PC Magazine for iPad

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that PC Magazine, which discontinued its print edition in 2009 but maintained its popular brand through digital channels, has been relaunched as a next-generation iPad app available starting today through the Newsstand section of the App Store. PC Magazine represents a unique opportunity to rethink a magazine for the digital age. While many publishers replicate print content in their tablet editions to comply with Audit Bureau of Circulation rules, Ziff Davis provided a clean slate for innovation. As a result, we were able to help its editors create a magazine unbound by the conventions of print. In our first meeting at the client's Manhattan offices, we were told that nothing was off-limits as we redesigned the magazine, with one exception: the striped PC Magazine logo. By our second meeting, the stripes were history.

Working alongside CEO Vivek Shah and his extraordinary team — Kathleen Kincaid, Dan Costa, Chris Phillips, Stephanie Chang and others — we dissected PC Magazine and rebuilt it to thrive on the iPad. The debut edition features an animated cover, real-time Twitter feeds for columnists, product reviews containing photos that the user can manipulate, and much more. It was built using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Professional Edition. Interactivity abounds, inviting the user to engage with content in ways not possible in print.

Phil Bratter, the talented former Creative Director of George, Worth and People magazines, spearheaded the redesign for Joe Zeff Design, working alongside staffers Christopher Holewski, Josh Penrod and Ed Gabel. Phil delivered inimitably, injecting spontaneity throughout the product and infusing each page with his sledgehammer signature of bold typography and bright colors. We look forward to future opportunities to engage Phil on other projects. A look at some of the before and afters shows the extent to which PC Magazine changed but stayed the same:

PC Magazine is no stranger to innovation. The print edition was born in 1982 as an "Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers." Within a year the magazine swelled to 800 pages per issue, switching from monthly to biweekly publication and adding a floppy disk edition. Its authority was unmatched when it came to technology product reviews, and its testing lab served as a model for other companies. PCMag.com was started in 1994 and a Zinio-based digital edition followed 10 years later — both continue to this day.

As times changed so did Ziff Davis' fortunes, and the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008. PC Magazine ended its 26-year print run and became a digital property, published online and through Zinio. Backed by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, Shah acquired Ziff Davis Media in 2010 and announced his intentions to build a dynamic digital media company. We're proud to be part of that story. Visit the Apple Newsstand and see for yourself.

Fast Company, Optimized for The New iPad

The April issue of Fast Company turned up in the Apple Newsstand today, featuring a cover story on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and some of the newest features of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Fast Company is one of the first magazines to offer Retina optimization, with sharper type and images when viewed on the new iPad. Those who previously downloaded Fast Company will need to download Version 1.1 from the App Store in order to see the enhancements to the April issue. The high-definition version is rasterized at four times the resolution of the version available for the iPad 1 and 2.

The app also leverages a new "Favorites" feature, enabling users to bookmark any article by tapping on a star icon in the upper right corner of the navigation interface. To highlight an article, tap once on the screen to access the interface and tap on the star icon in the upper right corner. A list of favorites will appear, spanning every issue that the user has downloaded, permitting easy access to all favorites in all issues regardless of which issue the user is currently reading.

The April issue is Fast Company's second, both produced by Joe Zeff Design. The first was an iTunes Store App of the Week in several countries, as well as an Adobe App of the Week. This latest issue enhances the print experience by adding multimedia features and animations, as well as a bonus reprint of Fast Company's May 2007 cover story on Zuckerberg, yet weighs in at less than 90 megabytes. As with the first issue, many advertisements are pinch-to-zoomable to view small type, and the app is fully compliant with Audit Bureau of Circulation rules.

See for yourself — and be sure to download the update.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3

We put the new iPad — I mean, The New iPad — through its paces in the studio this morning. For what it's worth, what we thought: 1. 768x1024 magazine pages look no better or worse on the higher-resolution screen. For publishers, there's no penalty for continuing to produce pages at this resolution — they look just as good or bad on The New iPad as they do on the iPads 1 and 2.

