Martha Stewart—love her, or roll your eyes at her. As a graphic designer, I have to say that I fall into the ‘love her’ category. Martha and Lorenzo de Medici have a lot in common: both are known as despots and patrons of the arts. I don’t believe that being a despot is all bad. If you have creative vision, you have to fight a lot of mediocrity to see your vision realized (hello, Steve Jobs?). Martha’s management style may not be as extreme as Steve Jobs’, but the results that both achieve with their creative teams is extraordinary.
I love that Martha has fully embraced all things digital. She was an early adopter of blogging and tweeting and now digital publishing. The aesthetics of Martha Stewart Living Magazine are perfect for digital user interface design—minimal, graphic and modern.
The iPhone UI is the most challenging for designers because of the small screen size, but the new iPhone app for Everyday Food is intuitive, simply designed and photo-driven.
The new version added a nice gaming mechanism with the Recipe Shuffle feature. It’s almost as addictive as Angry Birds.
Where Martha Stewart Living really shines is on the iPad. The larger format allows for large format photography and beautiful typography with the added bonus of embedded video and animation.
For a publication like Martha Stewart Living, the digital platform is an excellent medium to leverage their existing content, capture a new audience and monetize all at the same time. Like I said, Martha and Lorenzo de Medici.
The excellence of Martha’s jump into digital publishing reminds me why both Martha and Marcia (The Brady Bunch) inspire such envy.
Filed under: Design Topics, Technology Tagged: | app, Everyday Food, iPad, iPhone, Martha Stewart, UI Design
