SPD Medal Finalists

The Society of Publication Designers has announced finalists for its 47th annual awards, and Joe Zeff Design is honored to be among those under consideration for five Gold and Silver medals in four categories. This year's contest attracted three times as many digital entries as the previous year, according to the organization. The winners will be announced at the SPD Gala on Friday, May 11 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The finalists, from the SPD press release:

TABLET APP OF THE YEAR (not associated with a print brand) • Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 2011 • The Final Hours of Portal 2, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 22, 2011 • Flipboard for iPad, Mike McCue, Evan Doll, Creative Directors; July 21, 2011 • Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine”

USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY • Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director, George Steinmetz, Photographer, Ed Gabel, Illustrator; April 2011 • POWER Platon, Scott Dadich, Creative Director, Platon, Photographer, Yarek Wazul, Illustrator; 2011 • GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director, Dora Somosi, Director of Photography, Benjamin Lowy, Photographer; June 2011, “Libya” • TIME, Kira Pollack, Director, Radhika Jones, Editorial Director; 2011, “Time Lightbox”

TABLET APP, ORIGINAL COVER • Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine” • la vita nòva, Laura Cattaneo, Creative Director; December 2011, “Drawings To Read” • Martha Stewart Living, Eric Pike, Creative Director; July 2011, “Show Your Colors” • TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11” • WIRED, Brandon Kavulla, Creative Director; July 2011, “The Mental Machine”

TABLET APP, ENTIRE ISSUE • Fast Company, Florian Bachleda, Creative Director; June 2011, “The 100 Most Creative People in Business” • GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director; 2011, “GQ Style Manual” • SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; March 2011, “SPIN Play” • SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; August 2011, “SPIN Play” • TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11”

See the entire press release here.

Fast Company on the iPad

Joe Zeff Design is excited to announce that the first monthly issue of Fast Company for iPad is available starting today in the Apple Newsstand here. Apparently we're not the only ones excited — Apple is promoting the app on the front-page billboard of the iTunes App Store this week. We worked closely with the editorial, design, photography, online, advertising and circulation departments at Fast Company to produce the issue using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Edition, with significant help from our partners at WoodWing Software and Adobe Systems. Many thanks to editor Bob Safian, executive editor Noah Robischon and creative director Florian Bachleda for providing an unbelievable opportunity to work together to reinvent Fast Company for the tablet.

The March issue features the magazine's annual list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies, packed with activities that enable the user to engage with content in ways not possible in print. The fun begins on the cover, where the user wipes clean a frosted panel of glass to reveal cover subject Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter. Inside there are quizzes, games, animations, movies, audio clips, sharing tools, hyperlinks and a discussion board where users can interact with the magazine's editors. See for yourself:

Music by Crugie Riccio.

The issue is fully compliant with Audit Bureau of Circulation requirements, and available to print subscribers at no additional charge. Every advertisement has pinch-to-zoom functionality, allowing users to read small print not legible in other tablet magazines.

The team at Joe Zeff Design provided support on many levels — redesigning pages to optimize the tablet experience and reimagining print illustrations as tappable animations. We produced the entire issue at our studio in Montclair, NJ, collaborating throughout with Florian and Noah and their staffs. Using the free Adobe Content Viewer app, Fast Company employees accessed fully-functioning demos on their iPads and received notifications every time a new layout was posted for review.

With help from WoodWing and Adobe, Joe Zeff Design helped Fast Company configure Adobe DPS to take advantage of key features such as Omniture analytics and subscription integration through CDS Global. We'll be working together on an ongoing basis to produce Fast Company's monthly editions, in addition to other high-profile engagements that include a relaunch of PC Magazine for Ziff Davis and other tablet initiatives outside the boundaries of traditional publishing. President Joe Zeff will be a keynote speaker at the WoodWing Xperience March 27-28 in Amsterdam, talking about opportunities to expand digital publishing successes beyond magazines to business, education and other markets.

Credit goes to our extraordinary team at JZD, which includes Ed Gabel, Josh Penrod, Christopher Holewski, Krissi Xenakis and Phil Bratter. The studio has designed three apps singled out by Apple as Apps of the Week: Solar System for iPad and March of the Dinosaurs, both for Touch Press, and Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz. Solar System for iPad is one of 85 apps in Apple's App Store Essentials Hall of Fame.

