"bulletin" on the iPad: The showpiece from Lake Zurich
Eine Geschichte über Bewegung. Und was resultiert, wenn der innovative Chef eines Kundenmagazins mit einer innovativen Gestaltungsagentur die Grenzen auslotet: eine Premiere mit Zürcher Know-how.
Sometimes little is needed. For example, courageous clients who challenge and encourage. And curious doers who can suffer and want to achieve. Without both, what has been followed with great interest, considerable scepticism and ultimately appreciative applause in professional circles would not be a reality today: the Swiss corporate communications agency Arnold Inhalt und Form (AIF) was the first company in the world to produce an iPad version of a customer magazine using the K4 editorial system from Vjoon and Adobe software. The world's oldest banking publication, Credit Suisse's "bulletin", has been available free of charge as a multimedia magazine in the iTunes App Store since the beginning of August. Swiss clients and service providers played a key role.
Daniel Huber, Head of External Publications at Credit Suisse and Editor-in-Chief of the internationally award-winning client magazine "bulletin", remembers the first discussions about the latest issue focusing on "movement" very well: "In the beginning, the editorial team and agency shared a fascination for the new iPad medium. Then there was the will to become part of this new media channel as quickly as possible and to gain experience as quickly as possible in the sense of learning by doing." AIF, which has been working for "bulletin" for more than 12 years, did not need to be asked twice. Agency founder Urs Arnold: "As a leader in the market, we have always had an icebreaker function. Now, too, we wanted to exploit the latest technological developments and develop a commercially viable solution that works in terms of production technology."
The result is a magazine that is more than just a magazine: the printed version has been set in motion on several levels - through extensions that connect it with the digital world. The customer magazine traces movement from the mobile use of smartphones to the eternal topic of perpetual motion to the physical, human movement of the hunters, a combative wearer of two prosthetic arms and a pioneering dancer. The cover is enriched with augmented reality - Zurich personal trainer Dave Dollé sprints off as soon as you hold the cover in front of a computer webcam. QR tags lead directly to videos after being photographed with a smartphone. And pages of the customer magazine photographed with "Kooaba Paperboy", the print version of which is published five times a year in four languages and with a total circulation of 148,050 copies, are provided with links that can be followed and managed on a smartphone or computer.
That's already plenty. But by no means everything.
For the first time - outside the USA - AIF used Adobe's digital magazine publishing technology (DMP) for the latest issue of "bulletin", which, in conjunction with Vjoon's K4 editorial system, creates the conditions for commercial production of the apps and for the use of iPads in corporate publishing. Only the editors of the American technology and design magazine "Wired" had previously created an iPad version of their own magazine using the same technology - the creators of AIF risked the first attempt at later commercial use in editorial publishing and corporate publishing with some daring. "bulletin" editor-in-chief Huber confirms: "The biggest difficulty is probably that there is currently no clear indication of the direction in which user behavior will develop. Which functionalities will be perceived as useful and which will be dismissed as superfluous gimmicks? We are of the opinion that a pure reading app is not enough and that we have to offer a certain added value with the 'bulletin' app. In this respect, we were able to rely on a rich pool of ideas from the editorial team at AIF."
Under the project management of Senior Art Director and CIO Lukas Huggenberg, the company based in Stäfa on Lake Zurich explored all the possibilities - and produced a result that is convincing in terms of content. From now on, the integration of K4 with DMP will enable the fast and uncomplicated implementation of professional digital magazines. The iPad version conceived and designed by AIF includes all the texts from the "bulletin" focus section, the business section and the leader interview from the international English edition. Multimedia functions such as animations, videos, picture galleries and hyperlinks to websites have been added wherever appropriate and possible. Graphics have been made even easier to understand with animations, and you can even have an article read aloud. In contrast to many digital versions of magazines already available in the App Store, which have been transferred virtually 1:1 from the printed magazine to the iPad, "bulletin" has a layout that is fully optimized for the medium and offers excellent readability in both the vertical and horizontal versions.
In order for AIF to make the transition from a printed edition to a mobile iPad application - with sophisticated content and design - in the shortest possible time, the company had to rely on the cooperation of Adobe, Vjoon and its Swiss integrator Topix. Topix, based in eastern Switzerland, was also enthusiastic about the cooperation with the Zurich-based company. CEO Dieter Herzmann: "When the right people work together, something can be achieved. Because I believe that this is the case with AIF, Topix and Vjoon, we met for a kick-off meeting in Hamburg. Four weeks later, a good product is now available."
AIF has been working with the K4 editing system from Vjoon for years. The Hamburg-based company uses the publishing system to structure workflows for all connected users and to control the production process for any number of different objects such as layouts, articles, text files, photos, tables and films as well as for different output channels such as print, web, iPad and smartphones. In feedback rounds, AIF was repeatedly able to point out potential for optimization in K4 to Vjoon. The editorial system now allows parallel work on print, online and iPad output and ensures that users have access to the full range of Adobe Creative Suite. Efficient workflows and automated processes in the background ensure a smooth and uncomplicated workflow.
