Trouble in Paradise

So far I have tried to show how Vogue is adapting to the new Digital Age. My main point was that the magazine is successful at adapting and perhaps even one step ahead of other fashion magazines.

Of course there will be someone who will disagree with me, so I tried to find opinions that contradict mine. I found these to articles that I want to share with you.

Has Vogue Been A Little Slow On The Digital Uptake?

by Contributor on October 16, 2012

Read more at http://www.fashionotes.com/content/2012/10/has-vogue-been-a-little-slow-on-the-digital-uptake/#yy213gcfCqpoUUDl.99 

Vogue is a fashion magazine. But, its not just any fashion magazine, it’s the biggest fashion magazine in the world. In fact, it’s much more than that; Vogue is not merely a magazine, which reports on the trends of the day, it defines them. If your shoes aren’t in Vogue, they just aren’t in. You might expect a magazine which has made its fortune keeping abreast of trends so well to be the first publisher to take to digital media, but not so. In fact, Vogue has been surprisingly slow on the uptake – so much so, I was beginning to think that by the time Vogue got into digital platforms, digital platforms would no longer be in Vogue.

In all seriousness though, Vogue has now managed to launch some apps, after years of prevarication. Their iPad app came out around a year after the iPad “Got Big,” and that certainly seemed like long enough at the time. The 52-year-old editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, has fully admitted to being a ‘neophyte’ when it comes to technology in an interview with the Telegraph.

“It has been much more work and much more complex to build and create it and work out what we were doing than I expected,” Shulman told the paper.

No surprises there; the senior editors who run Vogue publications clearly aren’t au fait with modern gadgets – and that’s OK.

But then, they did hire some top-notch designers and developers with the aim of creating a sleek and stylish app, which would represent Vogue’s ideals in digital space. Elegance, modernity, style, surely that’s what you would expect when you load up the Vogue app on your iPad? Unfortunately, it’s not what you get. It’s full of lush, beautiful photographs of women in sweeping dresses taken by Mario Testino, Peruvian fashion photographer. When you make an app that relies on massively detailed images for every page, what do you think’s going to happen? The app is ridiculously slow; I could make an award-winning dress in the time it takes to load a page, never mind downloading.

Photo By Mario Testino

This in itself is not a disaster; apps go through many versions before they’re perfected and Vogue is no different. Nobody gets it right first time, it must be said. But, if Vogue had actually joined the smartphone and tablet revolution at the outset, rather than halfway through, they could have long since resolved these issues. As it is, they’re simply blundering along, hoping that a sub-standard app will keep the masses happy. Maybe there’s a point to it all. Perhaps pixels will never be as beautiful as ink and apps simply aren’t the right platform for Vogue to waste too much time on. But then, digital media really is in Vogue at the moment, isn’t it? And, nobody’s asking Vogue whether or not they should buy a smartphone.

Most of the time Vogue dictates trends. In the world of digital publishing however, it’s still playing catch-up.

By Simon Drew,  writer for UK phone comparison service Best Mobile Contracts

Read more at http://www.fashionotes.com/content/2012/10/has-vogue-been-a-little-slow-on-the-digital-uptake/#yy213gcfCqpoUUDl.99 


Personally I cannot say anything about the Vogue iPad add since I don't own any Apple products. Of course it makes sense that the App is still imperfect because it still relatively new. The Internet wasn't as fast as it is now in the 1990's. Everything is work in progress but saying that App platform isn't right for Vogue and maybe they should not waste time on it is wrong.  Apps are a very important marketing tool,  if Vogue didn't have an app they would have fallen behind on sales etc. Apps are important to keep up with time but they need work and as I already said everything is work in progress. 


This article talks about the Vogue website. I cannot completely agree with this because I personally haven't seen the problems with the website that this article is talking about. Other problem with the article that it talks about the website in a very web design oriented manner. It seems like it was written by a web designer for other web designers. Perhaps common people like me and you would have not noticed the defaults of the website that the article mentions.  

All publishers should learn lessons from Vogue’s new website launch | 06 Sep 2012

Sometimes, being at the cutting edge of fashion isn’t the most sensible strategy.

