Today’s Obsession: Martha on the iPad

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By PrintMag, Steven Heller, PRINT Magazine, Jessica Deseo, and Zachary PetitPosted  ∙  2 min. read

If you’re paying attention to digital publishing for iOS, you know that Adobe’s recently released the Digital Publishing Suite in beta for InDesign. I spoke about this briefly last week. When I reviewed CS5 a million years ago, I was confused as to why inDesign seemed to have interactive capabilities (and remember, this was before Apple released either the iPad or iPhone 4, so digital publishing still seemed relegated to the web). Now it makes sense.Digital publishing is moving quickly. Recently, Conde Nast and Adobe announced they were partnering to get Conde’s digital publishing moved quickly onto Adobe’s publishing tools, and it felt like that happened maybe ten minutes after Apple backed down from their assertion that iOS devices couldn’t use packaged or interpreted Flash. (And, by the by, here’s a link to Adobe Labs’ Flash Interpreter for iOS, posted about a month ago.) TypeKit announced support for embedding fonts in apps, to help with more live typography, then Conde Nast launched Gourmet Live for the iPad, which makes reading a magazine into a game—the boyfriend is completely into this one. He’s already screwed up two recipes he unlocked inside the app, so it’s clearly doing something to his reading patterns. It’s not run on the InDesign Digital Publishing Suite, but nevertheless, it was an important move in visibility for magazines in digital form—Gourmet was widely mourned when its print version was killed off.

Today, we saw a release of Martha Stewart Living for the iPad, and costing about the same per issue as a printed magazine. This was designed within InDesign, uses typography from H&FJ, and uses Adobe’s new beta tools. Things move quickly, people—jump on that bandwagon!

The last time I remember things changing this fast was waaaaaaaay back in my first year of college. Our first semester was pasteup basics, how to use a waxer, do a decent marker rendering, and so on. We came back from Christmas break for spring semester, and suddenly everything was different. They’d installed a lab of black and white Macs running FreeHand and Illustrator 88.

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Posted inObsessions ∙ Patric King ∙ Print Design Articles ∙ Publication Design ∙ Typography

Steven Heller has written for PRINT since the 1980s. He is co-chair of SVA MFA Designer as Entrepreneur. The author, co-author and editor of over 200 books on design and popular culture, Heller is also the recipient of the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award for "Design Mind," the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement and other honors. He was a senior art director at The New York Times for 33 years and a writer of obituaries and book review columnist for the newspaper, as well. His memoir, Growing Up Underground (Princeton Architectural Press) was published in 2022. Some of his recent essays are collected in For the Love of Design (Allworth Press).

Creative Director of Print Magazine, Jessica is also a packaging designer and Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design. She has worked as a professional hands-on designer for a wide array of notable brands since 2005. In 2014, Jessica decided to combine both design and business to grow the Dieline. In 2016, she became a faculty member at ArtCenter College of Design teaching students sustainable packaging design. Currently she is the Co-Founder of a PR/Marketing agency called CoolWish where her objective is to work with stellar clients who want "to get themselves out there."

Zachary Petit (zacharypetit.com) has edited The Daily Heller for around 10 years, and was editor-in-chief of the print version of PRINT magazine. He is a contributing writer at Fast Company and the author of The Moon & Antarctica (2025) for Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series.

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