So the system is in place. What is needed now is a change in people's minds. In the minds of editors, communicators and designers. A banal detail: one layout used to be enough - for the printed edition. In future, three layouts will be needed: the print version and two variants for the digital version - portrait and landscape. Lateral thinking will therefore be required in editorial offices in future, as AIF CEO Urs Arnold also discovered when implementing the "bulletin" app: "It requires a different editorial way of thinking. You have to know what you want to do on the iPad right from the kick-off, which results in different editorial meetings. We suddenly have content that we communicate on different levels and in an interlinked way: with the printed magazine, with the iPad, with the smartphone, on the web. The normal page mirror has had its day." And: the procurement of content and knowledge about data sources will become essential, perfect research will determine the quality of digital editions in future - in addition to innovative design - which will encounter similar problems to publications on the World Wide Web in the past. Huggenberg: "The question of image usage is once again a major issue for apps. The image banks are not yet ready with the licensing models for their images for the new medium and have no idea how many downloads there will be: It could be 100, but it could also be a million."
Even if the K4 editorial system enables publishers and publishing agencies to structure the workflows for all connected users and to control the production process for any number of different objects and for the various output channels, the designers will still have to keep an eye on their traditional profession in the face of all the technology.
And what is the driving force behind this new development - for Vjoon, for Adobe, for AIF? Urs Arnold is convinced: "A new market is opening up - that's the driving force." On the Internet, consumers can hardly be encouraged to pay for content. Although "bulletin" on the iPad is free of charge, Apple in Cupertino is registering a nice increase in sales of paid content: in its second attempt, the provision of competent and high-quality information for a fee seems to be working after all.
Florian Caprez
An interesting distribution model
After around ten days, the iPad "bulletin" download statistics have taken off. Fueled by blogs, tweets and classic PR, the app was downloaded over 2500 times from iTunes App Stores in over
downloaded in 60 countries. To date, it has been installed around 17,000 times on an iPad, a good half of them outside the USA, the "home country" of the iPad. As a result, it was at times among the top 10 most downloaded free apps in Switzerland and among the 50 most downloaded apps in the USA, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and other countries.
If one compares the print run of the international edition of "bulletin" (20,000) with the increasing number of downloads worldwide, it is foreseeable that the number of magazines consumed digitally will probably exceed the number read in paper form. If we now also take into account that a good proportion of consumers are to be found in countries to which the postal delivery of printed magazines is expensive and takes a long time, a highly interesting distribution model becomes apparent: worldwide, simultaneous availability as a pull medium, without expenditure on logistics and contact costs, which decrease with every download. Exclusively qualified contacts without loss of distribution costs and consciously desired by the potential reader - the "bulletin" shows the way.
Daniel Huber, Head of External Publications at Credit Suisse and Editor-in-Chief of the internationally award-winning client magazine "bulletin", remembers the first discussions about the latest issue focusing on "movement" very well: "In the beginning, the editorial team and agency shared a fascination for the new iPad medium. Then there was the will to become part of this new media channel as quickly as possible and to gain experience as quickly as possible in the sense of learning by doing." AIF, which has been working for "bulletin" for more than 12 years, did not need to be asked twice. Agency founder Urs Arnold: "As a leader in the market, we have always had an icebreaker function. Now, too, we wanted to exploit the latest technological developments and develop a commercially viable solution that works in terms of production technology."
The result is a magazine that is more than just a magazine: the printed version has been set in motion on several levels - through extensions that connect it with the digital world. The customer magazine traces movement from the mobile use of smartphones to the eternal topic of perpetual motion to the physical, human movement of the hunters, a combative wearer of two prosthetic arms and a pioneering dancer. The cover is enriched with augmented reality - Zurich personal trainer Dave Dollé sprints off as soon as you hold the cover in front of a computer webcam. QR tags lead directly to videos after being photographed with a smartphone. And pages of the customer magazine photographed with "Kooaba Paperboy", the print version of which is published five times a year in four languages and with a total circulation of 148,050 copies, are provided with links that can be followed and managed on a smartphone or computer.
That's already plenty. But by no means everything.
For the first time - outside the USA - AIF used Adobe's digital magazine publishing technology (DMP) for the latest issue of "bulletin", which, in conjunction with Vjoon's K4 editorial system, creates the conditions for commercial production of the apps and for the use of iPads in corporate publishing. Only the editors of the American technology and design magazine "Wired" had previously created an iPad version of their own magazine using the same technology - the creators of AIF risked the first attempt at later commercial use in editorial publishing and corporate publishing with some daring. "bulletin" editor-in-chief Huber confirms: "The biggest difficulty is probably that there is currently no clear indication of the direction in which user behavior will develop. Which functionalities will be perceived as useful and which will be dismissed as superfluous gimmicks? We are of the opinion that a pure reading app is not enough and that we have to offer a certain added value with the 'bulletin' app. In this respect, we were able to rely on a rich pool of ideas from the editorial team at AIF."
