A Dream Becomes A High Def Reality
The making of a digital cover for a limited edition AnOther Magazine
Since his teen years, Dazed & Confused founder Jefferson Hack had imagined a day when magazine covers would be more than just still images. Moving, rather than stationary pictures, perhaps even set to music. Blame it on a holographic cover of a National Geographic that Hack saw in 1988 and never forgot.
As he became an adult and developed a reputation for innovation in publishing and digital media — particularly in the fashion world — his idea continued to evolve into a much bigger vision: Create the first ever high definition video cover for AnOther Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2015 issue.
The 15-year-old, luxury biannual, has a reputation for high-end aspirational fashion and design, and is one of the cornerstones of luxury style media. So Hack needed to find a company that paid as much attention to the tech as it did to the design and detail. Plus, this one-of-a-kind publication had to be ready in time for the March 2015 Fashion Week in Paris, and it had to feature an homage to iconic fashion designer Alexander McQueen.
“Alexander was a long time contributor to the magazine and to the fashion world,” Hack explained. “I wanted to do something very original, ambitious and bold that would honor him and show that he was as much about light as he was about dark.”
Hack knew there would be obstacles to pulling off such a one-of-a kind project. But even with a little more than a year to do it, he was convinced that someone could help make his vision a reality. After all, they would be making publishing history. But after almost nine months of presenting the idea to different design engineering and manufacturing firms, he was still a man with nothing more than an idea. Frustrated and seemingly out of options, Hack called his London team one day in early November 2014 and told them, “It’s just not going to happen.”
Later that evening, he joined a group dinner at The Clarence Hotel in Dublin. Across the table sat PCH CEO Liam Casey. Neither had met until then. The conversation eventually got around to Hack’s scuttled project. Casey was intrigued and the two of them agreed to give it a go. Hack had finally found someone willing and apparently able to bring his vision to life.
Keep in mind that what Casey agreed to have PCH create had never been done before. Not typically a problem for a company that prides itself on making good on its core tenet — if it can be imagined, it can be made. But Paris Fashion Week was now only four months away, and taking a new product from idea to development to manufacture generally takes one to two years. And while unexpected hurdles can kill a project at any stage, the more common enemy is scope creep.
“Jefferson was the perfect creative for us because he had a laser focus vision from start to finish, so this took a lot of the risk out of the project,” Casey said. “It meant that even with such a short timeframe, our team could also be more focused on how we worked to help him realize his vision.”
Putting it into perspective — the flat-as-possible-video display
Back at PCH’s offices, Casey assembled a core project team. The central question for us: How do you create and deliver 1,000 working prototypes in just four months while coordinating with mechanical and electrical engineers, vendors, and a host of experts from London to Cork (Ireland) to San Francisco to Shenzhen (China)?
There was also the Chinese New Year to take into account. Most of PCH’s partners and experts in Shenzhen would be on vacation in February. That meant a working prototype would need to be completed in January… and that four month window just became three.
We quickly organized the team around these key areas: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, manufacturing, packaging, and assembly and fulfillment. This meant we could be working on different elements as simultaneously as possible.
One of the primary considerations was to make the high definition video display fit a 9” x 12” shape defined by the size of the magazine. That meant the display itself had to be ultra-thin and flexible.
Unfortunately, available display options were disappointing. The flatter the display, the fewer the features. The thicker the display, the further we went away from the intent of an ultra thin design.
Eventually, we found a high definition, ultra-thin, hard display that fit the dimensions for AnOther Magazine. Now to find a battery and still have enough room for a bespoke board, audio ports, chip sets, a micro USB port, and control buttons into what remained of the 9” x 12 “space.
The solution was to minimize vertical space by making the components live next to each other rather than stacked on top of one another. But taking that approach meant trying to figure out what to flatten and where to finesse.
The first element we “flattened” was the battery. We eventually settled on having a battery custom-made to our specifications — at 2mm thin, it could power a continuous high quality, high definition video running at full brightness for 100 minutes without the need to plug it in. Running at less than full brightness could increase playing time up to four hours. The battery took up one full layer of the cover.
PCH then finessed a fit for the audio ports, control buttons, and USB port. Each pocket of empty space became a possible home for one more item. We then built a bespoke board layout with a super powered chip that was unavailable in consumer products outside of China. It was like having access to a Formula One engine.
Hack wanted the cover to fit the “limited run” of the magazine, which meant no future changes to the cover’s content or the ability to download it. That eliminated the need for any type of network connectivity to update or share the content.
We wrapped our first prototype in an acetate overlay around the top and sides to make it look and feel exactly like a traditional magazine — the exact way it would eventually be delivered. The edges were painted but not hidden, so seeing the layers of the cover would be like seeing the pages of a closed magazine.
New Year, New Challenges
One thousand units is a tiny order for a Chinese factory, and most would grumble at such a request. Especially when vacation plans are being interrupted. But thanks to the good relations we already had in place after years of working with partners and suppliers in China, they gave their full support. It also didn’t hurt that a few PCHers in Shenzhen worked the first days of the Chinese New Year to make sure production would succeed.
Meanwhile, Hack’s team was creating a two-minute video and a special soundtrack for the cover. The video, shot by Inez and Vinoodh, consisted of high def moving images of Rihanna wearing Alexander McQeen. Longtime McQueen collaborator John Gosling created the soundtrack.
By early February, only two months after Hack saw an initial prototype in San Francisco, we hand delivered a fully operational sample to his London office. He picked it up and watched a high definition video magazine cover come to life. His vision was rapidly becoming a reality.
“I was literally in awe of what the team had created,” said Hack. “By the time I had talked with Liam, I was thinking this idea would never take off. Too many people were telling me it couldn’t be done. But not only did we pull it off, PCH created it exactly as I envisioned, and made sure that it matched my personal standards and those of the magazine. I think Lee [McQueen] would have been thrilled as well.”
Live at Paris Fashion Week — 2015
Four months after Jefferson Hack and PCH CEO Liam Casey met at The Clarence, AnOther Magazine’s Limited Digital Edition launched at Colette’s in Paris in time for Fashion Week. A bulk shipment of 1,000 magazines featuring the breakthrough video cover and 440 pages of printed content were later sent to Hack’s office.
Noted designer Karl Lagerfeld was the first to buy a copy — he evidently bought three. (They sold for £125 / 125 euros a piece.) And in an article about the magazine project in Dazed Digital, Vogue’s Suzy Menkes offered this Instagram post, “WHAT! The first moving digital cover of a glossy magazine that I have ever seen is in the hands of Jefferson Hack…Is it a fad? An LED toy? Or the future of blending art, fashion and technology?”
Jefferson Hack had finally seen his dream become a reality, and an industry took note of a possible new trend.
“Everything about this project fit what we believe we stand for — doing whatever it takes to help visionaries like Jefferson bring their ideas to life,” Casey said. “It also pointed to the growing convergence between fashion and technology. We think there’s an opportunity for fashion to drive that and we hope this represents another example of how that can happen.”