Joe Zeff Design is a WoodWing Creative/Design Partner and an Adobe DPS Solutions Partner. For more information about Joe Zeff Design, WoodWing Software or Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, please contact studio@joezeffdesign.com.

Join us in Amsterdam!

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to be part of the WoodWing Xperience, a digital publishing conference scheduled March 27-28 in Amsterdam that will gather thought leaders from throughout the industry, including executives from Time Inc., Adobe and Barnes & Noble. In addition, WoodWing will offer workshops centered on its Enterprise software and Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Keynote speakers:

• Joe Zeff, President of Joe Zeff Design, an influential design and strategy firm outside of New York City that advises publishers and corporations on app development. His company has designed three apps that have been chosen App of the Week by Apple, and one that resides in the Apple iTunes Hall of Fame. Formerly the Graphics Director of Time magazine, Joe and his team have created hundreds of magazine covers and illustrations, and they have leveraged their expertise in traditional publishing to become a leader in the digital space, working closely with large publishers to advise on content development and produce monthly issues for the iPad and other platforms. Joe is a board member of the Society of Publication Designers in New York City and WoodWing's first Creative and Design Partner.

• Mitch Klaif, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Time Inc. Mitch has worked at Time Inc. since 1997, beginning his career there as director of customer service and operations for information technology. He then served as deputy chief information officer, assisting in the overall management of the company’s information technologists and its hundreds of mission-critical systems. Before moving to his current position, Mitch served as Time Inc.’s CIO and vice president of global magazine and digital technology, where he led the division that managed the company’s around-the-clock magazine, production and digital technology operations. Mitch began his career in information services at Dow Jones in 1976, where he worked for 20 years.

• Zeke Koch, Senior Director of Product Management, Design at Adobe Systems. In this role, Koch oversees the strategy, planning and design for Adobe’s Digital Publishing products. Previously, Koch was principal product manager for Adobe’s Platform Strategy where he was responsible for defining strategy and direction for Adobe’s “Vectors of Innovation” including Multi-screen, Cloud and Social Computing. Earlier, Koch was the director of product management for Adobe’s Mobile and Desktop Platform Product Management teams (including the Flash Player and AIR). Koch joined Adobe from the acquisition of Macromedia where he was group product manager for Mobile Clients. Prior to Adobe, Koch spent a decade at Microsoft, first as a program manager on the Word 97 team and ultimately as the group program manager for the Windows Mobile Shell team.

• Ravi Gopalakrishan, CTO of Barnes and Noble's Nook product business. Ravi established the Nook development team in Palo Alto, CA in April 2009 and has since led the development of four successful Nook products: Nook, Nook Color, Nook Simple Touch and most recently Nook Tablet. All four products have been highly successful and have helped Barnes and Noble grow its e-book market share from zero to over 25 percent in less than two years.

• Hans Janssen, CEO of WoodWing Software. Hans is one of the founders of WoodWing Software and has stepped into the role of CEO since August 1st, 2007. He has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, both on the technical side and on the business end. Janssen previously worked as the technical director for Mediasystemen, after which he became the Director of IT for the Telegraaf Media Groep.

• Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software. With 15 years of experience in developing state-of-the-art solutions for the publishing industry, his thorough understanding of this industry combined with the latest technology and creativity, result in best-of-class solutions.

Joe Zeff Design works closely with WoodWing and Adobe to help publishing companies develop strategies for digital publishing. We're currently working with two large publishers to produce innovative iPad editions of their print magazines. We provide these publishers with end-to-end support, from design to production to advertising to subscription integration to workflow, assisted by WoodWing and Adobe.

For more information on the WoodWing Xperience, visit their website here. See you in Amsterdam!

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

We're extremely excited to be a part of the Society of Publication Designers' "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" night tomorrow at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City. Joe Zeff will moderate a discussion with two of the most intriguing characters in publication design: John Korpics of ESPN and Christopher Hercik of Sports Illustrated. Both are print designers who have evolved into multidisciplinary maestros, overseeing apps, television, websites, books and much more. And both are long-time clients (check out our logotype on the current ESPN The Magazine below) and long-time friends.