2. 1536 x 2048 magazine pages, such as the Vogue issue that came out yesterday, are significantly sharper on The New iPad than on the old. Whether the difference is worth the increased weight of the app is a strategic decision for publishers. The 768x1024 version was 277 megabytes. The 1536 x 2048 version was 412 megabytes. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite allows you to publish both resolutions, and the proper issue is downloaded to the proper devices automatically. Pretty slick. What isn't slick is that the publisher needs to render each edition twice, at the higher and lower resolutions, complicating the workflow.

The unretouched image below shows two renditions of the Vogue app. The device on the left is the iPad 2. The device on the right is The New iPad.

3. The bigger difference between one iPad and another was not resolution but color cast. The iPad 2s in our office are all much whiter than the two The New iPads we tested. Both The New iPads had a distinct yellow cast that made the overall viewing experience less pleasurable. For all we know, they'll cool down once they've been used more, or once their temperature changes. The image at the top of this post shows our Fast Company launch on the iPad 1, 2 and The New iPad. The 2 seems brightest, even though all are set at the maximum level. This was consistent among every iPad 2 in our studio.

4. We think Apple should just call The New iPad the iPad 3 already! :-)

The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that "The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3," an interactive book for iPad that presents the story behind Electronic Arts' blockbuster video game, is now available in the iTunes App Store. Mass Effect 3 is the latest action role-playing video game by EA’s BioWare division, and its launch last week ranks among the most successful ever. The company sold 890,000 copies in its first 24 hours of release in North America alone, and more than 3.5 million units worldwide in the first week. Three hours after its release, "The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3" is already at No. 1 in the Top News Paid iPad Apps category in iTunes.

Geoff Keighley, host and executive producer of GameTrailersTV on Spike TV, worked directly with BioWare's developers to learn the backstory of the Mass Effect phenomenon, and then with Joe Zeff Design to bring that narrative to life for iPad.

The app is our second collaboration with Keighley. Our previous app together, "The Final Hours of Portal 2," was hailed by Fast Company magazine as "pushing the limits of storytelling" and is a finalist in the Tablet App of the Year category of the Society of Publication Designers annual competition. Dr. Mario Garcia called the app "a textbook case study of how one can tell stories in the tablet platform" and Gizmodo made it an App of the Day selection.

"The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3" pushes far beyond the capabilities of the Portal 2 app, packing dozens of interactive features that include an animated cover, video game, quizzes, polls, two features that allow the user to build their own video stories, panoramas, two music players, more than 20 minutes of video, interactive infographics, and more. It was produced using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and a team of HTML programmers from around the world.

One of the most popular features from the Portal 2 app returns — the feedback page. Users from around the world are already submitting comments, part of a community within the app that enables dialogue among those who have read the story and played the game.

View images from the app and buy your own copy today. We thank Geoff for another amazing opportunity to work together, and wish him the best of luck on another incredible Final Hours app. Many thanks as well to the team at Joe Zeff Design who worked around the clock to design and develop the app in less than three weeks: Ed Gabel, Josh Penrod, Christopher Holewski and Krissi Xenakis.

Our Fourth App of the Week

Our Fast Company launch last week captured Apple's attention, as the company made it App of the Week in some of its iTunes Stores worldwide. Joe Zeff Design has designed three other apps singled out by Apple as Apps of the Week: Solar System for iPad and March of the Dinosaurs, both for Touch Press, and Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz. Solar System for iPad is one of 85 apps in Apple’s App Store Essentials Hall of Fame. To learn more about the Fast Company launch, along with a video showing our process, click or tap here.

