I am always rendered speechless by the sheer beauty of BERG (London) work combined with the visual brilliance of Timo Arnall. I dont really know the intricacies of who were involved in the project, but it seems like they had several different teams collaborating on this project. What struck me most about their video was the high quality of the production and the simplicity with which an idea had been communicated. It’s really inspiring to see!
Excerpts from the BERG blog:
We’ve been working with our friends at Bonnier R&D exploring the future of digital magazines. Bonnier publish Popular Science and many other titles.
Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010?
and then later
The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience. We hope so. That gets tested in the next stage, and rolled into everything learned from this, and feedback from the world at large! Join the discussion at the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab.
Recently there have been digital magazine prototypes by Sports Illustrated, and by Wired. It’s fascinating to see the best features of all of these.
I especially love the idea about rubbing and ‘heating’ up content to make things active. As mentioned in their blog, they let the Web be the Web and focus their exploration more on the subtle joys of reading a magazine in the digital realm.
(Image courtesy: BERG London blog)
I’ve been following alot of the projects about digital reading recently and found this concept to be among the better ones by miles.
I aspire to reach near such levels of clarity, honesty and beauty with my work someday.
