I’ve been hinting at this for a while, but the time has finally come for me to talk about the next issue of Letter to Jane. If you’ve read anything I’ve said for a while I’ve probably included the word “different” in there somewhere. Looking back I now realize that I’ve probably overused that word already before things have even got started. It was really all I could say because for a long time I didn’t know what the next issue would look like, I just knew they couldn’t be the same. Now I don’t want to say too much because I don’t have the issue finished. I have some things setup, tech demos made, some interviews scheduled, and other things like that, but there’s nothing at the point where I want to speculate what the exact final version will look like. I guess I know what I want, but I don’t want to settle yet. I do want to take a moment to try to get past “different” and get into some real details, or at least bring up some points for continued discussion.
So here’s what “different” means so far:
A new design: I’ve come up with some early models are less cluttered but still has all the options as before. There will be a better flow in this issue. That’s one thing I really wanted to fix from previous issue. It’s hard to find that fine line between “sections” like Letter to Jane and “pages” like other apps. Working on the Port Magazine app solved this issue to me. It won’t be exactly the same because it will be a different design, but that is definitely where I want to go with it.
Break it down into real sections: I don’t know if Four Stories will be the official title when all is said and done, but it is really what I’m aiming towards. I want to do a Roshomon type of thing, focus on different ways to tell a story. Even though Moral Tales was broken up into sections those were kinda just for show. It was still very much just one long stream of content. I want to make more clearly defined sections in this issue, with each section having a particular theme, such as one section being more text heavy or video centric. It will still flow like one whole magazine, but I still think the iPad has a problem with giving you a sense of place. In a print magazine the weight and the amount of pages give you a feel for where you are in the publication. On an iPad it feels like just a long stream. It’s something Port and The Guardian have really tried to tackle well and I want to make that a focus too.
Move away from pixel perfect design: One of the iPad’s strengths so far has been the ability to have pixel perfect designs, just like print. It’s something the web can’t do and what has turned off a lot of designers from digital work. I want to move slightly away from this though, not the entire issue, but parts of it. All iPad magazines are composites of fullscreen images, even mine. I just break it up for more interaction, but how Moral Tales works isn’t much different from a Conde Nast app. This is fine now but soon screen resolutions are going to change and making a fullscreen image for each size is going to be difficult. Other options are getting better in iOS that will allow for more of the design work to be rendered in the app. One example of this is that I’m going to get rid of the “Text Mode” I have in previous issues and make all text in this issue be embedded so that you can select and copy whatever you want. It’s another area where I’m trying to find the right balance and I’m not quite there.
Original content: I’m still going to feature artist’s portfolios, that’s not going away, but I want to expand that and shake it up a bit. I also want to make more content in-house. With this issue I’m interested in looking at Letter to Jane not as a magazine, but more as a studio in a way. I’m producing content that already has a built-in distribution channel, and I want to take advantage of that as best as I can. I want to have original video and short films, and soundtrack, and more interactive features. Like I’ve always said, I want to use the iPad’s strengths to my advantage, and I think I can do that now in a more fluid way.
Give the app room to grow: One of the things I hate about apps is that they’re hard to update. If I want to tweak something then I have to resubmit it to Apple and you have to redownload everything and it’s just not ideal for anyone. So I want to make a section of the app that is HTML. I want an online section that will allow you to at least read all the interviews from every issue and stay up to date with what is going on with Letter to Jane. I think if I had come up with this in Moral Tales then I would’ve tried to make every feature have some HTML in it, but these days I have a little more sense and know that it’s better to give it its own section and not throw the kitchen sink at every feature.
