Plunge ahead into the "high fidelity" digital future, says creative director

Yesterday I attended Paper to Pixels in Toronto, a session co-sponsored by Masthead, Design Edge Canada and Adobe. It was something of an extended gee-whizz infomercial by Adobe, as expected (and there was much to gee-whiz about in its new CS4), but the keynote was a presentation by Campion Primm (great name, huh?) who is the creative director of Viv magazine, a wholly digital California-based women's title.

Primm urged designers (most of the audience) to "go into the digital age with grace" and to get into it early. That way they can hold onto the "high fidelity magazine experience". He was quick to dismiss lame magazine websites as no substitute.

"We want a magazine to look like a magazine."

(I found it interesting that the actual design is done in InDesign then, only after the design is right, web developers layer on the animation that's needed, using Flash.)

Some other observations:

• the magazine of the future is probably not going to be on paper;
  
• digital allows readers to have an enriched experience -- “To have someone interact with your page is going to give them more than if they just read it.”;
• only if you master serialization -- giving the reader more and repeated experiences -- will you be able to sell advertising;
• pages need to be designed to use the tools available to avoid endless scrolling, particularly keeping ads in view;
• videos should be at the readers' option by clicking on it;
• advertisers often have to have help from the magazine taking advantage of its interactive and animation possibilities.

By the way, Viv is not some throwaway; it's a paid sub, at $US36, available through Zinio.You can preview the issue, however.

Masthead has its own report on the event.