Wired‘s iPad Demo Wows SXSW Audience

Scott Dadich, Design Director for Wired and Jeremy Clark, Experience Designer for Adobe, previewed a demo of Wired‘s future plans for an iPad version of the Conde Nast title. Judging by the response on Twitter, the demo created bit of a stir, primarily it seems for showing what the future of magazines could look like. Video of the demonstration is below.

Earlier this year, Dadich and his team at Wired created a short video clip (embedded below) that gave them a significant jump on this new phase of publishing over their competitors. And it worked — a part from an nearly as impressive Time Inc. produced version of Sports Illustrated, no other publisher’s have been nearly as masterful as the Wired demo. The presentation at SXSW was different however, in that it was a full demonstration – not just a short segment designed to drop jaws.

Felix Salmon blogged about the demo for Reuter’s and had this to say:

Dadich kicked off his presentation by showing a photo of the large art and design team at Wired, and noting that the website can’t boast anything like that kind of staffing dedicated to making articles look good and read well online. He’s excited about the iPad app, because it gives the magazine’s team a chance to play in a highly structured closed environment, like the magazine, and to create something just as minutely designed while at the same time being much more wired in terms of being able to play with multimedia. It was great watching him geek out over things like font kerning — the custom fonts he’s using for the magazine have over 10,000 kerning pairs, or different spacing between letters depending on which letters you’re using. (26 squared is only 676, so this goes way beyond just having custom kerning for each pair of normal letters.)

While Salmon lauds Dadich’s enthusiasm, he does not share it:

But it’s pretty clear that the iPad is going to make the Berlin Hall even wider than it is at moment. As far as I can tell there are no plans to port content from Wired.com onto the iPad, and it even seems that Wired is going to regress to its old habit of waiting a week, after the magazine comes out, before stories go onto the website. That practice came to an end when Condé bought Wired.com, but now Condé very much wants people to read the magazine on a paid iPad app, rather than on the free website, and wants to minimize the number of people who pass on the iPad app because they know they can get the same content online for free.

Yes, Salmon’s skepticism is warranted, if for no other reason than the savior-esque hype of the iPad is premature at best. But any demo at this earliest of iteration’s is not completely thought out — at this stage it looks far more like a print magazine on a monitor than a natural extension of both print and digital channels of a publishing brand. In short, we’ve seen this sort of short-sightedness before and called it “vaporware”. But again, we shouldn’t blame the pioneers for not having solved all the problems yet – we should support any and all efforts of thought leadership and vision, in an industry that’s been sorely lacking in both.

Dadich’s status as a top designer in print is nearly unrivaled – he is among a very short list of top design directors in the business (his trophy case is filled with well deserved SPD and ASME awards.) However, his influence in this space has not only set him a part from the pack from his print counterparts, its established him as the default leader in this emerging new space.

Wired rocks audience at SXSW with iPad demo from Mangrove on Vimeo.

Following is the original demo of the Wired tablet version released in February.