Digital magazine layout with horizontal scrolling
More and more magazine publishers offer their magazines as digital versions in addition to their printed version. Which is great for magazine junkies like me :) But in most cases it is not a very pleasant experience unless you view the magazine on a tablet, laptop etc. with a big screen, where it can be acceptable.
I mainly use my non-retina iPad mini tablet (while I'm on the go or in bed before sleeping) to read or try to read digital magazines that e.g Wype, Zinio and issuu.com offers and it sucks in most cases. It sucks because of all the zooming in and out or you are not able to read the text. As you can imagine the experience is even worse on a phone.
Wype, Zinio or issuu.com basically gives you the magazine, as a (pdf?) file or "how it is set-up for print" file by the magazine creators, which is not very reader-friendly when you are using a device with a smaller screen.
I hope in the near future that the magazine creators / publishers will prioritize making their digital magazines more or fully responsive. Specially the magazines with a lot of content on their spreads. I know it will require more man-hours since you (probably) need to do a second layout, but it will pay off in the end. In addition to have a solution where you can save a full cache version of the responsive magazine, for offline use, would be just peeeeeerfect :))
Below are some design mockups of a "split screen" magazine layout, with horizontal scrolling, for a 1024x768 pixels display resolution. Split screen is probably not ideal for mobile but using a horizontal scrolling could interesting.
Alternative layout where there are no links on the right.
Nytt Rom | New Scandinavian rooms. One of my favorite magazines is the Norwegian magazine - Nytt Rom | New Scandinavian rooms. I get the printed magazine in the mail but they also offer digital issues with different content from the printed magazine. The digital issues are available via issuu.com and as mentioned in the beginning this solution is not very reader-friendly.
Below is an example on how one of the Nytt Rom spreads looks like via issuu and how it could look if a responsive layout was used.
