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Inside W Magazine’s glossy digital strategy

For W Magazine’s September cover story featuring Rihanna, the text is not a story or an interview, but a screenplay written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Inside the magazine’s pages, full page photographs feature Rihanna imagined as a queen in a post apocalyptic world created by photographer Steven Klein and creative and fashion director, Edward Enninful.

On its website, there’s a slide show of the cover shoot’s images, videos which offer a behind the scenes glimpse of the shoot and guest art director Terry Jones discussing his method, as well as designer sketches of the clothing made for the shoot, among other digital-only content. On Instagram, two separate GIFs were created for the two different magazine covers, exclusively for the platform.

The central idea of the September issue is transformation, a metaphor for what the publication is also experiencing in its big shift to digital. To read the rest of the story, visit Digiday sister site Glossy.

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