For tickets and more information, click here.

iBooks 2, and What Happens Next

Apple announced iBooks 2 today, with features that may revolutionize textbook publishing — as well as other publishing markets. The toolset is Apple-intuitive, and the free iBooks Author application will empower armies of educators and designers to create their own interactive books. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition previously lowered the cost of platform-based app development. Apple has now made it even less expensive — and less complicated — by offering templated layouts, easy-to-use widgets and tremendous functionality. As much as we enjoyed Phil Schiller's keynote today — particularly the part where he singled out "Solar System for iPad" as one of his favorites — we couldn't help but cringe at his summary of iBooks 2:

"Anyone can create stunning, interactive books."

Anyone, that is, with access to stunning photography, illustration, video, 3D models and HTML widgets they can drop into their templates. Production is not the obstacle to app development; it is creativity and content. Along with those stunning, interactive books one should expect to see a slew of mediocre ones, along with a lot of clones. As publishers rush to stock the App Store with interactive versions of their titles, one hopes they'll do so with imagery, animation and programming that leverages iBooks Author as a starting point rather than an end game.

It will be interesting to see how Apple develops its burgeoning publishing platform, and what markets it will target next. There would be significant demand for turnkey catalogs with e-commerce tools; restaurant menus with point-of-sale capabilities; annual reports with widget-based charts and diagrams. Apple continues to change one industry after another. Hopefully the transformation of textbooks — and other industries — will be driven by visionaries who innovate beyond what Apple has provided.

iBooks 2 is free. Inspiration and imagination are priceless. Never confuse the two.

The 4-Hour Chef Teaser

We had the good fortune to work with Melcher Media to produce best-selling author Timothy Ferriss' new app for the Kindle Fire and Apple iPad: "The 4-Hour Chef Teaser," a prelude to his hardcover book due next September. Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and "The 4-Hour Body," made news last fall by signing a deal with Amazon Publishing as its first marquee author. Said Ferriss, "My decision to collaborate with Amazon Publishing wasn’t just a question of which publisher to work with … It was a question of what future of publishing I want to embrace. My readers are migrating irreversibly into digital, and it made perfect sense to work with Amazon to try and redefine what is possible. This is a chance to really show what the future of books looks like, and to deliver a beautiful experience to my readers, who always come first.”

The teaser app is available free here: Fire and iPad.

It contains recipes, videos and a diet plan for surviving the holidays. We're especially proud of the interactive feature we created that allows you to drag a finger across the screen to make a bovine come apart Hannibal Lecter-style, revealing its cuts of meat! Delicious!

See for yourself: The Exploding Cow!

Some screenshots:

Crazy Mocha for iPad!

Crazy Mocha for iPad is a WoodWing app produced last week at Joe Zeff Design. We started Monday morning and submitted to Apple Friday night, just to see what we could pull off in a very short time. It has some fun things — a stylized Twitter feed, HTML-based coupons, location-aware mapping — that show the versatility of a platform-based solution. The app demonstrates a few points we hold near and dear:

• Platforms like WoodWing and Adobe significantly accelerate production. • HTML elements provide distinctive features to platform-based approaches. • Publishing tools created for interactive books and magazines are ripe for deployment in business apps.

Be sure to download from the iTunes App Store. It's free! (And be sure to poke the goat in the eye for a fun surprise!)

More Bells and Whistles, Please!

This just in from Adweek.com: Publishers are pulling back on enhanced apps, simplifying them in order to reach more people on more tablets! Time Inc. declares that interactive elements are "a secondary benefit!" And Hearst Magazines warns that enhancements are potentially distracting, confusing and irritating! Bah humbug, we reply!

Tell that to the next generation of readers, accustomed to flinging Angry Birds across a screen with their thumbs, sharing information with friends through Facebook and text messages, and mashing together content from various sources to customize their experience. And tell that to the advertisers who want nothing more than to attract that generation.

