The Huffington iPad Magazine

Don’t sleep on the Huffington iPad magazine! That’s my message to everyone for the holiday season. Huffington just marked their six-month anniversary of publication, and the now-free weekly app has become a powerful example of original tablet publishing. I’ve been doing a bunch of iPad consulting lately, and Huffington is always the first app I point to as something that is smart, original, engaging, and fully utilizing the power of the platform. Creative director Josh Klenert and his ace team have been creating some brilliant imagery and design, tapping a stellar crew of illustrators, photographers, and infographic-makers. It’s been fun to watch the Huffington design morph and mature, especially since it’s not based on an existing print publication format.

The app’s cover design fuses the sensibility of gonzo altweeklies with the cool, modern, restrained look of the Dirk Barnett-era Newsweek, plus a dash of Arthur Hochstein‘s pop-Photoshop Time magazine covers. And the cover imagery swings from illustration to photograph to photo-illustration, with a constantly revolving collection of artists and photographers. In an era when newsweeklies are dropping like flies, it’s inspiring to see someone still experimenting with the format, especially as a tablet-only app. I have no sense of the long-term viability of Huffington as a business proposition, but as a project it’s on the cutting-edge of tablet content creation.

The Huffington. visual team:

Creative director: Josh Klenert
Art director: Andrea Nasca
Photography director: Anna Dickson
Designers: Martin Gee, Troy Dunham, Eve Binder, Susana Soares
Associate photo editor: Wendy George
Production director: Peter Niceberg

The Huffington. iPad app is available free here.