Hasta La Ideas

All that iPad talk has died down a bit following those months of frenzy ahead of the official announcement in late January. Sure, there’s still tons of it, but it probably hasn’t made your inner ear ring as loudly as before. But if you couldn’t already feel the ground rumbling, it’s about to explode again with the release of Apple‘s new device this Saturday. The magazine industry has been particularly interested in the iPad’s release, seeing it as possibly rescuing them from falling profits, and as such, have released a handful of videos showing themselves off in tablet form. Most notably, you’ve liked watched the demos by Sports Illustrated or Wired‘s slick presentation. However, while we’re sure there out there somewhere, we had yet to see anything about how magazines will go about designing and building all this flashy content. So we were all ears and eyes when it came to this preview video by WoodWing, a company who has developed a plug-in for Adobe‘s InDesign. The example they use is Sports Illustrated. Whether or not they actually helped create what we’d seen demoed before, we’re not sure. But it’s an interesting behind the scenes look at content creation for Apple’s new toy:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s official: Interior Design is moving house. The magazine is among the design-oriented bunch of Reed Business Information print and online publications that have been acquired by Sandow Media, which publishes titles such as NewBeauty and Worth. The deal also includes RBI’s Furniture Today group: Furniture Today, Gifts & Decorative Accessories, Home Textiles Today, Casual Living, Home Accents Today, Kids Today, and Playthings. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Sandow, a portfolio company of private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, plans to hire more than 100 employees and expand its current New York City operations. The RBI facility in Greensboro, North Carolina will also become part of Sandow Media. “As design continues to increase its impact throughout our world, this is a terrific and exciting transition for Interior Design,” said the magazine’s publisher and vice president, Mark Strauss. “With Interior Design being the leading voice and advocate for the professional design community, there are tremendous opportunities moving ahead.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The latest victim of the print media crisis is Art on Paper magazine, which has ceased publication. Co-publishers Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett announced the New York-based bimonthly’s closure this evening, noting their hope “that six to twelve months from now, when the economy has improved, someone new will come along and revive the publication, either in print or digital form.”

Art on Paper began in the late 1960s as The Print Collectors Newsletter, a resource aimed at the burgeoning market for limited-edition prints. In the mid-1990s, the newsletter became Art on Paper (technically a spaceless, lowercase affair: artonpaper) and its editorial coverage was expanded to include photographs and drawings. Thereafter, the magazine maintained its commitment to works on paper in all media and recently collaborated with artists including Thomas Nozkowski, Polly Apfelbaum, and Monique Prieto to produce limited-edition works for its “Great Poster Project.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We can think of no better person than Julie Lasky, who now helms the smart n’ sustainable Change Observer, to demystify the final years of I.D., the 55-year-old design magazine that was folded last month by increasingly irrational F+W Media. We encourage you to steel yourself before reading “I.D.’s Executioners,” which details her Sisyphean six-year tenure as editor-in-chief of I.D. and as an employee of “a company whose institutional memory is as long as my thumb.”

Imagine going to a hospital and learning from the person holding the scalpel that he really doesn’t see a difference between your hand and your foot; after all, an appendage is an appendage, and a sock can be pulled over any of them. A blogger commenting on Bruce Nussbaum‘s post about I.D.‘s death wondered whether design thinking had been applied in any attempt to keep the magazine going. Don’t make me laugh. Whereas designers spend their days making astute decisions based on the accumulation of facts, I.D.‘s executioners seemed to feel that genuine understanding of their property was too expensive to acquire and finally irrelevant.

Read the full piece on Design Observer.

Recently on UnBeige:

After shuttering much-loved I.D. magazine last month (on the day after a company-wide Employee Appreciation Day), F+W Media continues on its path to destroy a design niche that has been decades in the making. The company’s latest befuddling move? Ousting Emily Gordon from her post as editor-of-chief of Print, the 70-year-old design title that has managed to win back-to-back National Magazine Awards for General Excellence with a skeleton staff.

As you may recall, Gordon worked as managing editor of Print under Joyce Rutter Kaye before taking over the top editorial post in the fall of 2008. Under Gordon’s leadership, Print revamped its website and digital presence, building a Twitter following that exceeds 15,000. After our sister blog FishbowlNY reported Gordon’s departure yesterday evening, the likes of Steven Heller and Debbie Millman left comments praising Gordon’s “deft editorial hand” and balance of the print and digital realms.

As for the reasons behind Gordon’s ousting, one source close to F+W Media, which was purchased in 2005 by private equity firm ABRY Partners, points to management’s wish for “a different kind of leader for the Print brand.” Another source says the company is repeating the strategy it used with I.D., which shed top editors (Julie Lasky, Monica Khemsurov, and Jill Singer) and then was quietly starved of resources before F+W put the title out of its misery—a week before Christmas. “I don’t think Print belongs at a company that so little values content, its employees, or design standards,” wrote one anonymous tipster in reply to our tweet about Gordon’s termination. “I hope it can find a buyer who does.”

So what’s next for Gordon? “I finally have time to finish and sell my nonfiction book proposal,” she told us this morning. “I’m learning all I can about content strategy. And I’m wishing all my beloved friends and former colleagues at magazines everywhere strength, humor, and fortitude in the hard months ahead.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.