Apple iPad- A New Way to Feel the Design World

After literally years of speculation, Apple’s tablet is here and it’s called the iPad. iPad runs almost 140,000 apps from the App Store. It’s also a useful tool for designers, illustrators and digital artists looking to get creative on the move. Before we kick off, here’s a quick rundown of the what Apple has dished up.

• The Apple iPad is a slate PC that looks like a big iPhone. It has a home button and an aluminium bezel like a MacBook.
• The 9.7-inch touchscreen is made of glass.
• 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. 30-pin connector, speaker, microphone, accelerometer and compass.
• It’s only half an inch thick, and weighs just 680g (about half a smallish laptop).
• An impressive painting app was revealed that allowed users to create artwork with their fingers on screen. So that’s that the paint splashes on the event invite were about.
• It contains a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, which is both processor and graphics. The Apple iPad will come with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of flash solid state storage.

Ways Apple iPad going to revolutionize the World:

Designer Sketchboard

Autodesk’s sketchbook mobile opened up the iPhone for artists to doodle in spare moments while waiting for trains, tubes, mates in bars or elsewhere. SketchBook Mobile opens to a black canvas where you can start drawing right away. You access brushes and other tools from a faint, tiny palette on the lower portion of the screen. Tap once, and you’ll see a pencil, spray gun, fat brush, erase, brush set, layer icon, colour wheel, and a mirroring tool. The iPad is quite large and offers a resolution of 1024 x 768 .While Autodesk hasn’t announced an iPad specific version of Sketchbook Mobile, the iPhone version will run on it. As part of the launch, Steve Jobs demonstrated the popular brushes app on the device. There may be opportunities for mobile design applications to incorporate minimal design features, possibly along the lines of the iPhone’s Photoshop app. There will also surely be many apps developed specifically for designers to aid in selecting colors, designing wireframe mockups, and other necessary tasks.

Portable Portfolio

By making use of app of iPod you can make your portfolio visible to others. But again screen size and resolution is a major issue, so the iPad will allow you to show off your work in much better way. Interactive designers should beware though, as running the iPhone operating system, there’s still no support for Flash sites. In addition to creative applications, the iPad can be an essential administrator and display tool for Freelancers (especially those on the go). Imagine the possibilities of full screen apps for handling billing, client presentations and the like.

A New lease of life for Design

The experience of reading a newspaper, book or magazine,while traveling means that you will be amused by the pleasurable layouts of print more than the strict segmented grids of websites. Hopefully this means that publishers will invest in design (and designers) for iPad versions of newspapers and magazines. Creating digital versions of magazines won’t be as easy as taking your print layout and exporting an iPad version along with your press-ready PDFs — even at the iPad’s 1,024 x 768 resolution, an A4 magazine page with 8-point body copy won’t be readable. Whether this means more jobs for designers, or cruddy replicated layouts depends on whether the interactive magazine model takes off and provides enough revenue to support good design (as well as the whims of individual publishing houses). For interactive designers, there’s hope that the iPad will enable more creative use of interactivity who are engaged in creating branded projects for clients. With Flash CS5 deployed to offer a simple ‘output for iPhone/iPad’ export system, creating applications could be simpler, quicker and more suitable for small projects than you’d expect.

Photos

You can enjoy sharing your pics with the cool and unique features of iPad. For example, the Photos app displays the photos in an album as though they were in a stack. Tap the stack, and the whole album opens up. From there, you can slide through your pictures, make it zoomed as per your own wish. You can even use your iPad as a beautiful digital photo frame while it’s is docked or charging. And there are lots of ways to import photos: You can synchronize them from your computer, download them from an email, or import them directly from your camera using the optional Camera Connection Kit.

Ibooks

There is separate set of e book apps called “ibooks”.Books can be browsed from an on-screen bookshelf and can be read widescreen. Pages can be flipped by touching the screen.An iBook store is built in featuring books from Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette book group.iBooks supports the ePub format for e-books.A beautiful hi-res screen will surely call for some eye-popping designs for a myriad of publishers. Add to this, the interactivity that will be available in the “print” layouts and e-publishing opens up a new revenue path for many talented artists.

A Reset on Advertising

Old usual conventions of online advertising–banner ads, pop ups, and so forth–aren’t popular with readers, with advertisers, and for sure not with designers. Now a new entry called “I- pad” will create a almost new range of opportunities. Once people start exploiting what it can do, we may see the kind of creative renaissance that will deliver the next George Lois or Lee Cow. People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone.

Avail Internet Anytime

Now you would be able to access Internet all the time and places.The large Multi-Touch screen on iPad lets you see web pages as they were meant to be seen ,one page at a time. With vibrant color and sharp text. So whether you’re looking at a page in portrait or landscape, you can see everything at a size that’s actually readable.With iPad, navigating the web has never been easier or more intuitive. Because you use the most natural pointing device there is: your finger. Scroll through a page just by flicking your finger up or down on the screen. Or pinch to zoom in or out on a photo .While website designs probably won’t need to be adapted for the iPad as much as for the iPhone, we must consider how our sites may be different with the Internet literally in the hands of our user.

A New Role for Print

Print media is also going to take up a new turn very soon.“If digital magazines with rich, uncompromised, real-time contentof the market on delivering what you need to know at the given time, what’s the point of print? I think that the publications that end up enduring will be the ones that exploit what print alone can do. The best ones will be things that you want to save, not toss in the recycling bin. They’ll project a sense of craftsmanship and permanence. And each one should be an object that just feels terrific in your hand. If you’re spending most of your time holding an iPad, you just might welcome a change of pace.”

The Unchanging

The reality behind the whole issue is, the basic principles of design are never likely to change. Alignment, Proximity, effective color schemes, repetition, and more will rule the design world regardless of the technologies that we, as designers, have to adapt to. The real question is, what methodologies and techniques might we have to adopt when new technologies emerge. The internet, for example, is completely going to revolutionize the graphic design industry. Designer have had to adapt, learn new skills, and continue to work across all popular media. Still the question is not resolved whether iPad is going to revolutionize the design world completely or not.Perhaps design as we know it will change forever. Perhaps  nothing will change. what are your thoughts on the matter?