This doesn’t look like Akash designed it.
One line of feedback pushed Panorama magazine from a functional digital zine into a much more authored editorial experience.
The first version of Panorama worked.
It was a multi-page digital zine inside the Cityflo app. Stories had their own screens, there was an Explore page, and structurally it behaved like a fairly conventional content product.
Then our founder told my manager:
“This doesn’t look like Akash has designed it.”
And I loved hearing that.
Not because the first version was bad, but because he knew what I could do well enough to notice when I hadn’t pushed it far enough.
So I went back to it.
Instead of simply making the existing version look better, I rethought the experience itself.
Panorama lives inside the Cityflo app, inside a WebView, on a phone. The multi-page structure meant opening stories, navigating back, and repeatedly moving between screens.
That made sense as an app.
It didn’t feel right for a magazine.
So Panorama became one continuous editorial experience.
The cover flows into an index. Stories run one after another. Longer pieces expand in place instead of opening another page.
Visually, I pushed it toward something much more editorial too.
Large typography. A controlled grid. Deliberate whitespace. Strong compositions. And moments where the grid breaks just enough to give individual stories their own rhythm.
The first version worked.
I’m glad that wasn’t enough.