Learning to Read Online
SPD GUEST EDITOR 01.16.15
magCulture.com
I remember the first time I hooked up a 56bit modem to the phone jack and wondered at the digital type that appeared on my Apple Classic screen. Yes it was amazing, eerie even, seeing content-- newsgroup lists--dropping onto the screen as the modem whined away. But what did this mean for editorial design?
Since then--the early nineties, in case you weren't there--lots has happened but people are still asking the same question. It's only in the last few years that we've begun to get anywhere near an answer (or answers). There were the Flash years--I worked on an exciting but almost unworkable digital magazine for mobile network Orange in the UK that relied on Flash animation--and then the PDF page-turner years. The iPad briefly promised the earth, and though it's established a role for some projects hasn't lived up to the hype.
Just a couple of years ago I remember despairing at the thought content would be consumed on phones. How could we designers possibly create identity within such limited space? But now at last we are seeing progress as screen resolutions improve and mobile reading take off. Responsive web design and web fonts have combined to open the floodgates; long-form writing can be designed to work well on the desktop and tablet and adapt to smaller mobile screens.
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