The June issue of Fast Company, which became available for sale yesterday in the iTunes App Store, is the first DPS publication to use Adobe Edge, a new HTML authoring tool that has not yet been released to the public. Joe Zeff shared the stage with Fast Company Executive Editor Noah Robischon and Adobe fellow Mark Anders to demonstrate Edge and how it integrates with Digital Publishing Suite.

We see Edge as a way to make passive content more active than ever, going beyond the existing DPS toolset. Other benefits: sharper type, smaller filesizes and greater extensibility of HTML content beyond the tablet. The Edge animation we designed for Fast Company was repurposed for the magazine’s website in less than five minutes. We look forward to using Edge and other DPS enhancements to benefit our publishing clients, which include Fast Company, PC Magazine, Everyday Health and UCLA Anderson School of Management.

A live blog of today’s event appears here. Among the other highlights:

• Adobe DPS now contains iPhone compatibility, adding yet another output format for digital publications. It will be interesting to see how quickly publishers leverage the ability to create mobile apps.

• Social sharing has been expanded to include e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, with links to DPS content presented in a browser with the same functionality as what appears on the tablet. Consumers can view a predetermined number of free articles before confronting a paywall and an invitation to purchase an issue or subscription.

• Adobe has made its font library open to DPS customers, making it possible to embed fonts within PDF-based folios without running afoul of licensing requirements.

And in other Joe Zeff Design news:

• Joe Zeff Design won two Gold Awards at the Society of Publication Designers annual competition last week at Cipriani Wall Street for its design and development of Time magazine’s “Beyond 9/11″ app.

• Joe Zeff will be presenting the keynote speech at a Society of Publication Designers event Thursday night at Smashbox in Los Angeles. Details here. Then on Monday, Joe will appear at the City and Regional Magazines Association annual conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Details here.

There’s a charging station for electric cars, places to plug in iPads and iPhones, and plenty of outlets for creativity. We’ve blended the traditional details of the original church with state-of-the-art computer networks and teleconferencing gear to create a one-of-a-kind environment for producing next-generation iPad apps. Exposed trusses, a 16-foot-tall wooden archway, reupholstered pews and a lectern are all repurposed from the original church.

Herewith, a video tour, accompanied by Kanye West:

. . . and some snapshots:

On the other side of our archway is Fanbrandz, a division of Frederick and Froberg that has created brand identities for Major League Baseball and National Hockey League franchises. We look forward to collaborating with their team on sports-related apps and illustrations for years to come. The office is one block from Montclair’s central business district, with easy access to some of the best restaurants in New Jersey.

Many thanks to the masterminds behind Hillside Square: developers Bob Silver and Jay Schweppe; Jack Finn & Company with a special thanks to Jack himself and Tom Minden; Sionas Architecture, PC and in particular Rick Jarzembowski; interior designer Rachael H. Grochowski of RHG A+D; Berman Home Systems; the Township of Montclair; the congregation of First Church of Christ, Scientist (which still occupies a smaller part of the building); and the hundreds of workers who made it all possible.

Invitations to come regarding our grand opening party. Meanwhile, we’re open for business for app design, production and consulting; magazine covers; illustrations and animations and more. Same as before, 973-655-0501 and studio@joezeffdesign.com. Looking forward to seeing you at the church!

Fast Company’s cover story features “The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes,” with more than 40 minutes of exclusive audio from journalist Brent Schlender’s recorded interviews with the late Apple founder. The iPad edition surpasses print in many ways, starting with the two-page cover that includes an index of articles, a play button that lets you hear Jobs’ voice before opening the magazine, and an animated portrait of Jobs by digital fingerpainter Jorge Colombo. Inside the issue are five more Colombo portraits depicting Jobs at different stages of his career, a half-hour podcast and a bonus reprint of a past Jobs feature — all baked into the app; no Internet required. The issue is Retina-optimized for new iPads and available here.

The May issue of PC Magazine also hit the App Store today, with a cover story downloadable software that’s absolutely free. The cover itself springs to life with a rich animation designed by Phil Bratter and animated by Christopher Holewski and Ed Gabel that you won’t want to miss. The entire issue is interactive, with literally hundreds of buttons unlocking layers of content. The columnists’ perspectives are presented as a mix of curated text and real-time Twitter feeds. Like Fast Company, PC Magazine is Retina-optimized for third-generation iPads, including their free sample issue. Unlike Fast Company, PC Magazine exists only as a digital brand, which affords more freedom to create an experience specifically targeted for tablets. PC Magazine is available here.

