Tuesday, February 21, 2012

DPS app design spotlight: Smithsonian Magazine

(This is the fifth in an intermittent series of posts highlighting interesting or innovative apps built using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.)

The folks at Smithsonian Magazine have done a nice job of adapting their magazine to the iPad. Here are a few things I like from the February 2012 issue.

The "Wild Things" article contains this little "quiz" sidebar item. This is a nice, simple way to engage the reader with the content.

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The "Mystique of the Mother Road" feature has this nice little interactive map. When you tap a town on the map, a push pin appears at that location, and the photograph below the map changes to a photo of that locale. This looks complex, but it is just some buttons on multi-state objects.

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Lastly, I like the consistent way that alternate images are displayed. Throughout the publication, there are "slideshows" of 2, 3 or more images. Rather than having visible buttons to advance from photo to photo, the user is instructed to "tap an image to see more". So tapping the entire image acts as a button to advance to the next image. Very simple and elegant. I also like the gray dots that indicate which image is being viewed.

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