As the vice president/creative director of Black Enterprise, Terence Saulsby is responsible for the look and feel of the brand, regardless of the medium. But he will be one of the first to admit that print has been the primary medium of concern for BE during his tenure at the media company. Black Enterprise is only now nearing completion of a mobile site, which, by all accounts, makes them late to the handheld party. However, as Saulsby has realized along the journey of creating the BE iPad app, what the brand is doing on the iPad gives them an undeniable opportunity to be a leader in the space.
How long have you been directing the look and feel of BE?
I’ve been on the magazine for about 12 years.
And is this your first time reproducing the monthly mag–or any content–for a tablet device?
Yes.
So what was this process like for you?
When we first started this a couple of months ago–it’s been a really quick turnaround process for us–the industry was touting the iPad as the savior of print magazines. So all of the things that came out before or had been touted–other than maybe like a Sports Illustrated, a Time Warner vehicle, where you’ve got extremely deep pockets to facilitate filling out the video content–most of the things we had seen before
In doing that we realized that the information can be delivered in a different way. You can break the information up differently from a magazine and make it somewhat more interactive. So it’s been kind of a learning process for us. This is the first time we’ve done this, and seeing what the device allows you to do versus what you’re allowed to do on the static page is kind of eye-opening. So we’ve been playing with that as much as we can while still sticking to the Wealth for Life mission of Black Enterprise.
I noticed that the page layout changes when you switch between the horizontal and vertical orientations of the iPad, which not all apps do. Did this design choice make the process more difficult?
It’s much more difficult to do it that way because you have to lay the pages out twice. Everything has to be done twice. It has to be checked twice, it has to be proofed
What’s the normal turnaround time for the print versus the iPad edition?
We separate the processes because the magazine gets a final-final proof before it goes to print, well after it’s laid out in pages. If we tried to marry the two processes, then you’d have to proof the pages concurrently and make all the changes concurrently. So we get the print version complete first–which takes two to three weeks to get printed and delivered–and that gives us a nice little window in order to work on the iPad version. We strip the text out of the print version and reformat everything. And the proofing process goes a lot quicker because it was already finalized once. Our copy team, at that point, is only checking for my mistakes. It really only takes us about three days of focusing on the iPad to get all the layouts redone, and then another three days to proof everything and make all the changes, and get the assets ready for delivery. So that’s about a six-day turnaround whereas the magazine is generally about a three-week turnaround.
BE isn’t a fashion magazine but the photos really seem to pop in the iPad version.
The images look like they do when we’re laying them out on screen. My photo editor is extremely happy. Everything is crisp and sharp, the color is how you want it to be. On the other hand, when you print, there are a lot of considerations–quality of paper, how fast the presses run, what ads run next to what copy, etc. Fashion magazines put a lot of effort and energy into getting those images right with those considerations, but as a small business publication, we can’t spend the same amount of resources on that as Vanity Fair. So in the magazine there’s always a degradation of the imagery from where we want it to be. With the iPad it’s a one-to-one deal.
The color-coded navigation in the app is identical to the magazine. Did you ever consider designing a different navigation scheme for the iPad?
We wanted to have the iPad app feel like the print version of Black Enterprise, so we took a lot of the same elements and reformatted them. The color-coding is something we do in the magazine, but it also works well on the iPad because it’s just easy to hit the bottom nav and scroll through the color bars. It’s an eye mnemonic that just catches you, so you don’t necessarily have to read as
This app does seem more about the BE experience than the capabilities of the iPad. What would you say to folks looking for the “wow factor” in this app?
I’ve seen a number of applications that have a lot of “wow factor”. The way they put these things together, I’m like ‘My god, this is absolutely incredible.’ It’s fun to play with, interesting to view, and highly interactive. However, after a few hours you’re like ‘Okay, I played the game. But where’s the info?’ Our mission is to get you the info. Our viewers and our readers are generally busy people, so we try to present the information in a manner where you can get it as quickly as possible.
Now that the app is available, are you already thinking about what’s next?
I don’t think we’ve come close to exploring what things we can really blow out monthly. The more we do, the more we see that we can change and play with. We’re–right now–working on our third version [of the app] and it’ll have a lot more screen interactivity than the July or the August versions.