SPD Medal Finalists

The Society of Publication Designers has announced finalists for its 47th annual awards, and Joe Zeff Design is honored to be among those under consideration for five Gold and Silver medals in four categories. This year's contest attracted three times as many digital entries as the previous year, according to the organization. The winners will be announced at the SPD Gala on Friday, May 11 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The finalists, from the SPD press release:

TABLET APP OF THE YEAR (not associated with a print brand) • Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 2011 • The Final Hours of Portal 2, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 22, 2011 • Flipboard for iPad, Mike McCue, Evan Doll, Creative Directors; July 21, 2011 • Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine”

USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY • Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director, George Steinmetz, Photographer, Ed Gabel, Illustrator; April 2011 • POWER Platon, Scott Dadich, Creative Director, Platon, Photographer, Yarek Wazul, Illustrator; 2011 • GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director, Dora Somosi, Director of Photography, Benjamin Lowy, Photographer; June 2011, “Libya” • TIME, Kira Pollack, Director, Radhika Jones, Editorial Director; 2011, “Time Lightbox”

TABLET APP, ORIGINAL COVER • Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine” • la vita nòva, Laura Cattaneo, Creative Director; December 2011, “Drawings To Read” • Martha Stewart Living, Eric Pike, Creative Director; July 2011, “Show Your Colors” • TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11” • WIRED, Brandon Kavulla, Creative Director; July 2011, “The Mental Machine”

TABLET APP, ENTIRE ISSUE • Fast Company, Florian Bachleda, Creative Director; June 2011, “The 100 Most Creative People in Business” • GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director; 2011, “GQ Style Manual” • SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; March 2011, “SPIN Play” • SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; August 2011, “SPIN Play” • TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11”

See the entire press release here.

Fast Company on the iPad

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that the first monthly issue of Fast Company for iPad is available starting today in the Apple Newsstand here. Apparently we're not the only ones excited — Apple is promoting the app on the front-page billboard of the iTunes App Store this week. We worked closely with the editorial, design, photography, online, advertising and circulation departments at Fast Company to produce the issue using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Edition, with significant help from our partners at WoodWing Software and Adobe Systems. Many thanks to editor Bob Safian, executive editor Noah Robischon and creative director Florian Bachleda for providing an unbelievable opportunity to work together to reinvent Fast Company for the tablet.

The March issue features the magazine's annual list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies, packed with activities that enable the user to engage with content in ways not possible in print. The fun begins on the cover, where the user wipes clean a frosted panel of glass to reveal cover subject Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter. Inside there are quizzes, games, animations, movies, audio clips, sharing tools, hyperlinks and a discussion board where users can interact with the magazine's editors. See for yourself:

Music by Crugie Riccio.

The issue is fully compliant with Audit Bureau of Circulation requirements, and available to print subscribers at no additional charge. Every advertisement has pinch-to-zoom functionality, allowing users to read small print not legible in other tablet magazines.

The team at Joe Zeff Design provided support on many levels — redesigning pages to optimize the tablet experience and reimagining print illustrations as tappable animations. We produced the entire issue at our studio in Montclair, NJ, collaborating throughout with Florian and Noah and their staffs. Using the free Adobe Content Viewer app, Fast Company employees accessed fully-functioning demos on their iPads and received notifications every time a new layout was posted for review.

With help from WoodWing and Adobe, Joe Zeff Design helped Fast Company configure Adobe DPS to take advantage of key features such as Omniture analytics and subscription integration through CDS Global. We'll be working together on an ongoing basis to produce Fast Company's monthly editions, in addition to other high-profile engagements that include a relaunch of PC Magazine for Ziff Davis and other tablet initiatives outside the boundaries of traditional publishing. President Joe Zeff will be a keynote speaker at the WoodWing Xperience March 27-28 in Amsterdam, talking about opportunities to expand digital publishing successes beyond magazines to business, education and other markets.

Credit goes to our extraordinary team at JZD, which includes Ed Gabel, Josh Penrod, Christopher Holewski, Krissi Xenakis and Phil Bratter. The studio has designed three apps singled out by Apple as Apps of the Week: Solar System for iPad and March of the Dinosaurs, both for Touch Press, and Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz. Solar System for iPad is one of 85 apps in Apple's App Store Essentials Hall of Fame.

Joe Zeff Design is a WoodWing Creative/Design Partner and an Adobe DPS Solutions Partner. For more information about Joe Zeff Design, WoodWing Software or Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, please contact studio@joezeffdesign.com.

Join us in Amsterdam!

