The Story Behind Mag+

Popular Science+ is the first magazine to emerge from Bonnier's Mag+, an ongoing project across all our titles in the U.S. and Europe to rethink the way magazines can be read on a new generation of full-color, touchscreen tablet devices.

ipad-app-spread

It's not about re-creating the magazine; it's about re-creating the magazine experience.

It's a relaxed, immersive environment where high-quality writing and stunning imagery work hand in hand to pull you into stories and through each issue. Our goal is to take the digital magazine beyond the first-generation pinch-and-zoom PDF replicas and create something that readers can use as effortlessly as the print version while taking advantage of the capabilities a digital environment offers.

PSplus-app-iconDownload the Popular Science+ app with the April issue in the iTunes Store now!

We partnered with London-based design firm BERG and in December 2009, we released this concept video, showing our early thinking:

Over the next few months, we pulled in teams from several Bonnier titles in the U.S., Denmark and Sweden to test that early vision against real content and hone it into a platform that would work with a variety of magazines, from the information-dense Popular Science to photo-heavy titles like Skateboarding and Islands to classic magazines like Parenting and Saveur.

On to the iPad!

The release of the iPad gives us a chance to put all our concepts into action, and we chose Popular Science as the first title to appear on the device. We again partnered with BERG to quickly build our app. But because Mag+ is about more than any one gadget, we didn't just create an app; we made a new kind of file, the Mag+ Issue Bundle, or MIB. It's a way to package all a magazine's content in the more universal digital language of XML so that we can quickly and easily bring it to more platforms. Our iPad app is at its core a MIB reader that brings that new file to life. And it also serves as a store for buying new issues and a library for keeping old ones.

What's Next?

We're thrilled about this first issue of Popular Science+ on the iPad, but this is only the beginning. In the next few months, we'll introduce Heated mode, a unique way to interact with the magazine's content: Clip passages or photos to send to friends, post to Facebook, or save to your own Scrapbook. You'll also be able to search across your whole library of issues and subscribe just like you can to the print magazine. And we'll keep refining the reading experience, offering new ways to explore the content and making ads more fun and useful. And we'll look to roll out Mag+ to new platforms, like Android. Follow us on Facebook at PopularScience+ or on Twitter at @PopSciPlus for the latest updates!

The six design principles that underlie the Mag+ digital platform:

  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Feedback? Questions?