Content advice from The Oatmeal

I’d be surprised if you haven’t come across a comic from The Oatmeal yet. His stuff is practically created to go viral – popular installments among the editorial crowd include “When to use i.e. in a sentence“, “How to use a semi-colon” and  “10 words you need to stop misspelling“. This video shows the creator of The Oatmeal explaining the secrets to his success – 5 million UVs a month, that is. (Depending on your workplace, some of the language/pictures are not necessarily safe for work. But it’s all funny.)

The evolution of magazine design

From a profile in the New York Observer of Scott Dadich, executive director of digital magazine development at Condé Nast:

“The only reason magazine design looks the way it does is because it’s the literal, physical limitations of two pieces of paper,” [Dadich] said.

“With this,” he said, gesturing to an iPad sitting on a couch, “we wiped the slate clean. We have one pane. We have these many pixels. We have this proportion. How are we going to use it and how are we going to tell a story?”

…

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.

Magazines Canada podcast series

I just got back from a run, during which I finally got to the AudioMag episodes that have been languishing in my iTunes. AudioMag is a Magazines Canada podcast series by Tina Pittaway featuring interviews with people involved in all aspects of the industry, inside and outside Canada, and the five episodes I listened to (including some that are on iTunes, but not listed on the website yet) were all informative and worth the time.

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything every interviewee had to say (note to Michele Gerrard: the music industry was a lost cause long before Apple got involved), there’s a lot that’s worth listening to. It’s like sitting down for coffee with some of the key figures in our business – without having to manage everyone’s schedules. Kudos to Magazines Canada for putting the series together.