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to be part of the WoodWing Xperience, a digital publishing conference scheduled March 27-28 in Amsterdam that will gather thought leaders from throughout the industry, including executives from Time Inc., Adobe and Barnes & Noble. In addition, WoodWing will offer workshops centered on its Enterprise software and Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Keynote speakers:

• Joe Zeff, President of Joe Zeff Design, an influential design and strategy firm outside of New York City that advises publishers and corporations on app development. His company has designed three apps that have been chosen App of the Week by Apple, and one that resides in the Apple iTunes Hall of Fame. Formerly the Graphics Director of Time magazine, Joe and his team have created hundreds of magazine covers and illustrations, and they have leveraged their expertise in traditional publishing to become a leader in the digital space, working closely with large publishers to advise on content development and produce monthly issues for the iPad and other platforms. Joe is a board member of the Society of Publication Designers in New York City and WoodWing's first Creative and Design Partner.

• Mitch Klaif, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Time Inc. Mitch has worked at Time Inc. since 1997, beginning his career there as director of customer service and operations for information technology. He then served as deputy chief information officer, assisting in the overall management of the company’s information technologists and its hundreds of mission-critical systems. Before moving to his current position, Mitch served as Time Inc.’s CIO and vice president of global magazine and digital technology, where he led the division that managed the company’s around-the-clock magazine, production and digital technology operations. Mitch began his career in information services at Dow Jones in 1976, where he worked for 20 years.

• Zeke Koch, Senior Director of Product Management, Design at Adobe Systems. In this role, Koch oversees the strategy, planning and design for Adobe’s Digital Publishing products. Previously, Koch was principal product manager for Adobe’s Platform Strategy where he was responsible for defining strategy and direction for Adobe’s “Vectors of Innovation” including Multi-screen, Cloud and Social Computing. Earlier, Koch was the director of product management for Adobe’s Mobile and Desktop Platform Product Management teams (including the Flash Player and AIR). Koch joined Adobe from the acquisition of Macromedia where he was group product manager for Mobile Clients. Prior to Adobe, Koch spent a decade at Microsoft, first as a program manager on the Word 97 team and ultimately as the group program manager for the Windows Mobile Shell team.

• Ravi Gopalakrishan, CTO of Barnes and Noble's Nook product business. Ravi established the Nook development team in Palo Alto, CA in April 2009 and has since led the development of four successful Nook products: Nook, Nook Color, Nook Simple Touch and most recently Nook Tablet. All four products have been highly successful and have helped Barnes and Noble grow its e-book market share from zero to over 25 percent in less than two years.

• Hans Janssen, CEO of WoodWing Software. Hans is one of the founders of WoodWing Software and has stepped into the role of CEO since August 1st, 2007. He has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, both on the technical side and on the business end. Janssen previously worked as the technical director for Mediasystemen, after which he became the Director of IT for the Telegraaf Media Groep.

• Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software. With 15 years of experience in developing state-of-the-art solutions for the publishing industry, his thorough understanding of this industry combined with the latest technology and creativity, result in best-of-class solutions.

Joe Zeff Design works closely with WoodWing and Adobe to help publishing companies develop strategies for digital publishing. We're currently working with two large publishers to produce innovative iPad editions of their print magazines. We provide these publishers with end-to-end support, from design to production to advertising to subscription integration to workflow, assisted by WoodWing and Adobe.

For more information on the WoodWing Xperience, visit their website here. See you in Amsterdam!

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

We're extremely excited to be a part of the Society of Publication Designers' "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" night tomorrow at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City. Joe Zeff will moderate a discussion with two of the most intriguing characters in publication design: John Korpics of ESPN and Christopher Hercik of Sports Illustrated. Both are print designers who have evolved into multidisciplinary maestros, overseeing apps, television, websites, books and much more. And both are long-time clients (check out our logotype on the current ESPN The Magazine below) and long-time friends.

