Anthony Wing Kosner

Anthony Wing Kosner, Contributor

Quantum of Content and innovations in user experience

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7/08/2011 @ 11:25AM |1,640 views

Dawn of the Stack: Condé Nast's Scott Dadich and the Evolution of the Magazine App

As a young designer, I had an audience with Alexander Liberman, the auteur/artiste who made Condé Nast an aesthetic powerhouse, who tried to convince me (unsucessfully) that editorial design was not very “creative.” What he meant was that, at the time, the balance of creative power in magazines was not on the side of the designer, particularly those of entry level. Fast forward almost 30 years and the picture is a little different. I met Scott Dadich last month at the Abstract Maine 2011 design conference in Portland, Maine. In many ways, the mantle from Liberman has passed to Dadich, who is now the vice president of digital magazine development for Condé Nast. Although far from running the show as his imperious Russian predecessor had, the team building Texan has already succeeded in a short time at placing design and creative direction at the center of what is new and important in magazine content production—and positioned Condé Nast at the forefront of magazine app publishers.

My old friend Evan Smith was the editor of Texas Monthly for most of the last decade, where Scott worked until he went to Wired in 2006. “Scott was always pushing, pushing, pushing. He always wanted us to do more, faster. For someone his age—he was in his mid-twenties at the time—he had an unusually mature sense of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it,” said Evan. “His command of the technology of design—the tools and the functionality—truly transformed us, truly made us a 21st century magazine. It was clear to me he had such high ambitions that we couldn’t contain him. And I was right. But his success hasn’t surprised me one bit. He’s more drive, personally and professionally, than any creative director I’ve ever known.”

Scott gave a great talk about how he jammed with a team from Wired and Adobe to reshape the magazine for the newly minted iPad. Much of the press about Wired’s app focused on the multimedia bells and whistles and attendant file size bloat. Most high-end magazine apps are open to this criticism, and most of them are trying to address it. But what’s worse: making your readers wait for a long download or having them be underwhelmed when the app opens up?

The most interesting thing to me, though, was how Scott and his team came up with a new architecture that specifically takes advantage of the tablet’s gestural potentials. Digital magazines of the page flipping pdf sort have failed to capture the imaginations of consumers. When I said something to this effect in a previous post, Marcus Grimm, the marketing director of Nxtbook Mediacommented (correctly) that digital magazines “have very much come into their own in the BtoB space.” He should know, Nxtbook produces a ton of them and has been in the game for almost a decade. But the fact is, a lot of those magazines no longer exist in print because the economics don’t make sense. So the BtoB audiences are engaged with these digital editions because they need the content and this is the way to get it.

As Dadich well knows, consumers have lots of choices and many have not been choosing print magazines. So one of the big choices these new tablet apps give consumers is to flip less pages. When they want to skim the top pages they flip through and when they want to “drill down” or “dig deep” they do just that—with their index fingers. Here’s the conversation I had with Scott recently about how these new shapes stacked up:

The whole idea of the stack—of the vertical and horizontal navigation…how did that emerge?

In late summer/early fall of 2009 we had decided to partner with Adobe to make the tablet magazine idea a reality. It was me, Jeremy Clark who is the director of the XD (Experience Design) group at Adobe, and his team consisted of Bruce Bell, Justin Van Slembrouck and Amy Haynes. So the four of them and then me and Margaret Swart, Managing Art Director and Wyatt Mitchell, Design Director, from Wired.

So the 7 of us really acted as a team for 6 months, working on all of these ideas. One of the things we did that fall was to do a content audit of 4 issues of the magazine where we broke apart all of the articles by section, by article length, by article type. Just as an exercise we oriented them in what are now stacks, to look at article lengths and design fidelity and the kinds of moves and investments we were making for those stories. So it’s like hanging everything on a clothesline—you can really quickly see the differences between all those different pieces.

scott dadich on digital magazine apps and stacks in forbes quantum of contentThere was a time there where we were thinking of this idea that you would swipe right/left to engage an article and then you would swipe up or down to get to the next article. Bruce and Justin felt pretty strongly that the metaphor of the clothes line was really the right way to go. So we tested both and really fell in love with what we were calling the clothes line at that time and it just seemed really, really natural. We had a convertible Dell touch screen laptop. Bruce and Justin had built a little AIR app that would let us do that—engage that browser metaphor—and so we started playing with it and really liked it. So I think we were using it around the office and I coined the word “stacks” for a stack of content—Apple uses the term stacks in their spring-loaded docking item—so it sort of looked like that and so I just used the word “stack” because we were having trouble differentiating internally at Wired between digital and print. We had internal clarity almost to a fault! We kept saying digital story, a story, pages, digital story, pages and it was just too cumbersome. So we bifurcated and from then on used the term “story” for print and “stack” for digital and “pages” for print and “screens” for digital. An 8-page story could be a 16-screen stack. From then on everybody got it. It was very quick and easy to talk about how we were structuring content in the digital edition.

When Gael went to start working on the Martha Stewart stuff, was she working with the same team from Adobe?

Yes, I showed Stephen (Doyle) and Gael my prototype back in the Spring of 2009 before I had even started working with Adobe and at that point the prototype didn’t have the stack metaphor in it. It was only when I started working with the Adobe folks that we settled on that. So she was familiar with the work I was doing and had wanted to engage on a digital edition of her own, so I introduced her to the Adobe guys and she started working with Bruce and Justin and Jeremy as well as Kenji Arakawa, another member of the team that was based here in New York.

In terms of your own personal survey of digital magazines at this point, are there a lot of people who’ve come to the same conclusion? Either through simultaneous invention or because they saw your thing and thought, “we can do that, too”.

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