Both magazines are produced monthly by Joe Zeff Design using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, combining the simplicity of Adobe’s platform with tablet-focused design and HTML enhancements. Shoutouts to Florian and Noah at Fast Company, Kathleen and Stephanie at PC Magazine, and the rest of the JZD team — specifically, Josh Penrod and Krissi Xenakis — for their contributions to these outstanding issues.

In other news:

• We’ve added UCLA Anderson School of Management as a client, and will work with the university and its design studio, Chess Design, to relaunch its alumni magazine on the tablet. We’re excited about the opportunity to work with UCLA and other universities to leverage the iPad and other technology as a way to engage with alumni, students and colleagues throughout the world.

• President Joe Zeff will be speaking on “iPad Publishing Strategies” at the City and Regional Magazine Association 2012 Annual Conference May 21 in Las Vegas — hi ho! Download more information here. Also, Joe will moderate a panel discussion at a Magazine Publishers of America conference June 21 in New York City. Details here.

• We’re moving to new offices April 27, relocating to a converted church two blocks away from our current space. What better place to find creative inspiration! We’re very excited about our next-door neighbor inside the church, the Fanbrandz division of Frederick & Froberg. Stay tuned for updates and an invitation to our grand opening.

• Congratulations to Dr. Mario Garcia on his upcoming e-book, “iPad Design Lab: Storyteling in the Age of the Tablet.” We designed the cover of Mario’s new digital book and provided interviews and insights throughout the process. Beyond his legacy as a publication designer and his influence as a consultant with hundreds of clients worldwide, we value Mario as a dear friend and wish him the very best with his must-read tome on tablets.

Have a great weekend enjoying Fast Company and PC Magazine on your iPads!

Joe Zeff Design is well-represented at the conference, with three people attending workshops and presentations. President Joe Zeff delivered a keynote address during the morning session about ways to apply lessons learned from digital magazine publishing to other fields, in particular the education and retail markets.

Time Inc. Chief Information Officer Mitch Klaif spoke about his company’s ambitious efforts to digitize all of its properties, singling out the Time magazine “Beyond 9/11″ app that was designed by Joe Zeff Design. (Thanks Mitch!) And Betty Wong, editor in chief of Fitness magazine, talked about her magazine’s transition to tablets and what her company, Meredith, has learned along the way.

WoodWing made news by announcing a new product called SmartDPS Tools, a set of enhancements to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite that make the software more capable and easier to use. The package, to be released later this year at a pricepoint to be determined, provides InDesign plugins that simplify the process of deploying hotspots and scrollable elements; an HTML5 widget library; and a streamlined way to turn PDFs into Adobe DPS folios.

The conference continues tomorrow with presentations from Zeke Koch, who oversees Adobe’s DPS efforts, and others. Stay tuned for more updates.

PC Magazine represents a unique opportunity to rethink a magazine for the digital age. While many publishers replicate print content in their tablet editions to comply with Audit Bureau of Circulation rules, Ziff Davis provided a clean slate for innovation. As a result, we were able to help its editors create a magazine unbound by the conventions of print. In our first meeting at the client’s Manhattan offices, we were told that nothing was off-limits as we redesigned the magazine, with one exception: the striped PC Magazine logo. By our second meeting, the stripes were history.

Working alongside CEO Vivek Shah and his extraordinary team — Kathleen Kincaid, Dan Costa, Chris Phillips, Stephanie Chang and others — we dissected PC Magazine and rebuilt it to thrive on the iPad. The debut edition features an animated cover, real-time Twitter feeds for columnists, product reviews containing photos that the user can manipulate, and much more. It was built using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Professional Edition. Interactivity abounds, inviting the user to engage with content in ways not possible in print.

Phil Bratter, the talented former Creative Director of George, Worth and People magazines, spearheaded the redesign for Joe Zeff Design, working alongside staffers Christopher Holewski, Josh Penrod and Ed Gabel. Phil delivered inimitably, injecting spontaneity throughout the product and infusing each page with his sledgehammer signature of bold typography and bright colors. We look forward to future opportunities to engage Phil on other projects. A look at some of the before and afters shows the extent to which PC Magazine changed but stayed the same:

PC Magazine is no stranger to innovation. The print edition was born in 1982 as an “Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers.” Within a year the magazine swelled to 800 pages per issue, switching from monthly to biweekly publication and adding a floppy disk edition. Its authority was unmatched when it came to technology product reviews, and its testing lab served as a model for other companies. PCMag.com was started in 1994 and a Zinio-based digital edition followed 10 years later — both continue to this day.

As times changed so did Ziff Davis’ fortunes, and the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008. PC Magazine ended its 26-year print run and became a digital property, published online and through Zinio. Backed by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, Shah acquired Ziff Davis Media in 2010 and announced his intentions to build a dynamic digital media company. We’re proud to be part of that story. Visit the Apple Newsstand and see for yourself.

