Jeff

@PE: I read magazines backwards too. You should go check out the magazine rack at Kinokuniya books in Rockefeller Center. It’s all Japanese magazines, which were MADE to be read from right to left, so you would probably find yourself going right to left. I do. It’s kind of like the sensation of seeing the toilet water spin the opposite way in the southern hemisphere: odd and disorienting but somehow satisfying. You would love it. ;-)

http://thewhalehunt.org/whalehunt.html

Click the three MODE buttons in lower right, and watch the transformation of the interface. The Mosaic mode is amazing. I have not read the full text, but I think this guy set his camera with an intervalometer to shoot an image every five minutes, 24/7. As they kill the whale he shoots faster. He calls it his “photographic heartbeat”.

Now just try THAT with a paper magazine!

I know that for a while there was an emphasis on fitting all the info on one screen, without scrolling, but really everyone understands scrolling. I find content easiest to read online if I scroll down and click “next” when I get to the bottom. I don’t really think anything has to change dramatically. What needs to happen is great content has to be readily available, and easy to find. That’s it.

I read backwards constantly.

also, check out the book the Last Magazine.

My favorite print-zine-on-the-web has to be:

http://www.thisisamagazine.com

To be honest, it’s kind of the same thing after a few pages and the content often looks like many of the many pointless, trendy art zines, but I really like that they take a print mag and turn it into something with interactivity and motion in a really simple HTML type of way.

Often, I agree with you on many things aesthetic, but I must say I am not impressed with this design or nav, and especially not the content.

In fact, most webzine navs are painful to use… if you ask me, the internet is about A) informational media (like this blog) and B) multimedia-media (interactive and motion).

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be webzines, but I just haven’t seen a single one I can stand to look at for more than 10 seconds.

There’s a dearth of good webzines that aren’t just some bad zine, minus the photocopy money, or basically a jpeg version of their print mag (ie: NY Times online is great in place of a newspaper, but I’d rather see the print version of T than the online one).

I just don’t understand why nobody appreciates the internet as it’s own medium and why it’s treated as a low-budget replacement for paper.

Really, starting a mag doesn’t require THAT much money if you don’t want to spend it. I mean, i-D was started on a photocopier for chrissake. Kids in my highschool did photocopied zines and that was back in the pre-indesign/quark days… they were all cut and tape jobs.

Maybe I’m being to critical here, but I just think still-image, written-word print zines on the web are a plain old lazy excuse for a magazine…

when i said ’show us something new’ that was a burst of rage director not towards our old shipmate ‘a photo editor’ but generally towards all the snapshot style photographers…

maybe it’s time for my rabies shot…

not to promote any magazine, but i like this technique of display. saw it on several sites already:

http://www.vivmag.com/flipbook

According to my market research, (aka, my fourteen year old daughter) magazines are still cool. She lives on her laptop but then I see it turned off and the legs are crossed and out comes Us Weekly and Teen Vogue (”the best” fashion magazine). It is just that with all the options magazines can’t be a dominant as they were (which gets back to that dayrate discussion). But I don’t believe they are going away.

It’s sad that a lot of magazines are changing their formats to look more web like, and dumbing their content to support cross-publishing of their content. APE has it right, “a computer screen is not a piece of paper.” Paper, for words, and especially images not only has a special quality, both visual and tactile, but has a persistence that the web lacks.

I’ll often leave a magazine open to a page with a wonderful photo, or even a great article, so that I can glance at it several times as I do other things. I will revisit a web site, I guess… but not that often for the same reasons.

Like cinema and video, web sites have more dynamic than static quality. There should be a strong place for both as distinct vehicles for different content.

Is the grass greener on the web? I think it’s just a different place. I hope print sticks around as print, even though I love a good web site.

Is it me?