WORKING WITH APP MAGAZINES EFFICIENTLY​

DISPELLING A MYTH

 

"An app magazine is done on the side without great effort."

 

This statement is definitely wrong. If you want to publish a professional app magazine you earn advertising money with, you have to provide human, time and financial resources. Human resources, because the sales team has to understand app adverts before actively selling them to potential advertising clients. Time resources, because the editorial team has to research material that is not used in the print edition (i.e. videos). Financial resources, because you need a tablet publishing expert taking everything into practise. You can certainly establish a tablet publishing process in-house. But experience has shown that you should not underestimate the time to be invested on staff and the money to be invested on many working hours.

 

The workflow of HCG corporate designs: The client sends the raw data (text as word or text files, pictures, video files etc.). Then the entire app magazine is created from A to Z, based on the editorial plan, and uploaded to the app store. The client outsources the whole digital publishing process to HCG corporate designs and thus saves precious human and time resources.

 

INTERNAL PROCESSES

 

THE EDITORIAL TEAM

 

The biggest difference between something printed and something digital lies in the amount of possibilities. In a paper magazine you can read text and look at pictures, whereas digital formats (such as a tablet) offer a broad range of animations, elements the reader can actively interact with (i.e. buttons), sounds, videos, static and moving pictures etc. For print, the editorial team is only dealing with creating the content, whereas for the tablet, the editorial team also has to think of how best to present the created content to the reader. How about adding an infographic, with animations and sounds? Or a video? Or a scratch off effect on the tablet? For every story, the editorial team has to raise the question: How do we maximize the user experience without taking the focus off the topic? The editorial team‘s basic understanding for apps is very important indeed. Besides that, you should be aware of the fact that screens - also tablet screens - are back-lit and thus make the human eye tired more quickly than paper does. Hence: Less text, more multimedia please!

 

THE MARKETING AND SALES TEAMF

 

The number of apps in the app stores is rising, so is the importance of marketing your app. The marketing team has to show what they are able to do here. But the first and easiest step is promoting your app on your website and your print magazines of course. This is where your readers are already. For example, you could place an eye-catcher saying "see the whole interactive gallery in our app" in your print magazine.

 

For the sales team it can be helpful to know which formats are worked with:

 

I   1 1 full page print does not equal 1 full page app.

I   The iPad display‘s dimensions are 2048 x 1536 pixels with a resolution of 200 dpi for Retina displays. This has to be

    taken into account when advertisements are generated.

I   Besides static advertisements, there are many interactive possibilities: Embedding audio, video, photo slide shows,

    pullout tabs, reveal effects, scratch off effects, just to mention a few. If you want to discover the full range of

    interactive app functionalities, I recommend the video Interactive functions in app magazines on my Youtube

    channel.

I   Flash is currently not supported.

I   When embedding videos into the app (saves annoying waiting/streaming time), the video files should be of high

    quality (HD). Don‘t worry too much about the file size as video files can be encoded. That means that the file size is

    drastically reduced while maintaining the HD quality.