Fast Company is one of the first magazines to offer Retina optimization, with sharper type and images when viewed on the new iPad. Those who previously downloaded Fast Company will need to download Version 1.1 from the App Store in order to see the enhancements to the April issue. The high-definition version is rasterized at four times the resolution of the version available for the iPad 1 and 2.

The app also leverages a new “Favorites” feature, enabling users to bookmark any article by tapping on a star icon in the upper right corner of the navigation interface. To highlight an article, tap once on the screen to access the interface and tap on the star icon in the upper right corner. A list of favorites will appear, spanning every issue that the user has downloaded, permitting easy access to all favorites in all issues regardless of which issue the user is currently reading.

The April issue is Fast Company’s second, both produced by Joe Zeff Design. The first was an iTunes Store App of the Week in several countries, as well as an Adobe App of the Week. This latest issue enhances the print experience by adding multimedia features and animations, as well as a bonus reprint of Fast Company’s May 2007 cover story on Zuckerberg, yet weighs in at less than 90 megabytes. As with the first issue, many advertisements are pinch-to-zoomable to view small type, and the app is fully compliant with Audit Bureau of Circulation rules.

See for yourself — and be sure to download the update.

1. 768×1024 magazine pages look no better or worse on the higher-resolution screen. For publishers, there’s no penalty for continuing to produce pages at this resolution — they look just as good or bad on The New iPad as they do on the iPads 1 and 2.

2. 1536 x 2048 magazine pages, such as the Vogue issue that came out yesterday, are significantly sharper on The New iPad than on the old. Whether the difference is worth the increased weight of the app is a strategic decision for publishers. The 768×1024 version was 277 megabytes. The 1536 x 2048 version was 412 megabytes. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite allows you to publish both resolutions, and the proper issue is downloaded to the proper devices automatically. Pretty slick. What isn’t slick is that the publisher needs to render each edition twice, at the higher and lower resolutions, complicating the workflow.

The unretouched image below shows two renditions of the Vogue app. The device on the left is the iPad 2. The device on the right is The New iPad.

3. The bigger difference between one iPad and another was not resolution but color cast. The iPad 2s in our office are all much whiter than the two The New iPads we tested. Both The New iPads had a distinct yellow cast that made the overall viewing experience less pleasurable. For all we know, they’ll cool down once they’ve been used more, or once their temperature changes. The image at the top of this post shows our Fast Company launch on the iPad 1, 2 and The New iPad. The 2 seems brightest, even though all are set at the maximum level. This was consistent among every iPad 2 in our studio.

4. We think Apple should just call The New iPad the iPad 3 already!

Mass Effect 3 is the latest action role-playing video game by EA’s BioWare division, and its launch last week ranks among the most successful ever. The company sold 890,000 copies in its first 24 hours of release in North America alone, and more than 3.5 million units worldwide in the first week. Three hours after its release, “The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3″ is already at No. 1 in the Top News Paid iPad Apps category in iTunes.

Geoff Keighley, host and executive producer of GameTrailersTV on Spike TV, worked directly with BioWare’s developers to learn the backstory of the Mass Effect phenomenon, and then with Joe Zeff Design to bring that narrative to life for iPad.

The app is our second collaboration with Keighley. Our previous app together, “The Final Hours of Portal 2,” was hailed by Fast Company magazine as “pushing the limits of storytelling” and is a finalist in the Tablet App of the Year category of the Society of Publication Designers annual competition. Dr. Mario Garcia called the app “a textbook case study of how one can tell stories in the tablet platform” and Gizmodo made it an App of the Day selection.

“The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3″ pushes far beyond the capabilities of the Portal 2 app, packing dozens of interactive features that include an animated cover, video game, quizzes, polls, two features that allow the user to build their own video stories, panoramas, two music players, more than 20 minutes of video, interactive infographics, and more. It was produced using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and a team of HTML programmers from around the world.

One of the most popular features from the Portal 2 app returns — the feedback page. Users from around the world are already submitting comments, part of a community within the app that enables dialogue among those who have read the story and played the game.

View images from the app and buy your own copy today. We thank Geoff for another amazing opportunity to work together, and wish him the best of luck on another incredible Final Hours app. Many thanks as well to the team at Joe Zeff Design who worked around the clock to design and develop the app in less than three weeks: Ed Gabel, Josh Penrod, Christopher Holewski and Krissi Xenakis.

