Q&A with Peter Meyers

Mike Rankin

As part of CreativePro’s coverage of the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, we will be featuring interviews with some of the speakers on the topics of their sessions and wider themes and trends in design and publishing technology. Here is a Q&A with Peter Meyers, who will be presenting From Eye to Brain: Content Design and the “Last Mile” Problem.

Peter Meyers is VP of Editorial & Content Innovation at Citia. He is the author of Breaking the Page: Transforming Books & the Reading Experience and Best iPad Apps. And he co-founded one of the first multimedia textbook publishers, Digital Learning Interactive. He has also written extensively about the effects of computer technology on mainstream culture for many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Salon, and the Village Voice.

The title of your session is “From Eye to Brain: Content Design & the Last Mile Problem”, can you explain what’s meant by the “Last Mile Problem”?

I pulled the term from the world of telecommunications where it refers to the difficulty in making that final connection between the fiber optic cable that goes around the world and your house. Over the past ten years there’s been an explosion in technology for making it easy to distribute content digitally across the web. Publishers can put something online and have it move swiftly around the world, making it available to billions of people. But we haven’t spent much time solving the problems of an audience overwhelmed with choices of what to read from websites, books, Twitter, and so on. How do we help those viewers deal with this virtual fire hose of information? IWhat we’ve done over the past decade is solve the distribution problem, making it trivial to get your content everywhere. But we haven’t thought deeply and carefully about the reader on the receiving end.

We can think about this last mile problem on a couple of different levels. Applications like Tweetdeck and Flipboard help by letting you filter this flood of information. What reaches you ends up matching your interests more closely. But if you go deeper and think about cognitive processes, you start to see opportunities to design content so it’s more engaging and attracts more attention. The design is what makes content easier to understand and more memorable, and forges lasting connections between author and reader.

Can you talk about some examples of publications that really make that last mile connection?

There are a small but growing number of hand-crafted digital compositions that have caught my eye over the last year or two. None of these are simple to replicate today. But what’s simple is never what gets done at the dawn of a new media era. And don’t forget that our composition tools are constantly improving. Where we are today isn’t where we’re going to be in a year or two or five. So it’s instructive to look at cutting edge examples, for a taste of how I think we’ll be designing content in years ahead.

The first example is a web-based combination documentary/photo scrapbook/history project called Welcome to Pine Point. It’s the story of a Canadian mining town that was shut down by the government and what happened to the residents afterward. It’s a beautiful example of what can happen when designers — in this case, two guys named Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge — come together and really think through the ways in which prose, pictures, audio, motion, and video can work together to create an emotionally compelling and memorable story.

The second example is an iPad app for Katachi magazine. It’s fairly new. They’ve only published a few issues so far, but they’ve done some wonderful work demonstrating how you can combine an innovative design vocabulary with touchscreen gestures to convey complex, memorable messages. One simple but elegant design in the app compares three different watches using changing depth-of-field and focus. When the viewer taps on one watch, it comes into focus and the others blur softly. It’s a great, simple way of presenting a collection of objects without making the viewer navigate through multiple screens.

It seems clear that the designer is absolutely essential in this type of work and that the combination of technologies vastly expands the creative possibilities.

I couldn’t agree more. I think we’re going to see all different kinds of publishing and media production operations over the next decade or so. Some will be highly automated. But I think there’s still an enormous opportunity and a need at a societal level for individual and highly talented designers to be involved in these multimedia compositions. And I think the rewards are going to be pretty significant. In an age of information overload and abundant content, companies that work with talented designers to create beautifully-crafted creations are going to get more attention than the stuff that’s being churned out by content farms and software mills.

In your session outline you also mention concepts like key point extraction, which are familiar in educational publishing. Can other types of publications gain from borrowing ideas from educational publishing?

Think about the rigid presentation structure of textbooks. It makes a lot of sense for students. It tells them what they’re going to learn. It shows them. And then it recaps what they learned. Now think about the cover of a pop culture magazine. They’re selling the content using a combination of imagery and clever copy-writing language. I think there’s a really interesting opportunity for anyone—book publishers, web designers, anyone making content today–to think about what’s happening in both those domains and incorporate it into their work. It’s funny; sometimes these ideas elicit a gasp from people. They worry that I’m suggesting we turn Moby Dick into the cover of Cosmo. And in some ways, maybe that is what I’m talking about—at least for the book’s table of contents. Given that we are so inundated with content choices, we need to think of ways to help viewers better navigate through all the choices out there. I wonder, for example, what would be wrong with taking a biography, novel, or textbook, and treating them in a way that merchandises, showcases, and spotlights the most interesting parts? And the beauty of digital publishing is that we’re not stuck with an either-or proposition. You can have both a standard table of contents and showcase in a colorful way what’s inside.

It is interesting, even just at an experimental level, to think about how you would make a piece of serious classical literature grab the attention of an audience that is used to consuming content 140 characters at a time.

That’s right. You can choose to ignore ideas like that or not, but if you’re interested in reaching a large audience in a meaningful way, you have to think about the ways in which people’s media diets have been shaped by short-form content. Personally, I’m a huge fan of what Twitter and “status update” writing has done for the quality of prose across our culture. It’s made so many of us–myself included!–better writers. There are of course examples of bad writing out there. But the formal constraints of tools like Twitter make writers do what has historically been done by editors. They force you to sharpen what you want to say and compact it into an efficient form, making it more friendly for readers to quickly consume. The competition for attention compels you to write in a more entertaining way. There are some people who have really found their right form on Twitter. They are able to write in an entertaining way not in spite of the 140 character limit, but because of it.