For tickets and more information, click here.

iBooks 2, and What Happens Next

Apple announced iBooks 2 today, with features that may revolutionize textbook publishing — as well as other publishing markets. The toolset is Apple-intuitive, and the free iBooks Author application will empower armies of educators and designers to create their own interactive books. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition previously lowered the cost of platform-based app development. Apple has now made it even less expensive — and less complicated — by offering templated layouts, easy-to-use widgets and tremendous functionality. As much as we enjoyed Phil Schiller's keynote today — particularly the part where he singled out "Solar System for iPad" as one of his favorites — we couldn't help but cringe at his summary of iBooks 2:

"Anyone can create stunning, interactive books."

Anyone, that is, with access to stunning photography, illustration, video, 3D models and HTML widgets they can drop into their templates. Production is not the obstacle to app development; it is creativity and content. Along with those stunning, interactive books one should expect to see a slew of mediocre ones, along with a lot of clones. As publishers rush to stock the App Store with interactive versions of their titles, one hopes they'll do so with imagery, animation and programming that leverages iBooks Author as a starting point rather than an end game.

It will be interesting to see how Apple develops its burgeoning publishing platform, and what markets it will target next. There would be significant demand for turnkey catalogs with e-commerce tools; restaurant menus with point-of-sale capabilities; annual reports with widget-based charts and diagrams. Apple continues to change one industry after another. Hopefully the transformation of textbooks — and other industries — will be driven by visionaries who innovate beyond what Apple has provided.

iBooks 2 is free. Inspiration and imagination are priceless. Never confuse the two.

The 4-Hour Chef Teaser

We had the good fortune to work with Melcher Media to produce best-selling author Timothy Ferriss' new app for the Kindle Fire and Apple iPad: "The 4-Hour Chef Teaser," a prelude to his hardcover book due next September. Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and "The 4-Hour Body," made news last fall by signing a deal with Amazon Publishing as its first marquee author. Said Ferriss, "My decision to collaborate with Amazon Publishing wasn’t just a question of which publisher to work with … It was a question of what future of publishing I want to embrace. My readers are migrating irreversibly into digital, and it made perfect sense to work with Amazon to try and redefine what is possible. This is a chance to really show what the future of books looks like, and to deliver a beautiful experience to my readers, who always come first.”

The teaser app is available free here: Fire and iPad.

It contains recipes, videos and a diet plan for surviving the holidays. We're especially proud of the interactive feature we created that allows you to drag a finger across the screen to make a bovine come apart Hannibal Lecter-style, revealing its cuts of meat! Delicious!

See for yourself: The Exploding Cow!

Some screenshots:

Crazy Mocha for iPad!

Crazy Mocha for iPad is a WoodWing app produced last week at Joe Zeff Design. We started Monday morning and submitted to Apple Friday night, just to see what we could pull off in a very short time. It has some fun things — a stylized Twitter feed, HTML-based coupons, location-aware mapping — that show the versatility of a platform-based solution. The app demonstrates a few points we hold near and dear:

• Platforms like WoodWing and Adobe significantly accelerate production. • HTML elements provide distinctive features to platform-based approaches. • Publishing tools created for interactive books and magazines are ripe for deployment in business apps.

Be sure to download from the iTunes App Store. It's free! (And be sure to poke the goat in the eye for a fun surprise!)

More Bells and Whistles, Please!

This just in from Adweek.com: Publishers are pulling back on enhanced apps, simplifying them in order to reach more people on more tablets! Time Inc. declares that interactive elements are "a secondary benefit!" And Hearst Magazines warns that enhancements are potentially distracting, confusing and irritating! Bah humbug, we reply!

Tell that to the next generation of readers, accustomed to flinging Angry Birds across a screen with their thumbs, sharing information with friends through Facebook and text messages, and mashing together content from various sources to customize their experience. And tell that to the advertisers who want nothing more than to attract that generation.

The tablet is where tomorrow's readers establish relationships with today's magazine brands. A passive stack of PDFs won't satisfy them, regardless of how many devices the publisher targets. Every major publisher already has access to creative tools in their platform-based workflows that deliver interactive panoramas, audio and video, social sharing, animated features, annotated graphics, and much more. The best solutions are those achieved through creativity, rather than expenditures. Advanced apps don't require costly and time-consuming programmers; they can be achieved mostly through resources already in-house.

