Designing for the iPad. Fail!

When we began our planning for making an iPad magazine we sat down and went to work on designing an interface. How would readers best be served and what would be simple enough yet still focus on page page interactivity rather than navigation (thats for another blog post).

We designed and drew and talked and made mach-ups and looked at best practices and came to a set of designed we could be proud of. We should be since we had more 20 years experience doing web and interactive work.

Sent it off to a developer for prototyping, got it back and it was all wrong. The developer had done a very good job, but we as designers had done terrible. It felt uncomfortable, twitchy, a bit disorienting and machine like. Back to the drawing board. 5 MORE TIMES!!!

That first experience designing for the iPad set the tone for what is now Katachi Magazine. We weren’t going to show the world how to make a ‘better’ iPad magazine. We were going to being teaching ourselves how to design for this device.

What has come out of these last 18 months is not a deep knowledge of how to make iPad experiences, but a humbling on how little everyone knows about iPad experiences. There is no one to look toward, or to read or ask for advise. We are all at (almost) year 0. We all just graduated from school and know need to learn how the real world works.

What excites me the most about this idea is that print graphics designers are now on the same level are seasoned interactive (web) designers.