TORONTO—The movement of magazines from print to online has been talked about before. But for Campion Primm, creative director of digital magazine VIV, the transition is imminent.
 

“This is not a conversation of do you like your website versus your magazine,” Primm said yesterday during his keynote speech at Paper to Pixels, an event jointly hosted by Design Edge Canada, Masthead and Adobe at the Hilton in Toronto. “It’s a question about what is the magazine of the future. In my mind, the magazine of the future is probably not going to be associated with paper.”

Designers Malcolm Brown of grafikmilk (Unlimited, enRoute, Adbusters), Claire Dawson of Underline Studio (Prefix Photo, Rotman), Norm Laurenco of K9 Design (Ski Canada, Active Woman), and Tanya Watt of Flare, chimed in on the advantages and challenges of the web in a panel discussion on designing for the digital world.

Primm wowed a room of graphic designers, art directors, publishers and editors with interactive quizzes and multimedia samples from the latest issue of California-based VIV. But he also touched on the difficulties he faces.

According to Primm, one of his primary issues is screen size. He says that the fast-paced environment of the medium requires him to keep up with technological advances. VIV, for example, was designed for the laptop. With the emergence of smaller devices such as the iPhone, however, VIV’s content becomes harder to use for readers and advertisers. “When you zoom in, you push off your advertiser,” says Primm. “Your advertiser is not going to pay for that.”

Members of the panel also had their concerns. As Flare’s art director, Watt feels it is her job to marry the look of the website and the print version yet add other features online. The key is to make sure it’s not too boring or too complicated. Watt says, “It’s important to have an understanding of those two worlds.”  Brown thinks there are simply some components of print that don’t necessarily translate well on the web, while Dawson sees designing a digital magazine as a longer process.

Unlike Primm, Laurenco believes the movement of print to online will take more time. “We’re trying to make a clear distinction between what’s on the website, what’s in the printed version and what’s going to be in the digital version,” he says. While Watt questions the value of publishing both in print and on the web: “I’m not sure there’s a point to creating a brand new magazine online for Flare.”

In the end, panelists agree money is the bottom line. Watt predicts that VIV’s innovative format and content is probably too costly for other magazines to duplicate. According to Brown, it comes down to funding. “If you want to put the web on a high standard, it needs to be financed.”