Sell the source code: I still don’t know if this was a genius move or an idiotic move, but either way it feels good to me. There’s one great thing I love about art that I don’t get to experience too often with Letter to Jane and that is that sense of passing knowledge along. It’s one of my favorite things about music. I can hear a song and get so much enjoyment out of just listening to it, but I can also pick up my guitar and learn how to play it, and by learning how to play it, I learn a new skill on my guitar that I can apply to my own music. There is a lot of things about the iPad that are just invisible to the consumer, you don’t get to see the process. Maybe that’s why the iPad is considered “magical” to many. I realized there are a lot of people that want to have their zine on the iPad and are pretty technically savvy, but don’t know the steps to take. I was in the same boat and it took me a long time to get to a place where I think I can help others like me, but now I think I can. iOS has also simplified a great deal since I started with iPhone SDK 3.0. I think Apple has gone to great lengths to eliminate the mistakes that get new programmers stuck. So I felt it was a good time to sell the project to help out other designers. I priced it at $200 dollars because I felt that was a fair price considering Adobe’s new single issue solution. This won’t be something you can just drop in your text and images and you have your own magazine, there is still a bit of work you have to do on your own to come up with your own magazine, just like if you bought a website template for your blog. The advantage of buying the source code is that you’ll now have the answers to how everything works. I’ll explain everything and be straightforward and visual as possible, but you’ll still need to know the basics, like how to navigate in Xcode, the difference between .h, .m, and .xib files, and how to submit an app to Apple. I’ll of course provide links to get tutorials, but I just want to make sure people know that there’s so much I can do to simplify things. That’s one reason for the price, the other is that I have been looking for a way to encourage more publishers to take a native app approach. I think there’s a great benefit and that it’s a great tool to learn how to use. I think the Port app is a great example of the advantages to native apps. The fact that we were able to come up with an idea from scratch and then keep tuning and tweaking it till we got the interaction we wanted just right is what really makes that app special. It may not be the right solution for everyone, but for some this will really open up great new displays of creativity that we haven’t even thought of yet.
Funding: One of the biggest things that is different this time around is that I’m asking for funding. I hope I was able to give you some idea as to why I think that’s necessary. I’m not just updating the content or refreshing the look. I really am trying to do something different, in every sense of that word. Doing something like this takes time and it I’ll need the help of others. It would take me twice as long and be twice as bad if I tried to do everything on my own again like I did before. Luckily I have very talented friends who are offering there services for free or for cheap, but they still need to be compensated for time and travel and things like that. It costs money to produce content and get supplies, to test things, and so forth. Letter to Jane has always been a personal project that came out of my pocket and is usually made at a loss. Well my pockets are empty now and I need your help. There have already been many of you who have been generous with your support and I hope many more of you can do the same. The fundraiser will go on for 30 days, so right before Thanksgiving. There are a lot of great rewards for backers that I hope you can take advantage of. I tried to set the levels accordingly so that fans could get a little something extra and professionals can also get something extra that appeals to them. I hope you can donate something to this project today, if not money than time. Just a little time to share this project with others and help get the word out. If you have any questions about this project please let me know. If all goes well I hope to have the new issue done in late December early January.
Thank you for checking this out, and please donate today.
-Tim
I’ve been quiet on the app front lately, but that all has changed today. Moral Tales for the iPad has been updated with iOS 5’s new features including better performance, new Twitter integration, built in dictionary, and access to the website in-app so you can keep up to date with Letter to Jane and read all the interviews and features from all 3 issues so far!
My very first iPad app, the first issue of Letter to Jane is back in the app store for $0.99. I rewrote the app so now everything is local (the app is still all html), you no longer have to be online to access any of the content, and I again included the website like I did with Moral Tales. I did a slight redesign and streamlined everything, but that’s it. All the content still looks the same. I would have loved to go through and redo everything, but I don’t have the time. I rebuilt it because people are still asking for this content and there is a lot of good stuff in there like my interview with Yoko Ono, No Age, Passion Pit, Aziz Ansari, and more.
Also, I’ll be writing about this more soon, but another app I worked on is out this week. Port Magazine’s new app is out now and I couldn’t be more proud of the work done on this app. It was a collaboration between myself, Jeremy Leslie, the good people at Port. It features a ton of original content and interactive features as well as a look into the new Johnny Depp movie The Rum Diary. Please download it and let me know what you think.