The tablet is where tomorrow's readers establish relationships with today's magazine brands. A passive stack of PDFs won't satisfy them, regardless of how many devices the publisher targets. Every major publisher already has access to creative tools in their platform-based workflows that deliver interactive panoramas, audio and video, social sharing, animated features, annotated graphics, and much more. The best solutions are those achieved through creativity, rather than expenditures. Advanced apps don't require costly and time-consuming programmers; they can be achieved mostly through resources already in-house.

Steve Sachs at Time Inc. cites "a great reading experience" as the top priority. Consider that the tablet is inherently flawed as a reading device. It beeps and burps every time you receive an e-mail or appointment. The screen is too shiny to read outdoors, and the batteries will die in the middle of a paragraph.

The passive delivery of words on a screen is only part of the tablet experience. The opportunity to interact with content, and interact with its creators, makes that reading experience much more engaging. Magazines evolve from one-way monologues to two-way dialogues. And consumers of all ages develop deeper relationships with magazine brands, providing publishers with opportunities to extend those brands based on those relationships and subsidize the enhanced apps that make all of this possible.

Recap: SPD Tablet Town Hall

Many thanks to Steve Hart from Adobe and Shawn Duffy from WoodWing for an amazing Society of Publication Designers event last night at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan, where a capacity crowd had the opportunity to query experts from both companies about their tablet publishing offerings. Some of the takeaways:

• The WoodWing-Adobe partnership creates a single standard for publishing magazines on the tablet. Adobe DIgital Publishing System (DPS) enables content creators large and small to produce dynamic apps with minimal programming. WoodWing enhances that system by adding a way to manage content, distribute work among multiple users and enhance creativity through InDesign plug-ins that simplify complicated programming.

• Adobe announced that all three versions of its DPS are now available for sale:

Single Edition enables anyone with InDesign to buy a $395 encryption key from Adobe's website that enables them to publish a single iPad app to the iTunes Store. At this point it is iPad-only, non-updatable and analytics-free, but nonetheless a breakthrough product that makes tablet publishing accessible to the masses.

Professional Edition is available for a $495 monthly subscription or a $5,940 annual fee. It allows publishers to create an unlimited number of updatable apps for the iPad, Android, PlayBook and — drumroll please — the Amazon Kindle Fire. These apps consist of standalone apps in which content is bundled and sold through app stores, and shell apps published to stores and individual issues that are downloaded from Adobe's servers for an additional fee. Both types include access to analytics that track user flow, providing valuable information for designers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Enterprise Edition is the Swiss Army knife of DPS systems, with enhanced subscription options and pricing based on the publisher's specific requirements.

• The audience was just as interesting as the panelists, and their questions were enlightening. There seems to be growing interest in publishing apps outside of the app stores — primarily for businesses looking to promote themselves, companies that seek more effective ways to disseminate information to a targeted audience, and enterprises that need to ensure that their content is secure. Hart suggested that Adobe will address this need in upcoming releases of DPS.

• A show of hands indicated that most of the audience came from large publishing companies that already had platforms in place — roughly 35 percent were WoodWing and 65 percent were Adobe. When asked how many in the crowd would be interested in training resources, the response was nearly unanimous. Joe Zeff Design will be working with the companies and SPD to identify ways to deliver that training — not just how to build apps but why to build apps and how to build better apps — in the near term. Stay tuned!

• There is considerable anticipation for the Amazon Kindle Fire, shipping next week, and expectations that its underpinnings in e-commerce will spawn a second revolution in tablet publishing with enhanced monetization opportunities.

• Once again, thanks to Tekserve for donating an iPad 2 that was won by Amy Jaffe, an art director. Many thanks to our partners at Tekserve, as well as the Indefatigable Emily Smith at SPD for organizing yet another amazing event!

A Town Hall on Tablet Publishing

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to be part of a special event on tablet publishing in which Adobe and WoodWing will present game-changing products that promise to rewrite the way magazines, studios and freelancers produce apps. The event is part of the Society of Publication Designers' speaker series, titled "Tablet Town Hall: Questions and Answers About the Next Generation of Tablet (and Kindle) Publishing." It is scheduled for Nov. 10 at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan. Tickets are limited, and available here.

