Pure design: Web influences

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mario garcia

Web influences The survival of print magazines and newspapers depends heavily on editors’ ability to embrace new media. The future consists of people living in a multimedia environment. They will read on the screen as well as on the printed page. Smart editors will make sure they keep users moving from one to the other, emphasizing the pluses of each as they refer them back and forth. One of the advantages of the printed page is that it provides a sense of closure. A newspaper or magazine has a beginning and an end, a first page and a last, whereas websites are an endless barrage of information. An editor can take advantage of this; he or she might publish a few paragraphs of an interview in the paper—just the right amount to tell the story—and refer those interested to a site where the remaining text appears. The best publications already include guides to the Internet. Just as we all find that bibliographies at the end of chapters enhance the utility of books, modern readers welcome a good list of selected websites to consult on a covered topic. But the real influence of the Internet on print may be in indexes, navigational devices and better use of functional color. The Web has made us more aware of indexes, facilitating what we wish to find, and leading us there. Print (not notorious for making navigation easy) can now regularly be seen applying these lessons

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pure design

to contents pages, covers and other indexing tools. As for color, we are beginning to use it like never before. Web designers have discovered color as a functional element for moving the user from one side of the screen to the other. Print designers are imitating the technique, with great success. There will always be printed newspapers and magazines in some form (smaller formats, for sure), but the strong publications will be allies of everything we are learning from the Internet. 

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mario garcia

Cross-Platform: Hispanic Business magazine includes Web references in all of their stories. These include links to reader- feedback pages, online polls and extended versions of stories.

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pure design

Indexes on the cover: Increasingly, we notice that magazine readers don’t spend the time to read the table of contents. John Miller and Aaron Kenedi have been in numerous focus groups where readers preferred coverlines with page numbers to find what they wanted. So when they designed Schwab’s On Investing magazine, they created a cover strategy that featured a mini table of contents—perfect for scanners. 29


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