Steve Sachs at Time Inc. cites "a great reading experience" as the top priority. Consider that the tablet is inherently flawed as a reading device. It beeps and burps every time you receive an e-mail or appointment. The screen is too shiny to read outdoors, and the batteries will die in the middle of a paragraph.

The passive delivery of words on a screen is only part of the tablet experience. The opportunity to interact with content, and interact with its creators, makes that reading experience much more engaging. Magazines evolve from one-way monologues to two-way dialogues. And consumers of all ages develop deeper relationships with magazine brands, providing publishers with opportunities to extend those brands based on those relationships and subsidize the enhanced apps that make all of this possible.

Recap: SPD Tablet Town Hall

Many thanks to Steve Hart from Adobe and Shawn Duffy from WoodWing for an amazing Society of Publication Designers event last night at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan, where a capacity crowd had the opportunity to query experts from both companies about their tablet publishing offerings. Some of the takeaways:

• The WoodWing-Adobe partnership creates a single standard for publishing magazines on the tablet. Adobe DIgital Publishing System (DPS) enables content creators large and small to produce dynamic apps with minimal programming. WoodWing enhances that system by adding a way to manage content, distribute work among multiple users and enhance creativity through InDesign plug-ins that simplify complicated programming.

• Adobe announced that all three versions of its DPS are now available for sale:

Single Edition enables anyone with InDesign to buy a $395 encryption key from Adobe's website that enables them to publish a single iPad app to the iTunes Store. At this point it is iPad-only, non-updatable and analytics-free, but nonetheless a breakthrough product that makes tablet publishing accessible to the masses.

Professional Edition is available for a $495 monthly subscription or a $5,940 annual fee. It allows publishers to create an unlimited number of updatable apps for the iPad, Android, PlayBook and — drumroll please — the Amazon Kindle Fire. These apps consist of standalone apps in which content is bundled and sold through app stores, and shell apps published to stores and individual issues that are downloaded from Adobe's servers for an additional fee. Both types include access to analytics that track user flow, providing valuable information for designers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Enterprise Edition is the Swiss Army knife of DPS systems, with enhanced subscription options and pricing based on the publisher's specific requirements.

• The audience was just as interesting as the panelists, and their questions were enlightening. There seems to be growing interest in publishing apps outside of the app stores — primarily for businesses looking to promote themselves, companies that seek more effective ways to disseminate information to a targeted audience, and enterprises that need to ensure that their content is secure. Hart suggested that Adobe will address this need in upcoming releases of DPS.

• A show of hands indicated that most of the audience came from large publishing companies that already had platforms in place — roughly 35 percent were WoodWing and 65 percent were Adobe. When asked how many in the crowd would be interested in training resources, the response was nearly unanimous. Joe Zeff Design will be working with the companies and SPD to identify ways to deliver that training — not just how to build apps but why to build apps and how to build better apps — in the near term. Stay tuned!

• There is considerable anticipation for the Amazon Kindle Fire, shipping next week, and expectations that its underpinnings in e-commerce will spawn a second revolution in tablet publishing with enhanced monetization opportunities.

• Once again, thanks to Tekserve for donating an iPad 2 that was won by Amy Jaffe, an art director. Many thanks to our partners at Tekserve, as well as the Indefatigable Emily Smith at SPD for organizing yet another amazing event!

A Town Hall on Tablet Publishing

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to be part of a special event on tablet publishing in which Adobe and WoodWing will present game-changing products that promise to rewrite the way magazines, studios and freelancers produce apps. The event is part of the Society of Publication Designers' speaker series, titled "Tablet Town Hall: Questions and Answers About the Next Generation of Tablet (and Kindle) Publishing." It is scheduled for Nov. 10 at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan. Tickets are limited, and available here.

