Rethinking the Traditional Magazine for the Mobile Age

South of France magazine is a brand new digital publication providing a new reading experience to the magazine world.

When we were creating South of France Magazine, we didn’t want to just upload PDF versions of a printed magazine like the other magazine creators. This was for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the PDF are usually based on an A4 piece of paper. This means that reading them on the iPhone and even some iPads can be very difficult due to the small text size, causing the user to have to zoom and pan around the page, making for a messy and unpleasant reading experience.

Secondly, the original format of a monthly or quarterly release of a printed magazine means users have to wait to get the latest content. South of France Magazine allows us to publish as soon as the article is complete.

Both of these downsides helped us to make very important decisions for both the UI and UX of the app.

South of France Magazine was not just going to be mobile first, it was going to be mobile only. This allowed us to move away from traditional magazine guidelines completely.

The first decision we made was to remove the idea of magazine issues and just include every article separately in the app but without breaking them up into any issues, groups or categories. This means that users can jump straight to the content that they want to read rather than flicking through the pages of unrelated content to read an article sandwiched between two A4 pages of adverts. This proves for a much nicer user experience as well as allowing us to do things that wouldn’t have been possible with a traditional design like marking certain articles show as read and unread.

The second decision was related to the current design, or lack of design, of digital magazines. The majority of digital magazines currently available to download from the App Store are simply a PDF version of their printed magazine, shrunk down for the iPhone and iPad. This means that users must zoom in and out and pan around the page just to get the text to a readable size. This is especially bad on the iPhone which is why some publishers decide to ignore the iPhone completely!

We didn’t think that was a good solution. This is why we decided to completely rethink the digital magazine design process. We moved over to more of a card based design system, with cards for text, images, interactive maps, videos and more. The cards draw once they have collected the data from the cloud, detecting the device they are running on and adjusting their size, position, padding and even text size to create the optimal reading experience for the device that is being used, however small or large the screen may be. This means that we can display the same content on the iPhone 5se all the way up to the iPad Pro 12.9-inch and never lose any of the intended design or experience.

As this was a new concept for magazine design, we couldn’t find a piece of magazine design or publishing software that fitted our requirements. This is why we decided to create our own, in house magazine design and publishing software from the ground up. Not only did it have to make a layout that adjusts across all devices, allow for immediate publishing to all readers of the magazine and support the flexibility to create custom layouts for each individual article, it also had to be mobile. It was for this reason that the magazine designer software was designed specifically for iPad. The simple UI allows the designer to create a new article and publish it to every reader in as few as four taps. We now articles publish from bars, cafés and boats all over the South of France. Because of this mobile workflow we can now take fantastic photos and beautiful 4K video using the incredible camera in the iPhone 6s, write the articles on the go with the iPad mini 4 using Split View to research at the same time, edit the photos and video on iPad then collect it all together using iCloud and share it with the world. The designer app has been updated to take full advantage of the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s beautiful display and extra screen space.

In this case, the iPad Pro has not only replaced the laptop, the laptop wasn’t even considered.

You can download the App from the App Store on iPhone and iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/south-of-france-magazine/id662715502?ls=1&mt=8