Adobe and WoodWing are the leading platforms for publication apps. The two companies recently announced a partnership that integrates Adobe's Digital Publishing System into the WoodWing Enterprise system. As a result, WoodWing users will be able to use Adobe and WoodWing creation tools interchangeably within InDesign and output content using Adobe's Digital Publishing System (DPS). Meanwhile, Adobe announced plans for a Single Edition version of DPS that brings down the price for developing a standalone app to $399.

All of this is great news for designers. WoodWing will continue to develop its Digital Publishing Tools, including its innovative HTML5 widgets that allow non-programmers to configure code through InDesign menus. Adobe's content viewer is much more user-friendly than Apple's Xcode environment, making it easier to preview and distribute apps in development.

Steve Hart from Adobe and Shawn Duffy from WoodWing will deliver presentations, followed by a question-and-answer session moderated by Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design. For more information, visit the SPD site here.

One Magazine, Four Covers . . . and Then Some

UPDATE: We're on the cover of TIME magazine this week, too. See the cover here. That's Steve Jobs on the cover of Fast Company this month. And Google's Larry Page. And Amazon's Jeff Bezos. And Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Four covers. One magazine. One studio: Joe Zeff Design.

Ed Gabel worked his magic on four portraits provided by Fast Company CD Florian Bachleda to create a stylized look that unifies the split-run covers. Many thanks to Florian and Photography Director Leslie dela Vega, as well as the Society of Publication Design, which made it their Cover of the Day today.

The covers:

Look for our illustrations on the cover of this month's Macworld, as well as a major newsweekly later this week — stay tuned!

On the iPad, Books that Refresh Themselves

One of the exciting opportunities in digital publishing is the ability to update content. Unlike a printed book, an iPad edition can be enhanced at any time, providing value to the consumer and renewed marketing opportunities for the publisher. "The Final Hours of Portal 2," Geoff Keighley's app about the blockbuster video game by Valve Software, has been updated with an entirely new chapter that continues the Portal 2 story. The bonus chapter contains exclusive imagery and Geoff's account of how the company extended the game with downloadable modules last week, and what may be next for the franchise.

The app, designed and developed by Joe Zeff Design, was originally published in April and celebrated by Fast Company as "pushing the limits of storytelling." It is available not only for the iPad but the Kindle and through Valve's Steam network.

These types of updates are an important way to stimulate interest in a multimedia property long after its release, and something no publisher should overlook. Similarly, we have enhanced our "Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz" app twice since its initial release, each time adding five additional images, audio commentaries and other content. (Not coincidentally, the Steinmetz app is featured as "What's Hot" in the Books category in 86 iTunes Stores around the world this week.) With more and more iPads in consumers' hands, updates help publishers keep their offerings forever young.

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

I had the privilege of meeting Steve Jobs in the mid-1990s, after he had resigned from Apple following a clash with John Sculley and started a computer company called NeXT. It was a different time -- a visit from Jobs stirred interest from only a handful of writers and editors in a small conference room at The New York Times, leaving space for a page designer to take one of the seats. Even then, with Apple struggling and NeXT not quite there, he was remarkably confident and spoke in such a way that everyone in the room leaned forward to take in every word. Steve Jobs stayed the course, overcoming one setback after another to recompose the world as he believed it should be. He inspired so many on so many levels, and for me that chance meeting leaves an indelible impression today. We live in a malleable world, shaped by those who are most steadfast in their beliefs. Steve Jobs' legacy will continue to effect change for centuries to come. — Joe Zeff Other designers reflect on Jobs and his impact at SPD's website: http://www.spd.org/2011/10/farewell-to-an-icon-steve-jobs.php

Josh Penrod Joins Joe Zeff Design

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to announce that Josh Penrod of the Los Angeles Times will join the studio as a designer and developer. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Josh previously held design positions at The New York Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune and taught visual journalism courses at Fordham University. He combines the inquisitive mind of a journalist with the intensity of a middle linebacker, and will contribute in all aspects of app development from concepting to production. With a background that includes HTML programming, Josh adds web design to our capabilities and will add custom functionality to our WoodWing + Adobe apps in the weeks and months to come.

Josh can be reached at josh@joezeffdesign.com. He starts later this month once he and his wife Elizabeth relocate to the East Coast.

WoodWing + Adobe: Power to the People!

