Monocle Mediterraneo
The 2011 issue of Monocle Mediterraneo is now available for pre-order. It’s available from 28th July. Yaay!
Acne Paper
The 12th issue of Acne Paper… it’s the youth issue, y’all… is out 5th July. Yaay… young ballet dancers spinning! What’s not to love?
Astronaut Magazine
Astronaut is a new indie digital magazine. It champions young filmmakers and other creatives. We’re impressed, and jumped at the chance to chat with co-founder Anne Prinz.
You’d originally planned on printing Astronaut, including a DVD with each copy. How long were you working on issue one, and when did you change the plan and instead make an iPad-only publication?
We had been working for two or three months in our spare time on the printed publication. We had half of it done when we decided to make a digital-only magazine. We changed plans because of high printing costs and how time consuming it is selling advertising pages… it would have been a full-time job for another person. An iPad is the perfect medium for Astronaut, with its focus on video content. The iPad made some of the difficulties of self-publishing disappear, at least for a small team like ours.
When you decided on the iPad, did you know how to go about producing an app? How did you pull it together?
Micka [Astronaut’s other co-founder] works for a company developing navigation-based services for mobile devices, so making an app was not a completely new path. But a magazine is quite different to other applications, as the habits of reading print magazines and books have to be considered and included in the concept.
I’m a graphic designer, so creating a digital magazine was kind of new and very thought-provoking. You not only think portrait and landscape, the iPad also gives you the opportunity to design an alterable, multilayer layout. We wanted the magazine to have this special iPad-feeling and wanted to find a balance between both worlds… a classy print look, but also make reasonable use of some application features. We were lucky to find a young company of app developers who were eager to pull the magazine together with us and to transfer our suggestion of a print magazine into a digital one.
How many people worked on the first issue… and how often do you intend to publish?
The main team consists of two people. A lot of old and new friends helped out, like the photographer Alexander Schneider, who is a character in one of the main stories in the first issue. While working on the film about his everyday life as a freelance photographer, we became close friends and he is now part of the Astronaut team and will be working on the second issue with us.
Throughout the whole production there were about ten people working on the first issue… graphic designers, writers, filmmakers, photographers and copy editors. Herr Müller, an illustrator, also contributed a lot to the magazine.
The intention is to publish Astronaut on a quarterly basis. We will probably need a bit more time for the next issue.
Did you check out any other iPad magazine apps before putting the issue together? Are there any other apps you especially like, or find inspirational?
Of course we checked out a lot of magazine apps to understand what other publications are doing right or what can be improved. We quickly saw that we wanted navigation similar to a print magazine, to leaf through the magazine from the cover to the last page… from left to right. Letter to Jane and V Magazine were inspirational to us.
When putting a magazine together it is important to stop looking at other magazines at some point of the production. It is more important to stick to your concept, and make it clear and user friendly.
How do you think the big, mainstream publishers are performing on the iPad?
Mainstream publishers have been keen to incorporate every possible feature the iPad can offer… a lot of good content has suffered as a result. The New York Times app is still one of my favourites. It looks minimalistic and it’s easy to use, but it’s the exception.
Is making Astronaut available on other tablet devises a priority for you?
Not at the moment. Of course we were thinking about it, but decided to wait until one of them comes out on top. The android tablets have different screen sizes and resolutions and even different buttons to navigate. If we would develop Astronaut for each one of them we would never get finished and it would be too expensive. But who knows which solutions will come along with HTML 5… this could be a way to make the magazine accessible for all tablet users.
Astronaut blurs the line between magazine, website and television programme… and does so with great success. How do you see tablet magazines developing in the next few years?
For independent magazines the tablet solution is a good alternative to traditional printing. For those with videos or other multi-media content, tablets are the perfect medium. The good thing about the native application is you will have everything directly available even when you are offline. Digital magazines will not replace print magazines, both have distinctive features which allow them to coexist. Hopefully there will be a lot of self-published digital magazines in the future. They are often very unique in their approach to storytelling and their visual appearance.
By Steven Gregor
Fiasco
Multiple covers for Fiasco magazine’s 12th issue. Yaay! The two above are our favs.
Letter to Jane
Letter to Jane is one of the best examples of digital publishing, says Vanity Fair digital design editor Hamish Robertson. We agree.
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