A fascinating and fun day at the Digital Magazine Awards (#dma13) and the “Un-conference” before hand. Spoke to all sorts of interesting people about what is going on in the industry.
Here are some of the things we saw or that came up:
1. Some of the innovators make free products. They don’t know why the bigger brands are not visually innovating. Also, I am not sure they can see the merits in the business innovations of the larger brands. For me, this is the scene at the moment.
2. A lot of the industry seems set on Adobe products and a struggling to understand a CMS model for either financial, tech or old mag cultural reasons.
3. The “open source culture” of shared ideas and research is yet another example of how magazine culture is missing out from digital culture.
4. A Dan Ichimoto (heapsmag.com) from Tokyo via New York showed us a magazine that switches content for male or female readers.
5. Rob Boynes did a fantastic keynote speech under an immense glitter dome. I wasn’t sure that it was understood by the “bells and whistles” brigade. Very interesting.
There was lots more that I haven’t had a chance to process. It was a really great event.
ideas/forms/functions 