On Digital Magazine Design

I was cruising LinkedIn this morning when one of their Question and Answer topics caught my eye. There was a woman in India looking for advice on how to promote a digital newsletter.

Having just a little experience doing digital publications for several Chevy vehicles, I offered up my recommendations for setting up a method to virally promote the publication.

Then I got a look at it.

Her magazine, Architectural Evangelist needs a pretty big overhaul in my opinion.

It seems clear that the publication was designed solely in flash. Doesn't appear that they're using any of the big magazine, magalog programs.

I'm fine with having to click through to read the type closely... but the font is barely readable even in the sub head sections.

Good design for newsletters and magazines online must be taken into account... otherwise, there's no point in producing them.

Love the tabs on the AE newsletter and I like the interactive graphs, but this needs a serious overhaul from a useability standpoint. If you were the quality assurance engineer on this project, what would you flag first?