That is all the app news for right now. I will look into other updates for the apps I have now, but honestly I really want to get started with the next issue of Letter to Jane. I have a lot planned, and I really want to get out as soon as possible.
-Tim
I would just like to apologize for anyone who has downloaded Issue 1 for the iPad only to realized that none of the content is showing up. Issue 1 was an HTML issue an I’ve been going through a server change. I originally pulled the app because of this and thought I had fixed everything so I reintroduced it in the app store for free only to realize that there are still some troubles with it. I have removed it again and hope to have everything fixed by next week. Again I apologize for the inconvenience. I know I’d be pretty pissed if I downloaded an app and all I got was an error sign so I’m going to try to get this solved as soon as possible, thanks.
-Tim
I originally wrote a piece last Fall titled How I made an iPad Magazine, discussing my thoughts on making the last issue of Letter to Jane: Late Autumn. That issue was an attempt at starting from scratch and re-examine what a digital magazine could be. After a successful launch and months of hard work, the next issue of Letter to Jane Magazine is out. Moral Tales is in some ways the next logical step to Late Autumn and in other ways, it’s a completely different magazine to me. As with the last release I have spent a couple days looking back at the making of Moral Tales and I wanted to give my take on the issue as well as where I think it fits in the current landscape of iPad publishing.
iPad magazines in some ways, have changed quite dramatically but for the most part they remain the same. The real change has come from the user’s point of view. Enough time has gone by where the novelty has worn off and people are either sold on the idea or not. Most magazines on the iPad have finally conformed to some kind of a standard of presentation and price. There still isn’t a centralized “newstand” for digital publishing in the App Store, so major magazines are scattered throughout various categories such as Entertainment, Lifestyle, News, Photography, etc. When I started Letter to Jane it was completely unknown ground and now I see it as a little more settled with some territories clearly defined. I feel that readers now know what they want out of aniPad magazine and they have expectations.
My mindset from the start was to give the people what they want, but not in a way they were expecting. That meant that I knew that I wanted to expand the issue from just photos and text to add video and make it more interactive. After I came to that conclusion I seldom thought about what would please people, or what the other competition was doing. This was probably the most isolated I’ve ever been on working on a project. I surrounded myself with all the art, music, film, etc. that inspired me and just drew from those inspirations. I made work that got me and my friends excited, but I always tried to remember at every step that everything had to be universal enough so that everyone could find something they liked in this issue.
Before I started making this issue I organically kept watching Eric Rohmer’s series of films Six Moral Tales and the early work of Chantal Akerman, such as Je, Tu, Il, Elle, News From Home, and La Chambre multiple times a day for a couple weeks. There was something in these films that I really wanted to tap into and I really let these works frame my artistic view point. While they are all different works, I feel that they all have something in common by being anomalies. They don’t really fit in with any type of artistic convention, they are just deeply personal takes on classical storytelling structures. That perfectly lines up with Letter to Jane.
I’ve always based the designed of the magazine on film theory, and being that it’s always been a digital magazine, I’ve never had to take in account how that translate to print. So for the last two issues I’ve made the issue a series of shots or scenes. Each feature is its own encapsulated scene, and every scene builds upon each other. Just as a film is built up of a series of corresponding shots, so is Letter to Jane. With that concept I couldn’t layout the magazine by pages, it would look too distracting with the background images, (believe I tried this every which way, what you see is the least distracting way to read the magazine).
Speaking of the backgrounds, that might be the first big change most people will notice. I hate to get stuck doing the same thing too often so the one rule I gave myself going into this issue was no blurry images, even though I liked making those images because the process was fun. I’ll quickly just say that I made most of the last issue by taking pictures with my iPhone and messing with it on my phone then finishing it up in Photoshop. I always like to find ways to make an image, and for Moral Tales I needed a change of scenery and made most of the images in Premiere Pro.
