I’ve pioneered a few forms of communication, especially online via the Web, over the years, and it’s been fun, but you do pay a price for being a pioneer. Back in 1999 I tried to create a viable digitally-published magazine, and the price I paid was overwork, then burn-out.
Nonetheless, for the duration of its all-too-short life, the magazine was enormously successful, at 210,000 *readers worldwide, and some of the innovations I created for it – in online advertising and Web editorial layout – are now finding their way into other, newer, digital magazines.
Even better, the features I needed so badly in order to produce the magazine exactly as I had visualized it are finally about to find their way into mainstream design and publishing software. Adobe Creative Suite 4 has not been released yet, but I’ve been reading about what is coming through its integration of InDesign CS4 with Flash CS4 Professional, and some new key features are precisely what I needed nine years ago.
My magazine was to be designed with all the care and quality of a print publication, delivered as a multi-page Flash file, allowing for deep interactivity in the advertising and editorial pages, with beautiful typography and excellent readability. To get even close to that though, with the software of the day, I had to make a few too many compromises and so I created it in XHTML and CSS, with embedded Flash, and published it to the Web, with a cut-down PDF version available on demand.
Nine years ago I was in regular contact with three software firms – Adobe, Macromedia and SoftPress (makers of Freeway) – and each of them was promising me that the features I needed were “coming real soon now.” Sadly, as it turned out, none of the three were even close to the mark, so I had to do it all by hand, in several different packages, taking too long, with too much effort.
It has taken Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia to give me what I wanted, at long last, and I look forward to trying out CS4 when it is available in Australia soon.
Adobe's InDesign Magazine as a Flash digital publication.
* 210,000 regular readers for an independently published digital magazine, coming out of Australia. I found it hard to believe, and am still amazed, but the techies who provided the hosting services for it around the world insisted those numbers were correct.