Ipad app Design: Rogers
NEW PLATFORMS & PUBLISHING
OVER 30 TITLES PUBLISHED.
2 LANGUAGES,
2 PLATFORMS.
TURNING THE PAGE
As soon as the iPad was announced we knew things were going to change. Rogers Publishing came to us with a mission - help them usher in a new era for their magazines, all 30 of them.
Considering no one really knew at the time the impact an iPad app would have on a magazine's audience and it's brand we started with one title - Maclean's. The challenge was, how do we teach a 28 billion dollar company with its established process a new technology?
We didn't have to.
We developed the app for Maclean's, but considering that Rogers hadn't staffed to support the weekly production of the magazine for iPad, we were happy to jump in. So develop an app and produce a weekly magazine for it. No problem!
DON'T STOP THE PRESS
We eventually created a set of tools for ourselves to manage the weekly production with an eye towards handing them off to our client - and they wouldn't have to change how they did things! If their layouts were in InDesign, we created tools so they could continued to produce iPad magazine layouts in InDesign.
Soon, we became a machine, once we empowered one magazine to produce and launch in the app on their own, we were getting another magazine on board with the app. And then . . .
The announcement of the iPad 2, with retina display, and a new OS came out and we had multiple magazines to update. It was a mad dash to QA a matrix of devices, OS's and connection types (3G and Wi-Fi). I fondly remember our Frankenstein iPad - the iPad 2 iOS 4.
THE NEWSTAND
We offered solutions to a 28 billion dollar company that allowed them to publish their own magazines for mobile, independently, without having to be tied to licensing Adobe Digital Publishing and Woodwing.