I really wanted to give this issue a location, an identity. Living in Oregon there are only really three images you get from this state: freaks, freaks in Portland, and freaks in the forrest. None of those images interested me at all. Early on before I knew what the issue was I knew I wanted to shoot it on the Oregon coast. One of the main reasons for that decision was that the Oregon coast can be really ambiguous if you want it to be. It’s always foggy, grey, and rainy with a lot of open spaces that no one ever goes to. This was perfect for me, I really wanted a “beach” nothing specific, just the symbolism of it all. I had been planning to do an art project with a new pop band Shadows on Stars for a long time now and I decided to cast them as the characters for this issue and we planned to go to the beach for the ONLY day in 5 weeks it wasn’t supposed to rain. Well we got to the beach and it indeed wasn’t raining, it was gorgeous day, which was the worst possible thing to happen to me. With the wind chill it was probably 30 F or colder and the images looked like it was 90. But, we regrouped and had a great time shooting the stills for the background as well as shooting the video for this issue.
The number one question I got asked after the last issue was why I didn’t have any video in the issue if I’m such a big film nerd. It was a valid question and the truth was because I didn’t know how to do it yet. I think one of the ways that a lot of magazines implemented video into their apps really shot them in the foot and I didn’t want to add video just because I could. I hate this notion that just because something has a certain capability, that means that it now has to be exploited no matter what. It’s the same notion that is going wild through photography these days. Just because cameras can shoot video now, that means that every photographer should now shoot video, photography is now just a process of capturing stills. It’s a thought process that bastardizes both mediums. Expression might have similar narratives but creation has multiple thought processes. So when it came to the app I didn’t want to make the same mistake and simply show a video in place of a photoshoot, or show behind the scenes, etc. I wanted to treat video the same way every other artist gets treated in Letter to Jane. Each artist gets their own space to show the work they want to with minimal oversight. I try to keep my involvement to a minimum by simply saying who gets in and who doesn’t and then trying to piece it all together at the end. So instead of just having video photoshoots, I have three narrative shorts in this issue: Forever Blue by Ramón Ayala, and Candy Walls by Eva Michon, as well my short made for the issue.
In my scrapbook piece I posted most of the images that directly inspired this issue. The short film for this issue was almost entirely a nod to Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle. In Akerman’s portrayl she begins by showing the down time and creative struggle of writing. In my short I made a loose collection of shots that focused on that same feeling of downtime and messing around to create a song. There was no script or really anything planned, we just had an empty room and some toy instruments and went to work. In fact the music you here on the video above is the final product of what Brian made up on the spot in the film. The short is part documentary, part essay. The art for this issue and the video were all shot within a span of 24 hours. I really wanted the whole issue to be made at the same time so that there would be a certain continuity to it. Just as all the interviews and features are a loose series of shots, I wanted them to go with the video so in a sense the issue is just a continuation of the video and the whole the issue is just one short film formed over different mediums.
Quickly I want to mention the design changes to the interview sections and the photo sections. One of the biggest problems of Late Autumn was that you simply couldn’t read it. The font was too small and multiple columns of text crowded the screen. So I corrected this mistake by making the font size significantly bigger and making it one centralized column. Late Autumn had the ability to copy and paste, and links to share the content on the web. With Moral Tales I drastically improved this by adding Twitter and Facebook. So now if you want to share an article in Moral Tales all you have to do is press a button to open in Safari, post the story on Facebook or Twitter, or simply copy the link. I really have been striving to not make these apps an island. You’re paying for this content you should be able to do with it as you please.
The main problem with the photo features in the last issue was that there was division as to how images should be presented in an app. Some wanted to manipulate them, while I believe, (and still do) the editor has the right to present them in any fashionable way they please. You wouldn’t buy a magazine and expect them to just have a bunch of unedited photos lying in there, (although that could be a really good idea for a magazine now that I think about it). I believe I solved this little problem by simply adding both versions to the app. When you go to a photo feature you see the edited version and simply press a button to look at the whole series uneditied. You can rotate, pinch, zoom, whatever you want with photos. So now there are multiple options; like I said, you paid for the content, consume it however you want.
