Paper or Pixels?
Do magazines (the printed kind) have a future as we increasingly migrate to the web? This and many other questions were raised at last week’s SPD panel discussion, Paper to Pixels. Five distinguished art directors offered their perspectives on moving from print to web, giving me so much to think about that I’m not sure where to start.
One main thread throughout the evening’s discussion was that of “be true to the medium.” Many good ways of thinking about designing for the web were presented: print design gives “a speech,” web design has “a conversation” (Khoi Vinh, New York Times) and we’re not just designing stories, we’re designing “ways INTO stories” (Ian Adelman, New York Magazine). Could go on and on about those!
But what also came out of using either medium to its truest and fullest was what may be a printed piece’s strength: some of us (and this will no doubt change as younger generations grow more accustomed to reading more on a screen) still like to read longer articles and stories in a “hard copy” format, and not necessarily sitting in front of a computer. As one panelist put it, printed magazines are good for “lush feature wells” – really long articles with beautiful pictures. True, for now. However, since a lot of us haven’t bought a newspaper in some time – I agree that “an online newspaper is a better newspaper” because it does better at what a newspaper should do – I think our reading habits are going to keep changing.
Magazines will likely be around for awhile yet, and possibly become more of a niche-market, specialized thing. But it’s inevitable that reading preferences are going to evolve to more screen-friendly practices (Kindle, anyone?). In fact there’s a new book out, iBrain, about how technology is influencing “brain function and behavior” (with a lot about social interaction). Yes, that does sound scary. But I guess as designers, we can’t keep fighting the current, we have to find ways to swim in it.
