” up front as a major seduction weapon.
I am in Oslo the first part of this week: a sunny Tuesday morning in this beautiful Scandiavian capital that I had not visited for quite some time. It is offering me the first glimpses of winter, a little of the white stuff on the side of the road as I made my way by taxi from the airport to the center of the city; the splendor of the Scandinavian capitals, the combination of sea and land, never stops to amaze me.
Of course, I am looking at it all through a different lens, following my eye surgery last Thursday in Florida. A grander, clearer view, one may say.
No sooner I get into a presentation about storytelling and multiplatforms for one of the big dailies here, and the words that seem to be as present as the cold air outside are: reinvention, rethinking, rebooting.
Although we hear these words in the context of newspapers and media houses primarily, I must mention a fascinating article read while flying here, published in the International Herald Tribune. Titled,
The Invincible Book Keeps Reinventing Itself ,by Alice Rawsthorn, this is thought provoking piece for those of us involved in the visual aspects of storytelling.
Its subject: the reinventing of books for the tablet age. I found that much of what the writer presents here has direct applications to our own reinventions and rebootings of newspapers to introduce their content into tablet platforms.
Rawthorne, who writes on design topics for the IHT, sustains that sometimes it is the design of a book——not necessarily its content—-that makes a book memorable.
Interesting thought which Rawthorne then proceeds to explain with a list of her favorite such books:
When it comes to the type of books that are likely to appeal to design nuts, some score highly on that basis, and others are memorable because of how they look. Then there are the books that will be remembered because their designers turned them into something dazzlingly new or different.
She adds that the iPad and other digital readers are creating perfect platforms for innovations in book design.
I will let you read the piece and check Rawthorne’s favorites, but I am rushing to get my fingers on one of them, Alice for the iPad(Alice in Wonderland) which, she says, allows the user to throw jam tarts at the Queen of Hearts or to shake the Mad Hatter’s head. How about chucking pepper at the Duchess?
You can do all of this by touching, stroking or tilting an iPad screen while flicking through “Alice for the iPad,” an application created by Atomic Antelope, an Anglo-American design duo (one designer is based in London, the other in Seattle) that specializes in developing new reading concepts for the iPad.
These are the pop moments that we seek beyond ficitional accounts like Alice in Wonderland, and into the day to day storytelling of newspapers and magazines.
Part of reinventing is giving our stories longer legs for the iPad and other tablets.
The fingers are curious and impatient, I told the group here today.
Perhaps Rawthorne is right: in the tablets, the design of the app, how it seduces visually, how it entices the fingers to play on the screen, the effects such action produces, could be the difference between a memorable and a forgettable app.
Financial Times op-ed page columnist Michael Skapinker writes about his experience participating in a college debate
where the motion was, “Print media is dead”—-he correctly states that it should have been “Print media ARE dead”. But, in any case, Skapinker does not believe print is dead, and uses the testimony of those in the train with him that day: everyone reading a printed newspaper.
Skapinker proposes this experiment:
Let us do a thought experiment that people have been performing for some time. Imagine a world in which print had never existed, in which all we had were computers and their successors. Surely some smart inventor would say: “I’ve got an idea. Print!”
Let him tell you all about the debate and who won it.
It is in print that our words will live on
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3db5e3ac-e06a-11df-99a3-00144feabdc0.html