In the content publishing industry, we’re always discussing technology and how it could be applied to solve the little challenges of life.
This article just popped up on our radar—which talks about the rise of designer Scott Dadich as the “Savior” of Condé Nast and how he became the new executive director of digital magazine development.
It’s a good story. He did the right thing with the right tech at the right time.
My favorite part is this:
“In Mr. Dadich’s ideal, it will work like this: A design editor will open up his computer screen and there will be four images down the right-hand side. Two will be dedicated to tablet devices; another is for the printed product; the last is for a mobile device. The design director will lay out a page unique to each medium. If you’re a story editor or a copy editor, you’ll make a change once, and it will show up in every version.”
Building a merged content, design and development platform has been a dream of multimedia, web and UX designers (and I suspect print designers as well) for a long, long time.
In my opinion, this is not an insurmountable task or product to establish. For nobody to come forward after all of these years and build a development/design tool that does that on several different formats is remarkable, and speaks volumes to what Adobe has been capable of doing, but never has let out of the bag.
They have part of this vision in some of their tools, but the big stumbling block has always been mobile and the various screen sizes for mobile devices (not to mention multiple platforms to do it in.), and the fact that Adobe really doesn’t want to sell a platform, they want to sell expensive individual pieces of software.
Now that Mobile Web 3.0 (essentially Apple’s iPhone Safari model) and HTML 5/AJAX/CSS 3.0 are all being embraced as replacements for Flash and other proprietary Adobe tech, it’s going to be very interesting to see if anyone besides Adobe comes up with a global design and content platform like they’ve described here as an alternative, with no or very little Adobe tech or software involved.
If what’s described above is really Dadich’s dream, he’s not alone in wishing this would happen, and he hasn’t been the only one considering this.
My eyes are on Apple to see how or even if they respond to this.
[image: kimmo quva]
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