This idea of multiple ways to approach the app is something that I again got from those films by Akerman and Rohmer. That open-ended, come to your own type of conclusion style while still have a clear narrative is what really brought the design process together. The structure of the issue is broken into chapters, and you can jump around from chapter to chapter anywhere in the issue. This was my answer to quick navigation. I wanted a way from people to move around without having to go to the index but I still wanted to keep a sense of discovery so I broke it down into sections, instead of individual articles. I also wanted a prologue section to give readers a chance to learn how to use the app in their own way.
I know I said there shouldn’t be instructions with the last issue, but to some extent I was wrong. No matter how simple you make something, some people are going to need clarification. It’s a new, open-ended device and customers expect to buy an app and be shown how to use it. Is it perfect? No, but it’s the reality of situation. Having said that, my instruction is minimal at best, and borderlines on the sarcastic. Months ago Khoi Vinh wrote a post about instructing a reader the way that maybe a videogame instructs a user, you show them instead of just telling them. The prologue has three sections: a video section, and interview, and a photo feature, all the kinds of things you’re going to find in the issue. All of them have a simple instruction to double tap on the screen and the screen changes. Really that’s all you need to know to work this app, is that where ever you are in the app, double tap and the screen will change somehow. In most cases it will make the UI disappear. I’ve talked before how I think iPad magazines should be designed with the idea that the iPad is just an empty picture frame, and keep things as simple as possible. There is not a lot of real estate on an iPad screen and it doesn’t need a lot of elements on there at once. So when you double tap the screen everything except the content goes away and you’re left holding the content. That is a very important distinction to make and one that I think separates Letter to Jane and makes it the abnormality I talked about. While other iPad magazines focus bringing a print experience to the iPad, I’m focusing on how you interact with the content directly. You are not touching a page you are touching the content, interacting with it, manipulating it. That is the biggest advantage I think tablets have over traditional print or the web, and I hope more people explore that aspect.
I will continue to keep writing about this issue in later posts but for now I just wanted to give an overall view of the issue, and focus on the areas I really spent a lot of time trying to improve. Letter to Jane Magazine: Moral Tales is available for iPad for $1.99. Moral Tales is a significant improvement over Late Autumn with more than twice the number of features, (there are more photography features alone in this issue than all the features in the last), three short films, new music to listen to, more in depth interviews and more. There is more polish and more thought went into this one and I hope you enjoy it.
If everything goes right, my next iPad app “Late Autumn” should be released in the next few days. While the app is a continuation of the print issue “A New Language” they are very different projects. Ever since the first iPad issue I’ve had a lot of people ask me for advice on how to make their own iPad zine, and I always told them to wait and see what companies like Adobe would bring. Well Adobe came and I wasn’t that impressed. I feel that the big companies can do what they want but the indie zines should build something from scratch and bring their own feel and attitude to the native iPad experience. So I started to document all my concerns from the beginning of the project so I could share with other content creators. What came from this journal was a bunch of sleep deprived breakthroughs and mindless Unibomber-esque ramblings, with some actual good content thrown in there every now and then. I went through the notebook and picked out some phrases from it and wrote some thoughts down below. Since you can’t write “This is all a process as I learn the ropes” in the product description I wanted to take this time to address some of the questions and decisions that went into making this app. I hope that if you have a comment or a question that you will let me know as I see my accessibility as one of the key advantages I have. If you don’t like something about Time Magazine you can’t talk to them about it and try to change it, but Letter to Jane Magazine is just me and I want to make the best product I can for my readers. There is an update planned for this issue and I want to keep adding new features to the next issue so please feel free to get in touch.
