The future of publishing is taking shape on the Web, and it is a mega mall.
The Nieman Marcus of the high end sites is Danilo Black, which designs and produces digital magazines. A co-venture of eminent designers Eduardo Danilo Ruiz of Monterrey, Mexico, and Roger Black of New York, Danilo Black has introduced “dynamic media” for a handful of publications. The showcase is FLYP (pronounced “flip”), which dazzles readers with video, photography, and good writing in an array of subject areas. FLYP has been called the LOOK magazine of the Internet.
FLYP is reportedly put out by fewer than 20 people. They probably could afford to hire more, but according to Danilo Black, the magic in dynamic media is to conceptualize the story concurrently in words and pictures. Not that many people have those skills, although the best print designers have advocated the approach for years. If only more publishers had listened to them, we might see a future for print media.
But no matter. Effective storytelling can be achieved with simple animation and an engaging narrator. Consider The Story of Stuff, narrated by Annie Leonard, the highly effective polemic against consumerism that was funded by the Tides Foundation and The Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption. Deceptively simple in execution, it tells a compelling story from both an historical and an environmental perspective.
Wouldn’t it be great to see more storytelling like you see in FLYP and The Story of Stuff? Publishers will need to figure out how to put together teams of terrific storytellers and manage them like film production companies. But now, at least, we have paradigms.
