Behind Flipboard’s Layout Engine

Charles Ying, developer at Flipboard:

When you read Flipboard, articles and photographs are laid out in a series of pages you can flip through, just like in a print magazine. Each magazine page layout feels hand-crafted and beautiful — as if editors and designers created it just for you.

We automate the whole process of layout design and editing by slotting your content into custom-designed page layouts — like fitting puzzle pieces together. We start with a set of page layouts created by human designers. Then our layout engine figures out how to best fit your content into these layouts, considering things like page density, pacing, rhythm, image crop and scale. In many ways, that is the key to Flipboard’s signature look and feel: at its heart are the work of real designers.

I’ve always appreciated the way Flipboard presents web articles into magazine-like layouts that, however, also feel “smarter” than print in how they treat images and text flow. It turns out, Flipboard built an entire engine that is capable of combining layout designs with algorithms to determine the best way to display articles depending on multiple variables and filters. Great read.

→ Source: techcrunch.com