GQ Brazil on iPad
In January 2011, GQ magazine arrived in Brazil, and I was invited to join as the first Art Director, assembling the design team and implementing a newly created design for the print publication. The title was released simultaneously on paper and tablet, which made GQ Brazil one of the first magazines in the world to create a visual project for both media at the same time, as it coincided with the launch of the first iPad.
The layouts for the iPad were produced in the beta version of Adobe Digital Editions directly on InDesign. The interactive features were still very experimental at the early stages of the software. The lack of references from other publications in the market made the design decision for navigation and interaction to be based on intuition. At that point, only a dozen of magazines were launched on the iPad (such as GQ-US and Wired-UK), being adaptations of the existing print edition.
All content of GQ Brazil was produced with digital in mind, including multimedia productions, such as videos, audio and 360º images. In some cases, the photo shooting was made entirely as video, with frames extracted to produce the article on the print issue, which was unexplored in any magazine in the world at the time.
GQ Brazil for iPad - reel 2011
For being a new platform for readers, I decided to create a straightforward navigation system. So instead of repeating the content in both orientations as the competitors, I decided to use landscape mode as an expanded table of contents. And the articles could be read by rotating the device to portrait mode.
It was fun to explore the new possibilities of a digital publication with my talented team of graphic designers. The photo shooting for covers usually had two teams of photographers; one focused on the printed magazine and the other produced multimedia content to the iPad version.
The groundbreaking approach and results were rewarded by being selected for the 10th Brazilian Biennial of Graphic Design, organized by ADG in 2013 (Brazilian Association of Graphic Designers).
Visual project: Crystian Cruz & Rodolfo França
Motion graphics: Renan Batista
DESIGN TEAM
Art Director: Crystian Cruz
Art editor: Andre Koguti
Designers: Rodolfo França, Renan Batista & Tamara Emy
