TAKEAWAY: Reed Reibstein gives us a short summary of the Society of Publication Designer’s “Paper to Pixels v2” event in New York Wednesday. PLUS: Mario and Richard Saul Wurman!
Mario meets Richard Saul Wurman during Reception at Society of News Design annual conference in Denver.
Wurman has devoted his career to making information understandable! Created TED (Technology/Education/Design) and author of 81 books all helping people search for visual answers to complex questions.
SPD’s iPad Event in NYC
Time art director D.W. Pine showed a photo of the wall his team uses in designing the iPad version each week: “The thing is, we still wind up printing everything out… In fact, we just built another wall, just for the iPad print-outs.”
The Society of Publication Designers hosted the first of several planned events exploring how magazines can work on the tablet platform. “Paper to Pixels v2: Lessons from Launching the First Wave of Magazine Apps” packed a huge amount of information into just a couple of hours Wednesday evening. For those few of us who had also attended this summer’s “Power of the Tablet” conference, it was a continuation of sorts, with more experience with the iPad informing the presentations. The five panelists largely focused on the development process: how publications like Time, People, and Popular Mechanics conceived of and produced their apps. The big message of the night was that designing an iPad app requires a different mindset for print designers, but is a wonderful opportunity to blaze a new path.
Moderator Josh Klenert has done a nice job summarizing the evening’s themes. Notes are available for Neil Jamieson’s presentation on the People app, as well as for Michael Lawton and Peter Herbert of Popular Mechanics. Joe Zeff presented an abridged and updated version of his talk from “Power of the Tablet”; the original presentation is online on his blog. (A final tidbit: Time art director D.W. Pine mentioned that there may be updates for their app in the next few weeks.)
Introducing the evening, magazine designer Robert Newman mentioned that the next “Paper to Pixels” should be in February. Keep an eye on the SPD website for updates; given how quickly the field is evolving, you’re not going to want to miss it!