Adobe rocked the publishing world today by democratizing tablet publishing, announcing a $399 edition that allows anyone to build their own app. Meanwhile, WoodWing announced a partnership with Adobe that will replace its own Digital Magazine toolset with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite by November 2012. We at Joe Zeff Design are thrilled at the news.

All of a sudden, everyone is an app developer, just as the desktop publishing revolution turned everyone into a designer. This is likely to accelerate the rate at which consumers embrace content consumption on a tablet device, which drives opportunity for those who create that content and experiences built around that content. A single platform makes it much more straightforward for companies like Joe Zeff Design to create design, illustration, animation and interactive content that turns everyday apps into extraordinary apps. Not only can we produce great apps, we can provide assets, tools and instructional materials to help others make great apps, too.

We look forward to addressing a much larger audience, from Fortune 500 corporations to local businesses that can leverage the power of the tablet to achieve their business goals. We see Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite as a starting point for creating amazing experiences, just as we used WoodWing's out-of-the-box platform to create one-of-a-kind apps with custom functionality such as "The Final Hours of Portal 2," "Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz" and "Above & Beyond: John Kascht." The ability to deploy HTML from within Adobe provides tremendous flexibility, and its Viewer tools will make it much easier to collaborate with others.

Thank you WoodWing for jumpstarting the digital publishing revolution, by providing the workflow tools that allowed Time magazine and others to launch their first iPad editions. Joe Zeff Design is proud to count itself among the beneficiaries of your prescient thinking. And thank you Adobe for unifying the marketplace and making creativity tools affordable and accessible to the masses.

March of the Dinosaurs

Joe Zeff Design is pleased to announce that "March of the Dinosaurs," a new digital book from Touch Press that was designed and illustrated in part by Joe Zeff Design, debuts today in the iTunes App Store as the iPad App of the Week. Touch Press, based in London, has dominated the electronic book marketplace from Day One, publishing "The Elements" when the iPad first launched and, most recently, "The Waste Land," a digital rendition of T.S. Eliot's classic poem. This is the second collaboration between Touch Press and Joe Zeff Design. The first, "Solar System for iPad," was an iPad App of the Week and is part of Apple's iPad Hall of Fame. It was described by Marc Saltzman of USA Today as "an out-of-this-world digital book that is as informative as it is beautiful" and has since been republished as a hardcover book.

"Once again Touch Press has been fortunate to work with Joe Zeff Design, who bring their deep experience of visual communication to our iPad titles," said Max Whitby, CEO of Touch Press.

"March of the Dinosaurs" is a visually rich storybook that recounts the adventures of a group of dinosaurs as they struggle to survive in the prehistoric Arctic. Produced in partnership with the National Geographic Channel and Wide Eyed Entertainment, it contains superbly realistic 3D animations that bring the dinosaurs to life in your hands, spinning through 360 degrees at the touch of a finger. Joe Zeff Design provided creative guidance throughout the project, and designed and illustrated the animated home screen, cast pages and interface elements, shown below:

Joe Zeff Design will be participating in two upcoming events to promote its iPad capabilities:

Your Business, Your App is a luncheon and panel discussion at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at Ogilvy & Mather, 636 11th Avenue, New York City. Hosted by Tekserve, the event is directed toward anyone interested in leveraging custom iPad apps to help achieve their business objectives, from small companies to Fortune 50 corporations. Panelists include Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design, Jason Richelson of Shopkeep.com, Jamie Manalio of Rust Labs, Aaron Freimark of Tekserve’s enterpriseios.com, Joseph Wachs of [x]cubeLABS and John Boese of Ogilvy & Mather. Admission is free, but registration is required. More information here.

Above & Beyond: An Event with John Kascht and Joe Zeff takes place at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 12 at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St., New York City. The two illustrators-turned-publishers will share the stage to talk about the experience of producing their "Above & Beyond: John Kascht" app, and how other traditional artists can tap into new creative and business opportunities made possible by the iPad. Admission is $15 for non-members, $10 for members and $7 for students. More information here.