Adobe and WoodWing are the leading platforms for publication apps. The two companies recently announced a partnership that integrates Adobe's Digital Publishing System into the WoodWing Enterprise system. As a result, WoodWing users will be able to use Adobe and WoodWing creation tools interchangeably within InDesign and output content using Adobe's Digital Publishing System (DPS). Meanwhile, Adobe announced plans for a Single Edition version of DPS that brings down the price for developing a standalone app to $399.

All of this is great news for designers. WoodWing will continue to develop its Digital Publishing Tools, including its innovative HTML5 widgets that allow non-programmers to configure code through InDesign menus. Adobe's content viewer is much more user-friendly than Apple's Xcode environment, making it easier to preview and distribute apps in development.

Steve Hart from Adobe and Shawn Duffy from WoodWing will deliver presentations, followed by a question-and-answer session moderated by Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design. For more information, visit the SPD site here.

One Magazine, Four Covers . . . and Then Some

UPDATE: We're on the cover of TIME magazine this week, too. See the cover here. That's Steve Jobs on the cover of Fast Company this month. And Google's Larry Page. And Amazon's Jeff Bezos. And Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Four covers. One magazine. One studio: Joe Zeff Design.

Ed Gabel worked his magic on four portraits provided by Fast Company CD Florian Bachleda to create a stylized look that unifies the split-run covers. Many thanks to Florian and Photography Director Leslie dela Vega, as well as the Society of Publication Design, which made it their Cover of the Day today.

The covers:

Look for our illustrations on the cover of this month's Macworld, as well as a major newsweekly later this week — stay tuned!

On the iPad, Books that Refresh Themselves

One of the exciting opportunities in digital publishing is the ability to update content. Unlike a printed book, an iPad edition can be enhanced at any time, providing value to the consumer and renewed marketing opportunities for the publisher. "The Final Hours of Portal 2," Geoff Keighley's app about the blockbuster video game by Valve Software, has been updated with an entirely new chapter that continues the Portal 2 story. The bonus chapter contains exclusive imagery and Geoff's account of how the company extended the game with downloadable modules last week, and what may be next for the franchise.

The app, designed and developed by Joe Zeff Design, was originally published in April and celebrated by Fast Company as "pushing the limits of storytelling." It is available not only for the iPad but the Kindle and through Valve's Steam network.

These types of updates are an important way to stimulate interest in a multimedia property long after its release, and something no publisher should overlook. Similarly, we have enhanced our "Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz" app twice since its initial release, each time adding five additional images, audio commentaries and other content. (Not coincidentally, the Steinmetz app is featured as "What's Hot" in the Books category in 86 iTunes Stores around the world this week.) With more and more iPads in consumers' hands, updates help publishers keep their offerings forever young.

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

I had the privilege of meeting Steve Jobs in the mid-1990s, after he had resigned from Apple following a clash with John Sculley and started a computer company called NeXT. It was a different time -- a visit from Jobs stirred interest from only a handful of writers and editors in a small conference room at The New York Times, leaving space for a page designer to take one of the seats. Even then, with Apple struggling and NeXT not quite there, he was remarkably confident and spoke in such a way that everyone in the room leaned forward to take in every word. Steve Jobs stayed the course, overcoming one setback after another to recompose the world as he believed it should be. He inspired so many on so many levels, and for me that chance meeting leaves an indelible impression today. We live in a malleable world, shaped by those who are most steadfast in their beliefs. Steve Jobs' legacy will continue to effect change for centuries to come. — Joe Zeff Other designers reflect on Jobs and his impact at SPD's website: http://www.spd.org/2011/10/farewell-to-an-icon-steve-jobs.php

Josh Penrod Joins Joe Zeff Design

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to announce that Josh Penrod of the Los Angeles Times will join the studio as a designer and developer. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Josh previously held design positions at The New York Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune and taught visual journalism courses at Fordham University. He combines the inquisitive mind of a journalist with the intensity of a middle linebacker, and will contribute in all aspects of app development from concepting to production. With a background that includes HTML programming, Josh adds web design to our capabilities and will add custom functionality to our WoodWing + Adobe apps in the weeks and months to come.

Josh can be reached at josh@joezeffdesign.com. He starts later this month once he and his wife Elizabeth relocate to the East Coast.

