Mag+

Mag+ was an early answer to the question of what a magazine wants to be on a tablet. Designed and built at BERG with Bonnier R&D between October 2009 and April 2010. The concept film below was published on 17 December 2009 and described an interaction language for a device that did not yet exist. Six weeks later Apple announced the iPad, and we had 54 days to ship a working magazine on it.

The Mag+ concept film. December 2009.

I led the studio at BERG when Bonnier approached us in October 2009. The brief was unusually well-formed for its moment: bring the engagement of a paper magazine, the long read, the deliberate beginning and end, the satisfying close, the fluid handling, to a touchscreen tablet. The tablet was a hypothesis. Apple had not announced anything. Bonnier wanted us to think the experience through first and build for whatever device arrived.

We made a film. The concept video was shot on chromakey, with a live actor’s hands gesturing at empty space; the magazine layouts were composited in afterwards. The point was to formalise a language rather than to demonstrate a working application. What leafing should feel like, what scrolling should look like, what pinching to a contents page should do, what holding a finger should reveal, what ending an issue should mean. We fixed those before any code existed to interpret them.

The four ideas underneath were Bonnier’s, and they survived contact with the implementation:

• A magazine is a mono-task medium. Silent mode, no notifications inside the issue, the issue itself the only thing on screen.
• An issue has a clearly defined beginning and end. You can finish it.
• Motion is gorgeous and fluid, a quality of the reading itself rather than chrome or transitions.
• The reading is comfortable for the long read as well as the skim.

The iPad was announced on 27 January 2010. We had 54 days. Popular Science+ (as PopSci+) shipped on the iPad’s United States launch day, 3 April 2010, as the first title on the Mag+ platform. From a film to a published title in a working store in fewer than four months.

PopSci+ on iPad. The working implementation, April 2010.

How it was built

The concept video was shot on chromakey with live hands; the layouts were composited in After Effects. The ‘gesture map’ became a working artefact rather than a sketch, a single document that a designer at Bonnier and an engineer at BERG could look at and agree on. The iPad app was written in Objective-C. We invented a small magazine-issue file format called MIB that kept publishing simple while preserving the typography and layout fidelity that magazines depend on. An InDesign-integrated authoring path meant production teams already trained on InDesign could lay an issue out without learning a new tool. The MIB format and the authoring path stayed with the platform after we shipped.

A small core team at the start. Jack Schulze, Matt Webb, me and the studio. Bonnier R&D Stockholm partnered every step. By the launch, most of BERG was on it.

Selected coverage

Steve Jobs called the work ‘really, really breakthrough’ during a later Apple keynote, naming Bonnier and BERG as one of the early publishing partners that mattered. The Bonnier deal was the front-page story for the iPad’s first publishing wave. Gizmodo praised the ‘beautifully graceful concept’, Engadget said it made ‘e-readers cower with envy’, and the New York Times identified ‘real promise’ in Bonnier’s approach.

The longer story is on BERG’s project page. The two films sit on Vimeo: the concept (December 2009) and the working implementation (April 2010).

Mag+ was made at BERG (London) with Bonnier R&D as client. The studio team in 2009–2010 included Jack Schulze, Matt Webb, Timo Arnall, and the rest of BERG. Bonnier R&D Stockholm partnered every step.