The Flipping Pages Blog

Every now and then, once a year if you’re lucky, you get to see something that changes the way you think about what you do. That’s how I felt the first time I saw the Sports Illustrated iPad demo back in 2009, the volcanically crowdsourced Stranded in 2010 and Astronaut, Launch of the Year at the 2011 Digital Magazine Awards.

Astronaut was among the magazines I was assigned to judge for the 2011 DMAs. At over 1GB it was a hell of a download and I have to admit, I had my doubts. As it turned out, it was a privilege to be reviewing what other judges on the panel called a “lovely experience” and a “groundbreaking magazine”.

Astronaut is made in Berlin and is all about giving independent filmmakers a forum to present documentaries and projects. It’s this mission to showcase video that makes it so special. The magazine is made for the iPad, quite deliberately made for iPad, and it uses all tricks of the developing tablet trade to seamlessly integrate classic magazine content with video.

Astronaut was first conceived as a print magazine with an accompanying DVD, but it works much better on the iPad where the video is right there alongside the words, helping to tell the stories. The publication presents a total of 80 minutes of video content in clips that run from four to 20 minutes long. But far from being a glorified show reel, each video is embedded in a long-form feature article that practises the best of old-school magazine crafts – writing, typography and photography.

June 10th’s launch issue features film of photographers and artists at work alongside the narrative of their ideas and aspiration. There’s a profile of Robert Rath, founder of the Erased Tapes independent record label accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful music video (below) from one of the label’s lartists. There’s a behind-the-scenes look at video game design and “Zoomer’s Treasures” a found-documentaryabout a junk lovers paradise stumbled upon by filmmaker Sam Huntley as he drove through rural Kansas.

Through 12 feature articles, the editors and designers have blended classic magazine content with video wonderfully well, making great use of layered text for both navigation and design. Unlike many made-for-iPad magazines, it’s difficult to get lost in Astronaut. The page progression remains fairly linear and a screen tap on any page will bring up a scrolling TOC that will take the reader to wherever they want to be in the publication.

Priced at €2.99/£2.49, the magazine is available from the App store, where you’ll see the best reviewer comment you could ever hope to see: “I enjoyed this first edition… when will issue 2 appear?”

Olafur Arnalds – Lojso from Astronaut Magazine on Vimeo.

Digital Magazine Awards Launch of the Year, 2011

Astronaut Video Magazine

Web: Astronautmagazine.com

Twitter: @Astronautmag

Download Astronaut from iTunes

While I was stuck, delayed, at Newark airport Wednesday night, the shining stars of the digital magazine industry enjoyed a gala evening at the London College of Communication to hear Wired UK announced Digital Magazine of the Year 2011.

In its second year, the competition attracted entries from 31 countries and the advances in such a short space of time has been quite remarkable, proof positive of the phenomenal change that is taking place in the digital magazine space. The most notable shift has been the move away from flash publications – more than half of the titles I judged this year were on the iPad.

You can see a full list of the winners over at DigitalMagazineAwards.com with the winning lineup including Wired UK, The New Yorker, BBC Focus, TRVL and British Vogue.

I’ll review the category winners here over the next couple of weeks. First up, launch of the year Astronaut.

What have head banging, the England football team, parsnip ice cream and digital magazines got in common? Strangely, they all feature in the career of Bruce Hudson, Editor of Retro magazine and founder of the Digital Magazine Awards 2010.

Bruce started out as a heavy metal reviewer in the late 80s, which he admits was never going to work for him, as he wasn’t a fan. Fast forward to the 90s and Bruce had switched to sports journalism as the editor of the London football magazine where, as a fan this time, he managed to interview seven members of the England team on the pitch.

In the noughties, Bruce was Communications Director for food company Fresh Daisy Organic and this is where he figured out the importance of industry awards. Fresh Daisy bagged 18 national awards – including the UK’s best organic ice cream for the ‘rather delicious’ Parsnip and Pear. “The impact on the public and buyers was massive,” he explains.

Now the editor of Brighton-based Retro magazine, focusing on the design and fashion movement surrounding classic clothing and accessories from the past, Bruce has taken his belief in the benefits of winning peer recognition into the world of digital magazines and launched the DMAs.

“I was looking for awards for inspiration, and possibly to enter Retro magazine. I realised there weren’t any and now we have the DMAs,” he says.

Diplomatically, Bruce avoids naming any favourite digital magazines just at the moment, but he expects the DMA winners to exhibit innovative design, exciting writing, groundbreaking and exclusive content and the ability to show that a magazine is influencing the sector they’re in. “I also want to take into account the resources the entrant has and how much they’ve achieved with that. In the individual sectors, I like people who push the boundaries of their craft, take risks, but with an understanding of classic influences.”

“I am really excited by the interactive possibilities of the medium, from click through to moving images… and this is just the start. The evolving phone and tablet formats enable digital magazines to push the boundaries even further,” he says.

As someone who always enters awards on the very last day of the competition, Bruce is surprised that he’s already had more than 50 entries from around the globe. “At the moment it’s a steady trickle, hopefully ending in a deluge in the weeks up to the cut-off date.”

Bruce’s big hope is that the awards will help the digital magazine come of age and explode the myth that they are a poor relation to the printed word. Amen to that.

For more information on entering your digital magazine, go to http://www.digitalmagazineawards.com