WoodWing + Adobe: Power to the People!

Adobe rocked the publishing world today by democratizing tablet publishing, announcing a $399 edition that allows anyone to build their own app. Meanwhile, WoodWing announced a partnership with Adobe that will replace its own Digital Magazine toolset with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite by November 2012. We at Joe Zeff Design are thrilled at the news.

All of a sudden, everyone is an app developer, just as the desktop publishing revolution turned everyone into a designer. This is likely to accelerate the rate at which consumers embrace content consumption on a tablet device, which drives opportunity for those who create that content and experiences built around that content. A single platform makes it much more straightforward for companies like Joe Zeff Design to create design, illustration, animation and interactive content that turns everyday apps into extraordinary apps. Not only can we produce great apps, we can provide assets, tools and instructional materials to help others make great apps, too.

We look forward to addressing a much larger audience, from Fortune 500 corporations to local businesses that can leverage the power of the tablet to achieve their business goals. We see Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite as a starting point for creating amazing experiences, just as we used WoodWing's out-of-the-box platform to create one-of-a-kind apps with custom functionality such as "The Final Hours of Portal 2," "Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz" and "Above & Beyond: John Kascht." The ability to deploy HTML from within Adobe provides tremendous flexibility, and its Viewer tools will make it much easier to collaborate with others.

Thank you WoodWing for jumpstarting the digital publishing revolution, by providing the workflow tools that allowed Time magazine and others to launch their first iPad editions. Joe Zeff Design is proud to count itself among the beneficiaries of your prescient thinking. And thank you Adobe for unifying the marketplace and making creativity tools affordable and accessible to the masses.

March of the Dinosaurs

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to announce that "March of the Dinosaurs," a new digital book from Touch Press that was designed and illustrated in part by Joe Zeff Design, debuts today in the iTunes App Store as the iPad App of the Week. Touch Press, based in London, has dominated the electronic book marketplace from Day One, publishing "The Elements" when the iPad first launched and, most recently, "The Waste Land," a digital rendition of T.S. Eliot's classic poem. This is the second collaboration between Touch Press and Joe Zeff Design. The first, "Solar System for iPad," was an iPad App of the Week and is part of Apple's iPad Hall of Fame. It was described by Marc Saltzman of USA Today as "an out-of-this-world digital book that is as informative as it is beautiful" and has since been republished as a hardcover book.

"Once again Touch Press has been fortunate to work with Joe Zeff Design, who bring their deep experience of visual communication to our iPad titles," said Max Whitby, CEO of Touch Press.

"March of the Dinosaurs" is a visually rich storybook that recounts the adventures of a group of dinosaurs as they struggle to survive in the prehistoric Arctic. Produced in partnership with the National Geographic Channel and Wide Eyed Entertainment, it contains superbly realistic 3D animations that bring the dinosaurs to life in your hands, spinning through 360 degrees at the touch of a finger. Joe Zeff Design provided creative guidance throughout the project, and designed and illustrated the animated home screen, cast pages and interface elements, shown below:

Joe Zeff Design will be participating in two upcoming events to promote its iPad capabilities:

Your Business, Your App is a luncheon and panel discussion at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at Ogilvy & Mather, 636 11th Avenue, New York City. Hosted by Tekserve, the event is directed toward anyone interested in leveraging custom iPad apps to help achieve their business objectives, from small companies to Fortune 50 corporations. Panelists include Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design, Jason Richelson of Shopkeep.com, Jamie Manalio of Rust Labs, Aaron Freimark of Tekserve’s enterpriseios.com, Joseph Wachs of [x]cubeLABS and John Boese of Ogilvy & Mather. Admission is free, but registration is required. More information here.

Above & Beyond: An Event with John Kascht and Joe Zeff takes place at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 12 at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St., New York City. The two illustrators-turned-publishers will share the stage to talk about the experience of producing their "Above & Beyond: John Kascht" app, and how other traditional artists can tap into new creative and business opportunities made possible by the iPad. Admission is $15 for non-members, $10 for members and $7 for students. More information here.