Online Magazine Launched: Nordic Innovation

Thu, Feb 17, 2011

I've been working together with the great people at the startup hub Klak (See https://klak.is/) to launch a new magazine called Nordic Innovation.

It's an online magazine focused on startups, innovation and design in the Nordic countries. The first issue has some amazing interviews with out-of-the-box people. I encourage you to give it a read.

screenshot of the nordic innovation website

I liked the interviews with Paul Bennet, Creative designer at IDEO and Roberto Verganti, Professor at Politecnico Di Milano. But the magazine has some really interesting content.

From a technical perspective...

(Since this is a web development blog)

The magazine's format

There was a decent pressure to keep it in a magazine-like format and even though almost everybody knows how much I hate flash, we still went away and created a flash based version using software called yudu. It's free and it works nice.

We also published a downloadable PDF and a "web version", which is basically just a html page with a JPG of all the pages. None of these solutions are very web-friendly or crawlable so that's a big problem in my book.

Treesaver.js

In the next version I hope to implement the magazine using treesaver.js. It's relatively new beta-level software that allows you to create online magazines that plays well with the web. So if you compare it to the normal flash-based magazine viewers out there, treesaver.js wins hands down:

  • It's all 100% HTML5 - so it's very search engine friendly and doesn't break the browser
  • It still looks good (and better than 99% of the flash-based magazine viewers out there)
  • You can link to the pages, copy text etc, because it's just a web page, essentially.
  • It works perfectly on a mobile phone (well almost perfectly)
The website itself

The website is a very simple HTML page, since there's basically nothing there yet, but I made it so that it will resize very nicely in a mobile browser. I didn't use any @media queries, I just did some width adjustments to make it work nicely. I'm pretty fond of that.

Tell me what you think of the magazine, the website or anything in the comments.