Ozu, Ozu, Ozu
The reason that it is sometimes hard for people to collaborate with me is that I literally talk in movies, it’s just how I’m able to express my ideas. While Yasujiro Ozu’s film Late Autumn wasn’t a direct influence on this issue, Ozu’s style in general was huge. For those that are not famliar with his work, his style was very simple, direct, and objective. While his films technically always had a beginning, middle, and end, they were never important, merely bookmarks along the way. This sort of minimal, non-linear style has always had a big impact on me and I really tried to embrace it with this app. The entire app has a very casual style. You can open the app and start to go through each story one by one, or you can swipe over and choose what you want to see, everything having equal importance. Since this issue was literally about conversations I felt it was important to always make sure that every page was styled yet uncluttered. In fact to use the word pages is false, there are no pages, just words.
No borders, the frame is already built in.
At it’s basic, most fundamental core, the iPad is a universal frame. It is by far the best way to view images, and works best when the screen is not cluttered. This minimal, one view, one function approach really goes hand in hand with my own aesthetics. I thought that one of the ways to make the app feel more natural is to work with the large black border around the iPad and not ignore it and work against it. This is also why every orientation is not supported because I felt that worked against the frame. When you’re reading something you need something stable, anyone who tries to read emails in bed knows this. So while everything doesn’t auto rotate, every orientation is taken advantage of by how the content was presented in order to take better advantage of the iPad’s “picture frame” quality.
No instructions.
I don’t want to sound like Steve Jobs, but I as I was building the app I kept repeating to myself that if I have to explain how to use the app, then I’ve failed. I mean it’s one thing if I was building a productivity app, but this is a magazine and a magazine shouldn’t need instructions. While this sounds easy enough, it became a bit of a challenge to create an interface that had little to no menu and still make it intuitave enough so that a person knew how to go to the next story, or swipe up to find more options, etc.
Copy, paste, and share.
One of the biggest complaints I hear about iPad zines is that they are just interactive pdfs, and that they are walled off experiences like CD-ROMs. I agree with these comments but as I tried to solve this problem for myself I learned that there may be more to this problem than just laziness on the developer’s side. Since I’m still a new developer there are probably some tricks I don’t know about, but from what I’ve researched there’s not really a proper way to display real text that is properly formatted and styled like a magazine needs. The UITextView options are fairly sparse, which is why most text on the iPad is images. The majority of the text in “Late Autumn” are PNG files but I really wanted you to be able to copy and paste so if there was a quote or a link you could copy it and share it with a friend. So I made a pure text view where by tapping on the text button brings up a non formatted, plain text version of the interview that let’s you copy.
This text mode also solved a couple other reading concerns I had. A feature that people said were missing from my last app was the ability to pinch and zoom so that they could make the text better. That ability is built in to this app, but I have it turned off for now because I’m not convinced it helps anything and makes swiping to the next image in every app I’ve ever used less effective. So if the text is too small to read or if you like to read articles vertically instead of horizontally, you can just hit the text button and that should solve those issues.
A blog book.
I have to be honest, that I didn’t quite remember what I meant by that phrase until I looked around some of the other notes I had around it. I noticed that when people were talking about other magazine apps they were just taking into account of translating the reading experience of the print magazine to the iPad, but that is a false outlook since reading print is only one of the ways we read now. I wanted to make sure I had a strong editorial design like a magazine but still keep the format of how most people read today, by reading blogs. Now I had to make some assumptions for this, but I figured that most people like me browse the internet by checking out an article and then clicking on one of the links at the end of the page to view more information. I wanted this functionality to be in my app, but I again had to find a way to add it in so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the main feature. I came up with what I feel is a pretty good solution. You can simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen and a set of options appear for each interview.
