Who's Formatting Your Content?

I have a GPS in my phone, but there's a reason paper maps unfold over your dashboard.

Everyone seems to be falling all over themselves trying to get their content "digital" - even if just to figure out what that means. Some people (Hearst) seem to have a couple feet already in the door. Most companies are handing their content off to third parties for conversion to proprietary formats. But how many people are considering what their pages are going to look like when they get there? Is that even really a consideration?

I must confess to the sin of not owning an iPhone, let alone a Kindle. I didn't buy the latest digital version of GQ. Please forgive me.

When all your best attempts at formatting are for naught

Most people who build pages for the web (myself among them) have multiple versions of several major browsers. They test their pages (at least the ones who care) on different operating systems and at different screen sizes and resolutions. There is an understanding that simple things like font size - even the fonts themselves - to the background color, even if pictures are displayed at all, are left at the discretion of the viewer, set by preferences on their system. Designing for the web means releasing a good deal of your creative control.

At least it used to. I've come across too many sites that displayed nothing - not one image, not even a redirect link - if you didn't have the latest Flash player installed. (All scripting is disabled on my system by default.) We still have a natural tendency to design pages vertically - it's how we're used to reading. Throw in some banner ads on top of your navigation bar, and combine that with the browser tool and bookmark bars, and reading some sites on a tiny netbook is finger-cramping, scroll bar tedium. Don't get me started on some so-called "mobile" sites, many of which are limited in content, not just navigation, so as to be worthless - or that they detect you're on a mobile device and automatically redirect you away from the regular site. Don't you, as a media producer, want people to get to your content?

Square page, round hole

Anyone who's ever had to reformat a print ad campaign for each an every title in which it would appear can (and probably does) go on at length about the headaches in collecting all the different specs for each publication and making sure each file conforms to them, reworking the typography, recompositing the artwork, ad nauseum. That's a single page, and one that doesn't necessarily change every month. Is every designer now to consider the format and aspect ratio of every digital destination of their work?

The Portable Document Format (PDF) was supposed to be the savior. It became the current go-to format for everything for being able to preserve all formatting across devices and platforms. It also preserves the size and dimensions. It still assumes that you're going to print it, or at least view it on a large screen. Most of the digital versions of magazines I've seen (Zinio) are just souped up, yet still largely static, copies of their printed originals. Even if I could download and view a PDF on my (Android) phone (I can't), trying to read it would be a zoom and scroll nightmare.

Magazines that have successfully moved their content online (Women's Health disclosure: I am a former employee) have done so by repurposing existing content, not by trying to put their pages into a browser. With an XML-tagged text extraction and downsampled images, you could host that content just about anywhere. But what would it look like?

Some publishers, like the New York Times, develop their own iPhone apps, so they at least have some control of how the information is displayed. But to be blunt, the pages of the Times are not, shall we say, design-heavy?

You pay your designers what you do because you care that much how your product looks. That, in addition to the content, is one of your selling points. Some hire big-name photographers. Many a creative director had obsessed on the subtle differences of scores of font families to find ones they feel are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Do you figure all bets are off once it enters the morass of "digital?" When you've assigned yourself to the notion that your edited-to-fit copy is being dumped into a plain text RSS reader, how much thought do you give to how it will look after it's printed?

That's not a rhetorical question - I really want to know how publishers feel about this issue. Do you, ideally, want to have the design intent preserved? If your trim size isn't the same aspect ratio of, say, a Skiff, do you want some assembly-line studio recropping and repositioning page elements? Do you not care if your readers have to zoom in to read the copy (something I abhor) as long as they're looking at the pretty layout first? Do you put all the copy in a single box and ask the reader to scroll the type window on the page? How much effort do you put into your CSS beyond "style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"?"

Standard Definition

Is design consistency even possible? I've had ad agency designers show me the PMS swatches they used in their print campaign, and ask me to match them on a video screen. Maybe, somewhat - on my calibrated screen. As I said here: Walk into a television retailer, one where the same program is on 12 different screens. The joke in the video post world is NTSC stands for Never The Same Color.

And NTSC (National Television System Committee) is a standard. And like other standards - HTML, XML, PDF - one dependent upon its final destination for how it ultimately appears. Right now, there are no standards in the e-reader business.

This is more complicated, in my opinion, than a mere rehash of the VHS vs. Beta, or even HDDVD vs. BlueRay wars. They, at least, were dealing with media in a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. Production departments that used to only have to make sure pages met print production standards now have to contend with reformatting everything for a variety of e-reader media. It seems many are deciding it's not worth the trouble (cost) and are just handing their files off to the device manufacturers and hoping for the best.