Our Fourth App of the Week

Our Fast Company launch last week captured Apple’s attention, as the company made it App of the Week in some of its iTunes Stores worldwide. Joe Zeff Design has designed three other apps singled out by Apple as Apps of the Week: Solar System for iPad and March of the Dinosaurs, both for Touch Press, and Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz. Solar System for iPad is one of 85 apps in Apple’s App Store Essentials Hall of Fame. To learn more about the Fast Company launch, along with a video showing our process, click or tap here.

The finalists, from the SPD press release:

TABLET APP OF THE YEAR (not associated with a print brand)
• Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 2011
• The Final Hours of Portal 2, Joe Zeff, Creative Director; April 22, 2011
• Flipboard for iPad, Mike McCue, Evan Doll, Creative Directors; July 21, 2011
• Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine”

USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
• Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz, Joe Zeff, Creative Director, George Steinmetz, Photographer, Ed Gabel, Illustrator; April 2011
• POWER Platon, Scott Dadich, Creative Director, Platon, Photographer, Yarek Wazul, Illustrator; 2011
• GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director, Dora Somosi, Director of Photography, Benjamin Lowy, Photographer; June 2011, “Libya”
• TIME, Kira Pollack, Director, Radhika Jones, Editorial Director; 2011, “Time Lightbox”

TABLET APP, ORIGINAL COVER
• Katachi, Ken Olling, Creative Director; November 2011, “Heroine”
• la vita nòva, Laura Cattaneo, Creative Director; December 2011, “Drawings To Read”
• Martha Stewart Living, Eric Pike, Creative Director; July 2011, “Show Your Colors”
• TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11”
• WIRED, Brandon Kavulla, Creative Director; July 2011, “The Mental Machine”

TABLET APP, ENTIRE ISSUE
• Fast Company, Florian Bachleda, Creative Director; June 2011, “The 100 Most Creative People in Business”
• GQ, Fred Woodward, Design Director; 2011, “GQ Style Manual”
• SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; March 2011, “SPIN Play”
• SPIN, Devin Pedzwater, Creative Director; August 2011, “SPIN Play”
• TIME, Joe Zeff Design, Creative Directors; September 19, 2011, “Beyond 9/11”

See the entire press release here.

We worked closely with the editorial, design, photography, online, advertising and circulation departments at Fast Company to produce the issue using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Enterprise Edition, with significant help from our partners at WoodWing Software and Adobe Systems. Many thanks to editor Bob Safian, executive editor Noah Robischon and creative director Florian Bachleda for providing an unbelievable opportunity to work together to reinvent Fast Company for the tablet.

The March issue features the magazine’s annual list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies, packed with activities that enable the user to engage with content in ways not possible in print. The fun begins on the cover, where the user wipes clean a frosted panel of glass to reveal cover subject Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter. Inside there are quizzes, games, animations, movies, audio clips, sharing tools, hyperlinks and a discussion board where users can interact with the magazine’s editors. See for yourself:

Music by Crugie Riccio.

The issue is fully compliant with Audit Bureau of Circulation requirements, and available to print subscribers at no additional charge. Every advertisement has pinch-to-zoom functionality, allowing users to read small print not legible in other tablet magazines.

The team at Joe Zeff Design provided support on many levels — redesigning pages to optimize the tablet experience and reimagining print illustrations as tappable animations. We produced the entire issue at our studio in Montclair, NJ, collaborating throughout with Florian and Noah and their staffs. Using the free Adobe Content Viewer app, Fast Company employees accessed fully-functioning demos on their iPads and received notifications every time a new layout was posted for review.

With help from WoodWing and Adobe, Joe Zeff Design helped Fast Company configure Adobe DPS to take advantage of key features such as Omniture analytics and subscription integration through CDS Global. We’ll be working together on an ongoing basis to produce Fast Company’s monthly editions, in addition to other high-profile engagements that include a relaunch of PC Magazine for Ziff Davis and other tablet initiatives outside the boundaries of traditional publishing. President Joe Zeff will be a keynote speaker at the WoodWing Xperience March 27-28 in Amsterdam, talking about opportunities to expand digital publishing successes beyond magazines to business, education and other markets.

Credit goes to our extraordinary team at JZD, which includes Ed Gabel, Josh Penrod, Christopher Holewski, Krissi Xenakis and Phil Bratter. The studio has designed three apps singled out by Apple as Apps of the Week: Solar System for iPad and March of the Dinosaurs, both for Touch Press, and Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz. Solar System for iPad is one of 85 apps in Apple’s App Store Essentials Hall of Fame.

Joe Zeff Design is a WoodWing Creative/Design Partner and an Adobe DPS Solutions Partner. For more information about Joe Zeff Design, WoodWing Software or Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, please contact studio@joezeffdesign.com.