Right now, in the world of digital publishing, HTML5* is about as fashionable and as cutting edge as you can get. The publishing prize that HTML5 offers is the possibility of building a web page that will automatically rearrange its component parts (pictures, headlines, text, navigation) to display well on any and all screens – from the largest desktop monitor to the titchiest smartphone display – using responsive design (see the background note at the bottom of this blog). In practice, publishers trying out HTML5 – which is still in development – have found it quite a task to get anything other than simple, text-heavy layouts to work predictably for all browsers and all devices, and at the moment the prize is proving somewhat elusive.

So when the UK edition of Vogue announced that it had completely rebuilt its website using HTML5, it got me very excited indeed. This is a complex, luxurious publishing product that is very far removed from simple, text-heavy layouts – and Vogue claims that it now has “…a more beautiful, authoritative and technically advanced fashion website than ever before”.

Sadly, it seems clear to me that the website was launched before it was ready.

Dolly Jones, the website’s editor, states that by “capitalising on the smartest innovation going, we could not be in better shape to continue to dominate the sector”. Proud, confident words, that come after eight months of development work. Perhaps they should have spent another couple of months doing some more testing…

Two minutes with a modern smartphone (a Galaxy SII) showed that there’s quite a bit more work to do before the site is ready for Android. The screengrab to the left shows a news item, where the picture of Signor Pilati is supposed to fit neatly to the width of the screen – but instead has ballooned out of control, resulting in a closeup of a pillar behind his left ear. The one on the right shows a list view of the news section, and you can see that the list has lost its neat ranged-left formatting, with some pictures large and centred, others knocked down to thumbnails, and text/headlines all over the place.

Even with a normal desktop browser, things do not always function as they should. I saw pictures trying to resize themselves several times before settling on a final shape, images that wouldn’t download in a particular browser until the page was refreshed, and a general ‘looseness’ that suggested the underlying rules for how the pages should adapt hadn’t been specified in sufficient detail. In the screengrab on the right you can see that the pic of Natalia holding the Olympic torch has drifted away from its accompanying story, while the model from Agent Provocateur has invaded her own news story.

It seems obvious to me that the website was launched before it was properly fit for viewing. How did this happen? I have no insider knowledge, but an understanding of publishing processes suggests some possible factors:
1) They didn’t do enough testing, and so didn’t uncover the issues.
2) They knew there were still bugs, but were compelled to launch before they were ready by an internally-determined deadline.
3) They were compelled to launch, ready or not, because of deadline promises made to advertisers.

Some of Vogue‘s fans have already left fulsome plaudits on the new website. But I suspect that other people will have gone to the new website, found the same problems that I did (and that was only a ten-minute scrutiny using three devices – it seems likely to me that there will be other issues that I didn’t spot in my short appraisal), and have gone away with their opinion of the Vogue brand diminished – not demolished, just diminished, because underneath it all you can see that there is a bold and interesting website waiting to be finished. And I suspect that this sad outcome was avoidable.

The object of this blog is not to say that HTML5 isn’t going to be very useful for publishers when it finally comes of age, because it will be; nor am I having a pop at Vogue for trying to be a digital publishing innovator, because I applaud its intent, and I hope it will be able to fix all the issues in short order.

What I am saying is that there is a very simple lesson here for all publishing professionals thinking about their digital strategy – and that is, if you’re going to innovate, make sure it works properly before you launch. And if it doesn’t work properly by the planned launch date,postpone the launch until it’s fixed. The timing of every launch should be in the publisher’s gift – don’t sacrifice the chance to make a brilliant launch instead of a flawed launch by mortgaging this precious gift to the suits or the advertisers, and don’t hem yourself in by setting arbitrary deadlines that you later wish you hadn’t.

Mark Rosselli is chairman of CPL

So these are the two articles that contradict what I have been saying previously in this blog.Its interesting that Vogue tries to promote itself as innovative, how they organise these talks about digital age and fashion but then there are these articles that kind of destroy the image that Vogue is trying to achieve. I don't completely agree with them but its nice to read something different and see two sides of the story.