Just received an email from Bonnier, very exciting new Mag+ concept for digital magazines on Apple ipad. I posted about it in my previous post as it was in beta prototype and i like this concept very much. They have taken the first step building a Popular Science digital magazine for the iPad.

“Our design vision has been to avoid what our friends at BERG call “a wrist screen running clock software” – we wanted to build the watch. It should feel like you are touching the actual magazine, using your natural body language – not looking through the screen and layers of buttons.”

“Magazines are a luxury that readers can lose themselves in. We have built a digital magazine for a device you can curl up with on the coach. It allows readers to lean back, away from the browser, and just focus on the bold images and rich storytelling. We wanted to build a linear story with a beginning and end. Because we believe that reduced complexity increases your immersion. And that the sense of completion is important. ”

The Popular Science+ digital magazine features simple, fluid swiping motions let readers move horizontally through stories, while vertical scrolling allows them to read an article without interruption or distraction. In the app’s unique Look mode, users can tap the screen to make the words disappear, highlighting the magazine’s big, bold photos and illustrations. Another tap returns to Read mode.

The Bonnier Mag+ platform and the Popular Science+ magazine are based on 6 design principles:

1. Silent mode: Magazines are a luxury that readers can lose themselves in. Mag + has fewer distractions than the Web. It allows readers to lean back, away from the browser, and just focus on the bold images and rich storytelling. Reduced complexity increases a reader’s immersion.
2. Fluid motion: Magazines are easy to browse, and Mag+ replicates that with a story-to-story navigation that’s more like a panning camera than a flipping page. As we say, “Flow is the new flip.”
3. Designed pages: Magazines are defined by their carefully conceived layouts that give readers an immediate understanding of the content and why it matters to them, a quality that got lost on magazine Web sites. Mag+ brings design back to digital publishing.
4. Defined beginning and end: Unlike the Web, magazines have a defined storyline and flow from front to back. Mag + returns to the notion that something can be, and wants to be, completed. It’s the end of endlessness.
5. Issue-based delivery: One of the great joys of magazines is that feeling of anticipation when a new one arrives. Mag+ maintains that by delivering full issues at once with all the same content as the print edition, and on the same schedule.
6. Advertising as content: Relevant, attractive advertising is as much a part of the magazine experience as the editorial content, and Bonnier wants Mag+ advertising to include both pin-ups and applications readers can appreciate.

If you have ipad you can download it via itunes here.

vivek