Under the project management of Senior Art Director and CIO Lukas Huggenberg, the company based in Stäfa on Lake Zurich explored all the possibilities - and produced a result that is convincing in terms of content. From now on, the integration of K4 with DMP will enable the fast and uncomplicated implementation of professional digital magazines. The iPad version conceived and designed by AIF includes all the texts from the "bulletin" focus section, the business section and the leader interview from the international English edition. Multimedia functions such as animations, videos, picture galleries and hyperlinks to websites have been added wherever appropriate and possible. Graphics have been made even easier to understand with animations, and you can even have an article read aloud. In contrast to many digital versions of magazines already available in the App Store, which have been transferred virtually 1:1 from the printed magazine to the iPad, "bulletin" has a layout that is fully optimized for the medium and offers excellent readability in both the vertical and horizontal versions.
In order for AIF to make the transition from a printed edition to a mobile iPad application - with sophisticated content and design - in the shortest possible time, the company had to rely on the cooperation of Adobe, Vjoon and its Swiss integrator Topix. Topix, based in eastern Switzerland, was also enthusiastic about the cooperation with the Zurich-based company. CEO Dieter Herzmann: "When the right people work together, something can be achieved. Because I believe that this is the case with AIF, Topix and Vjoon, we met for a kick-off meeting in Hamburg. Four weeks later, a good product is now available."
AIF has been working with the K4 editing system from Vjoon for years. The Hamburg-based company uses the publishing system to structure workflows for all connected users and to control the production process for any number of different objects such as layouts, articles, text files, photos, tables and films as well as for different output channels such as print, web, iPad and smartphones. In feedback rounds, AIF was repeatedly able to point out potential for optimization in K4 to Vjoon. The editorial system now allows parallel work on print, online and iPad output and ensures that users have access to the full range of Adobe Creative Suite. Efficient workflows and automated processes in the background ensure a smooth and uncomplicated workflow.
So the system is in place. What is needed now is a change in people's minds. In the minds of editors, communicators and designers. A banal detail: one layout used to be enough - for the printed edition. In future, three layouts will be needed: the print version and two variants for the digital version - portrait and landscape. Lateral thinking will therefore be required in editorial offices in future, as AIF CEO Urs Arnold also discovered when implementing the "bulletin" app: "It requires a different editorial way of thinking. You have to know what you want to do on the iPad right from the kick-off, which results in different editorial meetings. We suddenly have content that we communicate on different levels and in an interlinked way: with the printed magazine, with the iPad, with the smartphone, on the web. The normal page mirror has had its day." And: the procurement of content and knowledge about data sources will become essential, perfect research will determine the quality of digital editions in future - in addition to innovative design - which will encounter similar problems to publications on the World Wide Web in the past. Huggenberg: "The question of image usage is once again a major issue for apps. The image banks are not yet ready with the licensing models for their images for the new medium and have no idea how many downloads there will be: It could be 100, but it could also be a million."
Even if the K4 editorial system enables publishers and publishing agencies to structure the workflows for all connected users and to control the production process for any number of different objects and for the various output channels, the designers will still have to keep an eye on their traditional profession in the face of all the technology.
And what is the driving force behind this new development - for Vjoon, for Adobe, for AIF? Urs Arnold is convinced: "A new market is opening up - that's the driving force." On the Internet, consumers can hardly be encouraged to pay for content. Although "bulletin" on the iPad is free of charge, Apple in Cupertino is registering a nice increase in sales of paid content: in its second attempt, the provision of competent and high-quality information for a fee seems to be working after all.
Florian Caprez
An interesting distribution model
After around ten days, the iPad "bulletin" download statistics have taken off. Fueled by blogs, tweets and classic PR, the app was downloaded over 2500 times from iTunes App Stores in over
downloaded in 60 countries. To date, it has been installed around 17,000 times on an iPad, a good half of them outside the USA, the "home country" of the iPad. As a result, it was at times among the top 10 most downloaded free apps in Switzerland and among the 50 most downloaded apps in the USA, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and other countries.
If one compares the print run of the international edition of "bulletin" (20,000) with the increasing number of downloads worldwide, it is foreseeable that the number of magazines consumed digitally will probably exceed the number read in paper form. If we now also take into account that a good proportion of consumers are to be found in countries to which the postal delivery of printed magazines is expensive and takes a long time, a highly interesting distribution model becomes apparent: worldwide, simultaneous availability as a pull medium, without expenditure on logistics and contact costs, which decrease with every download. Exclusively qualified contacts without loss of distribution costs and consciously desired by the potential reader - the "bulletin" shows the way.
Urs Arnold, founder and managing director of Arnold Inhalt und Form.
