Wired & Vogue iPad

No playbook

The iPad launched in April 2010. Six months later, Wired UK became the first magazine in the UK to ship a native iPad edition. No design conventions, no tools built for the job, no one to learn from.

The only available path was Adobe Digital Publishing Suite — a beta tool that had never been used in production in the UK. We were its first real test case, and for a period we were the only team in the country using it.

Building the workflow from nothing

DPS was in beta — I was feeding back to Adobe weekly, and they were iterating. No one else in the UK knew the tool. We figured it out by doing it.

What we built: magazines with animated covers, embedded video, image slideshows, GIFs, and gesture-driven navigation. Each issue was designed and bundled ourselves — compiling each edition like a software release. Working directly with Apple, we secured placement on the App Store homepage at launch.

The decisions that defined the format

The hardest design problems weren't the layouts — they were interaction conventions nobody had established yet.

Portrait or landscape? Wired launched supporting both orientations, every layout designed twice. The production overhead was unsustainable and the experience felt inconsistent. I made the call to go portrait-only — a single considered orientation over two compromised ones.

How does a magazine navigate? Print readers turned pages. Web readers scrolled. The iPad was neither. We designed navigation signifiers from scratch — visual cues to swipe down through an article, across between sections, into interactive content. Tested, adjusted, tested again.

Single column, not double. Wired launched with double-column layouts — the print convention carried directly across. A few issues in, the problems were clear: screen dimensions were smaller than print, and double-column fights reading direction on a touchscreen. When I moved to Vogue I went single-column, reading downwards. The right decision, and it shows in both videos.

Vogue — leading from expertise

When I moved to Vogue, I was the only person at Condé Nast who had shipped an iPad magazine. I built a team of 3 designers, taught them the DPS workflow from scratch, and set the design direction as Lead Designer.

For Vogue I went landscape — fashion photography and editorial video are horizontal, and full-screen video played better in widescreen. I worked with the Creative Director, Editor, and Condé Nast's head of digital, presenting and defending design decisions at each stage — and edited the promotional videos myself.

Impact

• DMA 2011: Wired won Best Overall Digital Magazine and Best Technology Magazine; Vogue won Best Fashion Magazine

  Finalist, Digital Designer of the Year across both titles.

• UK's first native iPad magazines

  featured on the App Store homepage at launch, negotiated directly with Apple, ~2,000 downloads per month.

• National press coverage and outdoor advertising

  the Vogue promotional video ran on the London Underground and at Liverpool Lime Street.

Looking back

What I'd do differently: Push for portrait-only on Wired from the start rather than learning it through production overhead. The decision was right; it just cost one issue of dual-orientation work to get there.

Where it led: This was the first time I owned something from technical constraint to shipped experience — understanding a new medium, building the toolchain, making format calls, testing with users, presenting to senior leadership. Those instincts run through everything I've done since.