Designing a magazine for print is much more a labour of love than dynamic content injected into a CMS template – each feature is specifically put together with the design working in harmony with content. Generally publishing on the web is very different – there will be a single generic design and set of templates that present any article in exactly the same way. One of the few examples I can think of that breaks this trend is alistapart, where each article is uniquely illustrated prior to publication.

I’m interested to see where the balance will lie when publishing content for a tablet. It could range from having a dedicated production team within a publication to hand craft a unique design for each issue, to basic templated content within a standard framework.

In any case there is now a very definite case for sorting out workflow and access to content so that a publisher can easily target multiple platforms.