My mindset from the start was to give the people what they want, but not in a way they were expecting. That meant that I knew that I wanted to expand the issue from just photos and text to add video and make it more interactive. After I came to that conclusion I seldom thought about what would please people, or what the other competition was doing. This was probably the most isolated I’ve ever been on working on a project. I surrounded myself with all the art, music, film, etc. that inspired me and just drew from those inspirations. I made work that got me and my friends excited, but I always tried to remember at every step that everything had to be universal enough so that everyone could find something they liked in this issue.
Tim Moore's third edition of Letter to Jane is out, and it's my favorite magazine iPad app to date, and I've been buying pretty much all of them! Tim goes on to explain how he looks for inspiration from movies and other design objects - but not other apps. And since he doesn't come from a print background, he has no biases about what a magazine has to be.
New media ideas tend to limp along until someone claims "native" and begins to work without preconceived notions and false constraints. This is why so many magazine's web sites and iPad apps struggle (especially the 400MB Adobe-powered abominations) — editors hold on to old workflows without considering new contexts and opportunities to connect with their audience. Compare that approach (and you don't have to look hard for an example) to Tim Moore's. He left video out of his first two editions because he didn't know how to do it yet, but he stayed true to the mood he wanted to create and the community he wanted to reach. What's most surprising to me is that after he writes in compelling detail about all the work and detail that goes into the app, he describes how much free space he wants to give his artists:
I try to keep my involvement to a minimum by simply saying who gets in and who doesn’t and then trying to piece it all together at the end, (I call it the Lorne Michaels approach but I’ll save that for another post).
I'm looking forward to it! In the meantime, I can't recommend Tim Moore's post more highly, if you are interested in literature, photography or technology, or just like to think deeply about creativity.
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