Fire in a Not-So-Crowded Theater

We're very excited about Amazon's announcement today of Kindle Fire and its little brothers. All of a sudden, the iPad has real competition for Santa's attention this holiday season, and what was once a crowded theater of competing tablets is reduced to two choices. Let us count the game-changers: • Pricepoint. $200 for a top-of-the-line device makes the entry-level $499 iPad seem expensive. The pressure is on Apple to bring down its price.

• Mass market potential. The marketplace for electronic books grows faster as a result of Amazon's pricing, and there will be more incentive for publishers to think digitally and cross-platform. WoodWing and Adobe stand to gain, with one-workflow-fits-all solutions.

• Simplicity. The clean interface makes the clunky Android tablets seem even clunkier. This is a tablet that seems easy to navigate, like the iPad.

• Form factor. The seven-inch tablet is here to stay, and the Fire's forebearers — the Samsung Galaxy Tab and even the Color Nook — seem ill-equipped to compete. Amazon's one-click ordering is the difference. Case in point: we were able to impulsively pre-order a pair of Fires without reaching for a credit card using our pre-existing Amazon account.

• Education. If I'm running a school district, it's a lot more likely I'll find the budget to put $79 Kindles in every knapsack rather than $499 iPads. When it comes to seeding tomorrow's consumers with today's devices, the schools are a battleground one can't overlook.

• The rest. 169 dpi vs 132 dpi for the iPad, although it's likely that a new iPad will up the ante, perhaps as soon as next week. There's no camera, but to be honest, using the iPad 2 camera is kind of awkward, like taking an xray. The 8GB storage capacity could be a limiting factor for multimedia content — even with the ability to stream media from Amazon's cloud servers. On the flip side, the ability to sync without a cable is awfully convenient, and more in line with trends toward distributed computing.

Upcoming events

Joe Zeff Design is taking part in two upcoming events in New York City intended to share insights about the world of tablet publishing. Your Business, Your App is a luncheon and panel discussion at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at Ogilvy & Mather, 636 11th Avenue, New York City. Hosted by Tekserve, the event is directed toward anyone interested in leveraging custom iPad apps to help achieve their business objectives, from small companies to Fortune 50 corporations. Panelists include Joe Zeff of Joe Zeff Design, Jason Richelson of Shopkeep.com, Jamie Manalio of Rust Labs, Aaron Freimark of Tekserve’s enterpriseios.com, Joseph Wachs of [x]cubeLABS and Irven Cassio of Luxottica Retail. Admission is free, but registration is required. More information here.

Above & Beyond: An Event with John Kascht and Joe Zeff takes place at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 12 at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St., New York City. The two illustrators-turned-publishers will share the stage to talk about the experience of producing their "Above & Beyond: John Kascht" app, and how other traditional artists can tap into new creative and business opportunities made possible by the iPad. Admission is $15 for non-members, $10 for members and $7 for students. More information here.

Position Available at Joe Zeff Design

Joe Zeff Design is interviewing for a position available immediately in Montclair, NJ: a graphic designer to manage the technical side of our operation. We’re looking for someone who can push our WoodWing apps to the next level, but not a programmer — a graphic designer with lots of great ideas and a willingness to roll up their sleeves and build great apps. We would train you in all aspects of app development using WoodWing’s Digital Magazine Tools, which do not require coding experience but do require basic familiarity of HTML and JavaScript and an interest in learning more. You would design and process page layouts using InDesign CS5 and create profiles, certificates and app builds using Xcode. Again, we’ll teach you what you need to know and expect you to eventually teach us whatever we don’t.

You need to know InDesign CS5 really well, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Extra points if you know After Effects, Final Cut Pro or any 3D package, as we can certainly put those skillsets to use. From time to time we work in PowerPoint, Keynote and WordPress, and we’d expect you to get involved there, too.

This is a position that will define itself by the candidate’s qualifications. Someone with information graphics experience may find opportunities to push the envelope in data visualization, while a strong graphic designer may focus on developing new storytelling techniques. It is emphasized however that the candidate’s primary responsibilty will be producing our apps from start to finish, including a fair bit of troubleshooting.

The candidate should be comfortable with the dynamics of a small studio in which everyone does a little bit of everything. One day you may be working on a Jay-Z album cover, the next day you may be running to Staples for paper clips. Expect to work on multiple projects at once, and expect all of them to constantly change up until they are finished. This position requires someone who is detail-oriented, extremely precise and well-organized.

