I couldn’t help myself–I had to download a copy of billionaire Richard Branson’s new iPad-only magazine, Project. It represents a budding front in digital publishing–direct to iPad readables–and I knew it would be cool.

After reading it a bit this morning, I can confirm that Project is indeed cool, has an international viewpoint–one cool thing about a digital mag is you can easily distribute across borders–and features all kinds of multimedia enhancements, though if you’ve seen the Wired iPad app, Project won’t so much rock your world as confirm what you suspected: the iPad is a sweet spot for magazines. So lemme share a couple pages.

Right off, when you “open” Project, the cover does something surprising: Jeff Bridges starts moving and a kind of odd Tron montage billows around him then settles back into the static image of the cover.  Very sweet.  Then, once inside, you’ve got your navigation menus at the top and bottom, though headlines on the cover link right to the stories, which themselves feature various kinds of animations.  Project is a magazine, meaning it’s full of the usual mag lists and nibbles, as well as Q&As and longer features. Here’s a page from a Q&A with someone who works at a cool new kind of record label. Note all the navigation tools at the bottom, which take you to Web sites mentioned in the articles and let you watch/ listen to bands:

Of course, it’s very magazine-y in its design and content.  This isn’t an attempt to reinvent the kind of short attention span reading we come to magazines for.

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