As her Webstock profile says, prior to joining Method, Jennifer was the interaction designer for several of the New York Times' web, mobile, and tablet products including The Opinion Pages and Opinionator, NYTimes Real Estate Search for iPhone, and most famously perhaps, NYTimes for iPad and iPhone.
But before that, for the seven years after college (what we call university, I believe), Brook focused on making books using old-fashioned letterpress printing and hand-binding to create limited-edition letterpress artist books.
Her print work graces public and private collections including rare book libraries at Duke University, Savannah College of Art and Design, Cleveland Institute of Art and George Mason University.
It was an ideal background. The challenge of building the NYTimes iPad app was to design something new that still feels familiar to NYT readers - the app had to maintain typography and branding.
I wondered if Jennifer ever thought she would embrace new technology when she was creating books the old way, since I meet people all the time who, defending books and print, say 'It'll never change'. I think what they mean it's they who will never change, or at least, resist it.
But she never found that a problem, having always considered books as 'interaction design' in the first place - you hold a book, look at it, turn the pages, and you may mark where you stop.
Already with her books, Jennifer was deconstructing the interaction and exploring book forms to allow more interaction to unlock certain content. For example, in all the artist books she made, there was text that could not be read unless someone did something in addition to just opening the book.
So while Brook made headway in the rather exclusive world of artisan print and bookbinding before the iPad, she is from a computer literate household in Florida. "There were always computers in the house." Her father taught himself HTML and her mother ended up becoming a technology expert for the school she worked at.
Therefore, perhaps, Jennifer didn't find it counterintuitive to move into the digital realisation.
She still lives in both worlds. As a consumer, Brook definitely doesn't want to give up on the tactile media that print represents. "On the weekends, I don't want to switch on a computer. I read magazines and books."
But on the other hand she reads books on her iPhone while on the subway and loves the Amazon Kindle she bought recently. "The Kindle is amazing to view - text doesn't seem to vibrate the way it does on other computer screens that glow. And being able to search through the words is an incredible thing."
With a Bachelor of Science in cognitive psychology from the University of Florida, Brook is well placed to oversee the transition between technologies while we're still at the point at which both are totally relevant.
"We are part of a lineage; books are a long part of our history." That means the metaphor that we use to process publications is still bound to influence the way we approach, and read digital publications, just as it informs designers in their production. But that will change.
At the moment, traditional books, magazines and newspapers still exert influence over the way people design publications for iPad and, indeed, over the way people view them.
Jennifer Brook was part of the experience of the launch of the original iPad, leading the New York Times team that devised the NYT app showcased at the launch back in 2010. I asked how the team coped with the considerable secrecy Apple demanded, and even if she was allowed to talk about it. Team members avoided twitter for the three weeks of the final stages, for example.
"I do talk about it. I can tell you that in terms of the secrecy, we treated it as just another design constraint." She chuckles. "It was a very focussing constraint - we got a lot of work done in short time."
They spent three weeks at the Apple campus in Cupertino and, stressfully, the first full demo of the forthcoming New York Times app and critique was in front of then Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Brook's team developed, then demonstrated the New York Times app for Apple's original iPad press conference when the iPad was first released to the public in April 2002.
I hoped the weather would behave for her New Zealand trip (it mostly hasn't so far, but it has to be better than a New York winter).
An in-depth interview by Josh Clark fills out more of Brook's background, including the fact the lived in a tree house for several years and also makes leather shoes.
- Mark Webster mac-nz.com