Now a lot of people will think what I’m about to say was an oversight, but in reality I looked at it as a feature. Since I was building this app to work with iOS 4.2 I knew that I had multitasking and that you could easily switch over to the browser and then jump right back to the app. That is why there is no built in browser in the app. When you click on a link it switches over to Safari. This way it didn’t conflict with the design, and aesthetics of the app. There’s also a problem with built in browsers in that they don’t always have quite the functionality that the actually Safari app has, and I just find that most app browsers to be very clunky. I also had a concern that I would be walling off someone else’s content. These links go to pages that are not my own, and that’s not a problem when you view them in a browser, but walling them off in a paid app where a person can’t easily access and share that page is a problem that I didn’t feel was necessary. If there is a big demand for a browser I will work on adding one, but for now I think it’s a much better experience to use the multitasking, and again working with the native feel of the iPad and not making my own arbitrary system. I will admit that the sharing function with having to go through the website is not ideal to be kind, but as I couldn’t figure out an elegant way to integrate it more that was the best way I could think of. In reality it’s not bad; just hit share and then press either the Twitter icon or the Facebook icon. I agree there is a better way and if you had any advice or could help me with that I would be grateful.
Bells and whistles?
How interactive should this be, and where is the proper line of editorial control? This was something I went back and forth on. I think the bells and whistles that initially set the tone for iPad magazines were ultimately a bad trend. I want to preface what I’m about to say, by proclaiming that I am a huge tech geek, you lives and breathes all this stuff, so I have nothing against tech people when I say that our need to want to tweak and touch everything takes away from the magazine experience and turns iPad apps into a lame video game. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with all those animations and interactive elements, but if they don’t fit the original concept then, they are just tacked on to make it look cool and ruin the real content. The first Popular Mechanics app is a great example of that, did anyone even read one article in that issue?
So even though I wanted to add in all those little pointless flashing animations and buttons with the fade effects, it ultimately didn’t fit the concept and I believe that the content alone is good enough if it’s presented properly. The concept of Late Autumn was conversations in their purest form. Unedited narratives in word form and them narratives in photography, but never the two mixed. With the next issue I want to plan it around more multimedia, but as I said before the concept has to fit first.
My goal with this app was to make an app that was stylish while still be light, fast, and intuitive and I think I came close to that. File size was a big deal to me and I wanted to have a lot of graphics but come in at under 50 MBs, which is much smaller than most magazine apps, and I got everything into an app that is under 30MBs so I’m very happy about that.
The artwork needs to be contemplative, romantic without melodrama such as Godard in the 80’s, Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, Michel Pialat, or Ozu.
See? I wasn’t joking when I said I talk in movies. If you’ve seen any of my other artwork from this year you know that I’ve started making art that is softer and less direct. I’ve been playing with the concept that if you present an image but take away the usual symbols that we identify with, that allow us to use logic, then all you’re left with is the emotion or the feeling. The artwork in Late Autumn is in the same vein as the artwork in “A New Language” but the difference is that in Language the art told a linear story, in Late Autumn the artwork doesn’t have a narrative at all, but rather just a mood. I’ve also been inspired by the lighting and geometry of artwork from The Romantic and Rococo periods lately and there is a trace of that influence in these images as well. Deciding on what would be the 10 final images and what they would look like took a very long time to decide. Everything had to flow so well together while still being able to work out of context proved to be a challenge. By my last count I ended up making 2,041 different images and whittled that down to 10 or 12, so you can just imagine what a headache this part of the process was.
Well that is just some of what went into Late Autumn. I want to stress the importance of feedback when it comes to something like this, so that you don’t feel like you’re being force a system you don’t like. How digital publishing will be consumed is still up for grabs and I really want to keep that indie zine, built from scratch feeling alive in this new wave of devices. I don’t believe I mentioned it before but starting with Late Autumn, Letter to Jane Magazine will be an iPad only magazine. I am not going to keep making a print version and port it over. I will be putting out a digital version online and on the iPad, (and any other tablet that I like). There is still talk of doing something in print like a special book or poster series for each issue that will be a special project with some other artists and that will be put up as a Kickstarter project. Anyways thank you for reading and I look forward to a good discussion on where this project goes.