Salary and title commensurate with experience; position available immediately. Please send resume, relevant work samples to joe@joezeffdesign.com. No phone calls please.

Above & Beyond: John Kascht

Joe Zeff Design, cited by The Guardian as "one of America's top app designers," is pleased to announce that "Above & Beyond: John Kascht" is now available for sale in the iTunes App Store. The app is the latest in Joe Zeff Design's groundbreaking series of interactive books for the Apple iPad, telling the remarkable story of caricature artist John Kascht. Kascht's work appears on magazine features, book jackets, theater marquees and in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Kascht has also gained a following for his multimedia endeavors about his artwork, including a video documentary about drawing talk-show host Conan O'Brien that has attracted more than 120,000 YouTube downloads.

"Above & Beyond: John Kascht" extends beyond the artist's iconic watercolor paintings to present the stories behind his unforgettable work, transforming a gallery of illustrations into a robust experience that both educates and entertains, making it suitable for all ages. Among the highlights:

• Enjoy 30 of Kascht's most significant works, presented alongside his original sketches, audio commentary and other context that helps the audience understand how the paintings came to be.

• Hear Wendy Wick Reaves, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, describe Kascht's role among contemporary illustrators, and explore many of his paintings that are part of the gallery's permanent collection.

• Interact with the app by exploring immersive panoramas of Kascht's rural Pennsylvania farmhouse and his personal studio, and peer into a hive containing 500,000 honeybees, maintained by Kascht and his wife, Dolores.

• Watch an exclusive video in which Kascht describes a process in which he carefully dissects each subject and reassembles the parts in unexpected ways. "A caricature," says Kascht, "is a portrait with the volume turned up."

• Share images with friends through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

More screen captures and a promotional video can be seen at www.abovebeyondjohnkascht.com.

The app contains photography and video by A. Greg Raymond, a frequent collaborator with Kascht. Raymond described the project as transformative, tracing an evolution from still photography to video storytelling to something altogether different. "Composing with motion was exciting, and it still is, but the linear narrative is still handicapped. The viewer is a passenger. From the time a video starts until the end, the viewer sits and hopefully watches the piece in its entirety. The Above and Beyond series really changes that, by engaging and encouraging the viewer to interact in a way never before possible."

The series originated with "Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz," a collaboration between publisher Joe Zeff Design and the well-known National Geographic photographer. It has been recognized by Apple as an iTunes Store Staff Favorite in more than 65 countries and an App of the Week selection in Australia and New Zealand. The app "reinvents what a publication can be on the iPad," according to the Society of Publication Designers, and has been featured by Time magazine and Reader's Digest. It has climbed as high as 34th overall in the U.S. iTunes Store rankings, and is available here.

To celebrate the launch of "Above & Beyond: John Kascht," the Steinmetz app has been enhanced to include five new images and audio commentaries. The update is free to existing owners and can be downloaded through iTunes. The price of the app remains unchanged, at $1.99.

Joe Zeff Design continues to define storytelling opportunities on the iPad with its app development. Most recently the studio designed and developed a special app for TIME magazine commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The studio also designed and illustrated "Solar System for iPad," an iTunes App of the Week from Touch Press and one of only 66 apps in Apple's iPad Hall of Fame. A second collaboration between Joe Zeff Design and Touch Press is currently in late stages of development. Other noteworthy apps include "The Final Hours of Portal 2," described by Fast Company as "pushing the limits of storytelling" and "a model for publishing a la carte journalism as apps," and apps for corporate clients including PepsiCo and Splashlight.

Zeff and Kascht are scheduled to appear together at the Society of Illustrators in New York City in October to discuss "Above & Beyond: John Kascht" and its implications for illustrators. Zeff has addressed audiences throughout the world (Amsterdam, New York) about opportunities afforded by a publishing revolution that puts content creators in control of their work, and has been profiled by Adweek and other publications. Zeff will also be speaking about the power of apps to transform businesses at a Sept. 30 event at Ogilvy and Mather, sponsored by Tekserve. Watch this space for details.