Articles from 2009
Talking re-design
Designers Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro talk about their online design of Tablet Magazine, and the different places they found inspiration to shape the design. Interestingly, during the audio slide show, you get a quick look at the intial three directions they took.
Kill your darlings
Print magazine talks to eight book cover designers about rejected designs, including this quote from Gabriele Wilson which every designer will identify with: “Editors sometimes need to see what doesn’t work, in order to figure out what does work.”
Behind the cover
Photographer Peter Belanger’s timelapse video of creating a Macworld magazine cover is mesmerising to watch, and reveals just how much effort goes into the seemingly simple cover photo. Think of it as the photography equivalent to Mike Kus’ slide design time lapse video, which tracked the process of designing a presentation earlier this year.
A dubious sweepstakes
Michael Sokolove’s article “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?” in the New York Times Magazine tells the situation facing the US newspaper industry through the story of Philidelphia’s own papers, including the possible ignominy of being the first major US city without a daily paper.
Once a morning ritual and read over breakfast or on the commute to work, newspapers have found their “what’s happening today?” role replaced by websites and tv networks offering a continuous stream of news for free. How are they adjusting to this shifting demand?
A great introduction
Khoi Vinh has linked to a great redesign walkthrough of the new NPR.org site. It is a beautiful piece of video that proves that even somthing like an introduction to a redesign can have a nice narrated story.
We all know that data can tell different stories depending on how you spin it and the way data is visually represented can lead to assumptions by the viewer.
Nielsen online engagement numbers released
Mumbrella has the numbers from Nielsen’s latest stats for the time users spend on media websites in Australia (and also the US). The numbers aren’t entirely surprising, but it’s still interesting to see.
data.gov encourages transparency
As part of their Open Government Initiative, the US government have launched data.gov, a website to provide access to datasets they produce. Combined with services like ManyEyes, this should be interesting to watch.
How Times Media Group approached their redesign
BBH Labs’ talks to Times Media Group about their redesign of The Times in 2007. Their prototyping with “Project Victoria” is a great approach to testing out new systems if you can afford it.
Google have kept pushing ahead in their mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” this time with visualisations of datasets in their search results pages.
With Swine flu so prevalent in the world news at the moment, its only natural that there be some maps featured on news sites telling how the virus has spread across the globe.
Listen to your users
Among a slew of newspaper redesigns that are utilising more magazine-driven layouts popping with colour and graphics, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched a new design that uses more solid columns of text and smaller photos than most.
Meanwhile…
At the end of a down-beat article on the accelerating decline in circulation of the top 25 US newspapers (7% year on year) the New York Times adds a short final paragraph:
Meanwhile, the audience for newspaper Web sites continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2009, newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73 million unique visitors each month, on average, according to an analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. That is a 10.5 percent increase from the first quarter of 2008.